 Marty Klein is going to do junk science, moral panics, and sex. He's a licensed marriage and family therapist, and he's a sex therapist. Dan Savage, you know, Dan Savage has called his writing brilliant, which is pretty cool. You can sign up for his newsletter at the American Humanist, the American Hummus Association is right out front, it's delicious, the American Humanist Association. You know what's sad? The American Hummus Association would have more members than the American. Yes, it's delicious, but yeah. Please welcome Marty Klein. Thanks for that great introduction, George. I don't remember it. You can hear me without this, right? What a voice, huh? Well, it's a great pleasure to be here, and I really mean that. I always say that when I speak, but I really do mean it here. Why do skeptics need to talk about sex? I know why you want to talk about sex. Why do skeptics need to talk about sex? Well, you have your climate change deniers and your Holocaust deniers, and you have your condom efficacy deniers. Just the other day, for example, one of my patients says to me, I don't know why people say that condoms are central to safer sex. He says a friend of mine was having sex with a woman. The woman's husband came in and shot him dead. He was wearing a condom, didn't help. In one of my next to most recent books, America's War on Sex, I talked about how the religious right uses the issue of sexual regulation to undermine secular democracy and the separation of church and state with very little public resistance. And it turns out that if you want to attack science-based public policy, sex is the perfect place to do it. And in this book, I talked about some of the battlegrounds in America's War on Sex. We talked about sex education and reproductive rights and sexual minorities, the way that sex research has been almost completely gutted by all levels of government in the United States. So these are the battlegrounds in America's War on Sex. And the goal of America's War on Sex is to restrict whatever makes sex easier, healthier, more understandable, more entertaining, more varied. In other words, the goal of America's War on Sex is to restrict or prevent whatever makes sex more normal, whatever makes sex less subject to special rules of decision making, such as God's plan or gender roles. So here in America, and I've been around the world, and unfortunately, we've got America's War on Sex in some other countries too. We have the sexual disaster industry. We have the federal government. We have local government, state government. State governments are passing dozens and dozens of laws, for example, restricting reproductive rights. In fact, if you were around in 1975, and some of you look like you were around in 75, of course, if you were around, if you remember it, you know, you weren't really there, but there are more laws restricting sexual expression today than there were in America in 1975, which is shocking when you think about all the other things that have happened since 1975. Other aspects, other players in the sexual disaster industry, right wing think tanks, right wing legal firms, you know there's the answer to the ACLU, the ACLJ, much better funded than the ACLU. The therapy profession, my own profession, the therapy profession, big players in the sexual disaster industry. And those adrenaline rush crime shows at 10 o'clock at night with the heart pounding music and some transvestite hookers always getting murdered and the data is very clear that people who watch those shows think there's more sexual violence in the United States than there actually is. Think that there's more sexual violence in the US than people who don't watch those shows. So the sexual disaster industry is focused on overstating the amount of sexual violence and sexual danger that there is in America. And it creates the illusion that there's a sexual other prowling the countryside grabbing people and creating sexual habit. As a result, we have a sex panic. We're in the middle of a sex panic and you can see it in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different ways. And because there's a sex panic, Americans are demanding action. They're demanding action about a wide range of problems that either don't exist or that exist in much smaller amounts than they think. So this sex panic, which is leading to people feeling anxious, people are wanting to use public policy as a way of reducing their own private anxiety. So what people, such as the religious writer doing to keep this moral panic going is they're shaping the sexual narrative. They use dangerism. Dangerism is the operative word here. It's a Bangladeshi word. Dangerism to define the problem. We're going to see some examples of that in a second. They use phony categories. They use phony categories. We'll see some examples of those as well. And they create a them. Some people don't care if your children get molested. That's a favorite trope of this. Some people don't care if homosexuals destroy your marriage. Honey, I'm sorry I had an affair, but it's because of all those gay marriages. Of course, as part of the sexual disaster industry, they claim that victimization equals expertise. So for example, when there were federal hearing about the destructive aspects of pornography, there weren't anybody, anybody, there was nobody participating in that hearing who had not been damaged by pornography. And because people like Donna Rice used, I don't know if you remember her sitting on Gary Hart's lap, people like Donna Rice used claims that her marriage was destroyed because her husband watched pornography. She gets a seat at the public policy table. So claiming victimization equals expertise. It started with Oprah, and now we're reaping the benefits of that. And of course, seeing everyone as victims of the sex industry. People who manufacture sex toys, they're in the sex industry. And those are supposedly destroying marriage and so on. So what's the problem? According to the sexual disaster industry, what's the problem? Well, we have a gay problem. We have an anti-Christian problem. We have a promiscuity problem. We have an immorality problem. Now, if you think that those other problems, this way of looking at problems is going to drive what the solutions are. How different would it be if, instead of these problems, the American public policy about sexuality was aimed toward resolving these problems, the intolerance problem, the anti-secularism problem, the censorship problem. My website, which for better or worse is not pornographic, depending on how you think of pornography. But my website, sexed.org, you cannot access my website in a whole variety of places in the United States. The University of Arkansas, many universities that have filters to filter out horrifying material, they won't let you access my website. So if you want to go against the machine folks, go to my website, sexed.org. Now, let's talk about phony categories for a second. Don't you agree that we have to do something about all those people who either murder or keep library books overdue? Don't you agree? So here are some phony categories that we hear in the mass media and in political debate over and over again, porn and child porn. That's a phony category, birth control and abortion. That's a phony category. Now, because of that category, birth control and abortion, well, Plan B, the morning after pill, gets swept up as an abortion drug. Teaching, sex education, and masturbation. There is not a school in the country where kids are sat down and said, okay, now today we're going to learn two things. We're going to learn what is the capital of Bangladesh and we're going to learn how to masturbate. There is not one school in the United States that teaches them. Victims of trafficking and prostitution, that's another phony category. Prostitution is illegal. Trafficking is an entirely different, now it's legal in Nevada, right? It's legal in Nevada, not legal in the rest of the United States. But victims of prostitution, who exactly are those people who are paying good American dollars? Victims of trafficking, doing things against their will. So let's talk about what happens when you conflate two things that don't belong in the same category, trafficking and prostitution. Here's a shot from the cover of Newsweek a couple of years ago. There was a big cover story, the John Next Door. And here's the cut line. The man who, by sex, a new study reveals the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitution, warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls. Look at the phony categories in that. Here's another, oops, here's another shot of it. Demand for porn and prostitutes. That's not the same thing. Warping personal relationships, maybe, endangering women and girls, totally different. And yet, those things are included as pairs. And that goes on as a way of continuing the moral panic around sexuality all the time. We need to be literate consumers of the media and to see when those phony categories are being used to scare the hell out of people. When it comes to sexuality, there is no limit to how much value the sexual disaster industry can get. There's no limit to how much money you can make by scaring the American public about sexuality. Let's look at sex trafficking. Just a few years ago, nobody talked about it. Now, a lot of people are talking about sex trafficking. Mostly, they have no idea what they're talking about. Sex trafficking is a, of what little trafficking there is in the United States, it's primarily labor trafficking, but trafficking. But if you want to scare people about all of the sex trafficking, just put it in the same category as labor trafficking. Redefining trafficking to include porn actresses and sex workers. That's what the Newsweek story said. That people, according to Melissa Farley, who is an anti-porn activist, anti-everything, anti-sex activist, she says that all porn actresses by definition have been trafficked into their jobs. So that's a great way of inflating the numbers on how much sex trafficking is going on. She says that all people who trade sex for money or other things are being trafficked. So that's a great example of how you distort the numbers and then creating a panic around that, demanding that the public, demand that their politicians do something about it. Well, let's talk about sex addiction. Talking about witchcraft, let's talk about sex addiction. Now, he says, I've been in the doghouse ever since I tried to get my mother-in-law hanged as a witch. Well, you can understand that. Now, what are the diagnostic criteria for witch? Well, you know, they're not that well-defined. And it turns out that with sex addiction, it's the same thing. Sex addiction was invented in 1986. I got my license way before that. And when I was being trained, there was no such thing as sex addiction. It was invented by a prison addictionologist, Patrick Horne's. He himself will tell you, if you buy him a couple of drinks, that he has never taken a sexuality course in his life. He's an addictionologist. There are no validated criteria for sex addiction. They problematize non-problematic behavior, anything having to do with SNM, anything having to do with non-monogamy, sex addiction. It's morality dressed up as clinical fact. Now, there are people who come into my office and they will say, my husband is a sex addict. People come into my office, they say, I'm a sex addict. And I hear whenever somebody's caught with their hand in the cookie jar, whether it's Tiger Woods or David DeCovne or whomever, there are clinicians or therapists who go on TV and they say, yeah, Tiger Woods obviously a sex therapist. So I'm thinking Tiger Woods obviously a sex addict. If I had more time, I could speak more slowly. I'll have to listen to the tape to hear what I just said. Tiger Woods, the tennis guy. So what I see is that therapists go on television and they say, Tiger Woods obviously a, thank you. They've never met the guy, they've never met the guy. And they can diagnose the guy having never met the guy. People come in, they say, my husband's a sex addict. I say, are you a psychologist? They say, no. So here's the concept sex addiction. You don't need to be a trained clinician in order to do the diagnosis. You don't even need to meet the person in order to do the diagnosis. So how robust can this concept actually be? I get people coming in the office, this is no joke, this is really serious. I get guys coming in and they say, I'm here because I want to be diagnosed as a sex addict. My wife caught me having an affair and she wants to know, am I a selfish bastard or a sex addict? If I'm a sex addict, I can get treated. If I'm a selfish bastard, she wants a divorce. So these poor guys, these poor guys are saying to me, please give me a diagnosis as a sex addict. I said, I can't do that. I can diagnose you as a witch, but not as a sex addict. Now, one of the key tools for diagnosing sex addiction is the sexual addiction screening test. It's now 52 questions. Here is one third of the test, which I have helpfully highlighted for you. Has anyone been hurt emotionally because of your sexual behavior? Well gee, that lets out most of us. Have you subscribed to or regularly bought or rented sexual explicit materials? Well that lets out most of us. In fact, if you look at the sexual addiction screening test, which asks people about their non-standard, non-traditional sexual behavior. It asks people about their guilt and shame. The sexual addiction screening test is a test to see if you're an American. And if you're an American, of course you feel guilty about sex. If you're an American, of course, when you were 17 or 20 or 30 or 50, of course the way that sexual relationships work, sooner or later somebody's gonna get hurt. That's just the way the pushing and shoving of normal adult life works. Sexuality involves vulnerability. Sexuality involves the permeation of emotional boundaries. Of course people get hurt. So the sexual addiction screening test, which famously diagnosis people all over the place as sex addicts, is really about how do people feel about their own sexuality? And if you grow up in a culture or if you live in a culture where sexuality is taboo or difficult, then of course you're gonna qualify. I would actually encourage all of you to look at sast.com, the sexual, or Google the sexual addiction screening test. And you can find the sexual addiction screening. And I encourage everybody to take it, share it with your friends. Once every single person in the country is a sex addict, then we can have another conversation. Now let's talk about, by the way, all these slides will be available to you. I'm happy to tell you. You can have all these slides. I encourage you to use them. Just go to martycline.com slash slide slash tam. And that URL will be coming up soon. I hope, unless you'd rather look at my post. So let's talk about sex education for a second. Our ex first lady, our ex first lady famously said, I'm always a little irritated when I hear criticism of abstinence, because abstinence is 100% effective in eradicating STDs. Now, partly it's fascinating to imagine Laura Bush being a little irritated. But she claims that abstinence is 100% effective in eradicating an STD. Well, let's look at the data. Oops, let's look at the data. Here are 500 undergraduates at Northern Kentucky University. Oh, it's hard to read those numbers, isn't it? Well, 16% of the undergrads pledged that they'd be virgins until marriage. Two thirds of them broke that promise. Some of you actually know some of those undergraduates. Two thirds of the undergraduates broke their promise, and then here's the most interesting part. Of the ones who remained quote unquote abstinence, more than half of them said they had oral sex and still described themselves as virgins. All depends on how you define categories, right? So do people keep virginity pledges? Here's a national study in the Journal of Public Health, 14,000 young people, half of the students broke their virginity pledges, and then even of those who later have sex, a lot of them claim that they were virgins. Like gray is the new black, or orange is the new black. Well, oral sex is the new, not sex. So, which makes perfect sense because kids who went through during the George Bush year are people who went through, kids who went through abstinence-only sex education. They were told, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. So kids say, okay, we won't do this, and then they do this other thing or two or three, and then they say, well, we didn't do this, we're still virgins. Great system. Here's another example from the Journal of Adolescent Health. 12% of the students who took virginity pledges kept their promise. That means that 88% of the people who were depending on abstinence to protect them from pregnancy and STDs, 88%, there was an 88% failure rate in the use of abstinence as a method. You know, you might as well, you might as well get Sylvia Brown in here to predict who's gonna get pregnant. She'd have a better hit rate, I think, than 12%. Now focus on the family, which is a key player in America's war on sex. James Dobson said in an internal memo that we gotta hold up, if the public can be convinced that condoms really, really work, then proponents are gonna argue that the only thing that's holding people back from sexual expression is outdated irrelevant religious restrictions. Well, I think he's right. Took 30 years, but finally, Jim Dobson said something I agree with. Now it's pornography dangerous. I'm not asking you to vote on this. Let's use science instead. Here's the common model of how porn affects consumers. I'm not saying I agree with this, but here's the common model. That people use porn and they withdraw from their relationships. So people think of that porn during sex and they disconnect from their partners during sex. Now I have a competing model. Here's my competing model. Something goes on with somebody and it leads them to withdraw from sex and then from their relationship and then porn looks a lot more attractive. Or people, something causes people to disconnect emotionally during sex and then thinking about porn makes a lot of sense. So then we solve for X. Anybody who's gone to high school, and I know there's at least three people in the back there who went to high school, you know, solve for X. Well, what can lead people to withdraw sexually? What can lead people to focus on pornographic imagery instead of the partner that they may or may not be with? Well, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, resentment, mistrust, how about shame, guilt, or anxiety? That causes people to withdraw sexually. What about boring sex? Now I won't ask, has anyone here ever had boring sex? That wouldn't be fair. Boring sex can lead people to withdraw from more sex, right? Sex that's physically or emotionally painful. Sex that's frustrating. That can lead people to want less sex or to think about something other than the partner that they're having sex with who they happen to be angry about. Now let me tell you, in long-term monogamous relationships, there's a lot of sex that's not working very well. Maybe you've heard this. People would rather talk about why men are addicted to porn than about why men are not addicted to sex with their wives and girlfriends. I'm talking about heterosexual people. There's this enormous amount of sexless long-term marriages, this enormous amount of marriages or long-term relationships in which people are not having a lot of sex, and most of those couples would rather chew glass than talk about it. And it's a lot easier to complain about pornography than it is to talk about, gee, Herman, we haven't had sex in a year, what's up with that? So the most common configuration of porn relationships is that there's no connection at all. But for a small number of people, there is a connection. Now, what exactly is the content of internet porn? I hear all the time about violent porn, as if it's one word, violent porn, like some compound German noun, violent porn. And the truth is that if you go to the web, mostly what you see is not so troubling stuff. You see a little bit of troubling stuff, mostly. There's just millions and millions and millions of videos of happy people doing stuff that you used to do before you got married. So the porn panic myths that are being perpetuated, all porn is violent, not true. Consuming porn leads to people going out and raping other people. Consuming porn leads to, the new one, consuming porn leads to erection difficulties. I've been a sex therapist for 33 years. People had plenty of erection problems before the internet was invented. And if the internet goes away tomorrow, people will still have erection problems. Comes along with having a penis. For some people. One of the myths of the porn panic is that everybody who watches porn thinks it's a documentary. They think that that's really the way it is. When most people who look at porn, they know it's a highlight reel, not a documentary. Now come with me on a daydream. Go back with me 13 years ago. Come with me to New Year's Eve, 1999. We're partying like it's 1999. And we're having a couple of drinks and we speculate, hey, what if the US were flooded with cheap, high quality porn? That'd be a fun thing to talk about. Back in 1999, when the internet, people still didn't know, is this gonna be a fad or if it's here to stay? What would happen if we flooded? I don't know, maybe everybody would lose weight. I don't know, maybe everybody would quit their job. I don't know, maybe there'd be this enormous epidemic of rape and child molestation. I don't know, that's an interesting question. What would happen if we flooded the United States with cheap or free, high quality porn? Well, wouldn't you know we did the experiment? You don't often get a lot of social experimentation on a large scale, but we actually now know what happens if you flood the United States with free or cheap, high quality pornography. So porn goes up, social pathology actually goes down, but sexual anxiety goes up. Let me show you. Availability of porn, you can read the graph, right, from 2000 to 2012. Availability of porn goes up. What happened in the last 12 years when the country was flooded with pornography? The rate of sexual assault, which we know is underreported, but it's being underreported at a constant rate over the last 12 years. If anything, it's being less underreported. Now, the rate of sexual assault has gone down, the rate of divorce has gone down, the rate of teen pregnancy has gone down, and the rate of child sexual exploitation has gone down. The rates of these sociosexual pathologies have gone down with the extraordinary free availability of high quality pornography in the United States in the last 12 years. Now, we are too scientific to say that all of that porn caused a decrease in these things. But what we can notice is that the two things happen simultaneously. And in case you think this is an anomaly, because the US is so strange, the same exact data are true in Japan, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and many other countries where porn becomes overnight way more available, the rates of sexual violence go down. Now, what about, well, porn makes people have terrible ideas about women? Well, we can actually measure respect for women. These are rates now, rates. The rate of sexual violence against women has gone down since the availability of porn. The rate of admissions in professional schools and the clergy has gone up since all that porn came around. The rate of female judges and need I say, presidential candidates has gone up. Laws preventing marital rape are stronger than ever. Now we're challenging the rape, mostly of women in the military. More women initiate divorce than men and tech firms run by women have a greater success than tech firms run by men. So clearly, there is no decrease in respect for women in the last 12 years since all this porn came around. What we do have is that porn does give young people an unrealistic idea of how quickly you can get a pizza delivered. Let me talk briefly about Gardasil. Gardasil is the drug that if you give a series of three vaccinations to young people before they've been exposed to HPV, they're protected from HPV. It's the religious rights worst nightmare. It's their worst nightmare because they've been saying all along, oh, sex is so problematic for young people, they get HPV, then they get cervical cancer and they die. And so here's a graph over the last 150 years. The age of first marriage is going up in the United States. It's now averaging about 26. The average age of onset of puberty is dropping like a stone. It's now about 10. So the premarital sex or the nonmarital sex to limit for young people, the arena is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. There used to be very little premarital sex because people used to get married when they were about 15 years old. And they had puberty when they were about 14. Now it's a lot different. So what are young people supposed to do? So in attempting to dissuade the federal government from allowing this fabulous drug to be available, the Family Research Council said we should not give this vaccine to young people because they might see it as a license to engage in premarital sex. Yeah, I can imagine a 13 year old saying, oh, Kevin, we can't have sex because I might get HPV and I might get cancer and 50 years from now I might die. Because we know how many 13 year olds are focused on what's gonna happen 50 years from now. So sexuality is a place where people have maximum personal autonomy. Sexuality, the Italians famously say, bed is the poor man's opera. Everybody can be a big star in bed. Short or tall, fat or skinny, rich or poor, no matter what your abilities are. Anybody can use sexuality to experience and express personal power. That's one of the reasons that religion hates it. So sexuality challenges the idea that people need an outside agent to help them with their morality. Now the religious right says that sex is their beat because sex is a morality issue. So they say sex is not a science issue, it's a morality issue and because it's a morality issue it's our thing. And so religion says they need to be in charge of the rules about who's eligible for sex, what activities you're supposed to do, what parts of your body are legitimate sexual parts of your body and so on. Well, turns out that when it comes to sex what the religious people mean by morality is restricting people's choices. And so when religious people and their ideas about sexuality are encoded into law that means restricting people's choices, regulating how people live. And so that's why sexuality is central to the mission of skepticism because the religious right is using sexuality as a way of institutionalizing political power and de-legitimizing science. So I'm gonna skip ahead because DJ is waving at me, I don't know what he wants. But I'm gonna skip ahead and I'm gonna say that although we understand the difference between emotion and science, we need to take emotion seriously. Religion is the only political force in America that takes emotion seriously. And people want to feel better, particularly around sexuality. So we need to be talking about emotion when it comes to sexuality, when it comes to public policy. Because of this moral panic, because of the fear that people have, they're afraid that their kids are in danger, they're afraid that their partner is gonna have an affair, they're afraid that prostitutes are gonna take over their neighborhoods and they think that's a bad thing. So here are the meta responses, here are the meta responses that we need to practice talking to people. Of course we all want our children to be safe. Your question is based on so many assumptions, maybe we need to be talking about a different question. Yeah, an elephant's a really interesting animal, but a kangaroo is a really interesting animal. Let's talk about kangaroos instead. It can be difficult to find a balance between fact and emotion, but let's try. These are the kinds of meta responses that we need to give to people so that they feel that we care about how they feel. Then when they feel that we actually care about what's real to them, dinosaurs are not real to most people. Whether or not your husband is gonna go to a prostitute, get an STD and infect you, that's real to people. Or at least they think it's real to people. The fear of that is real to people. So let's practice talking to people that we're arguing with or conversing with or debating with. Let's practice talking to them and helping them feel like we care about their feelings. So to continue the conversation, you can go to my website, my Twitter feed, again, for all the slides that we did or did not see today. You can go to my website, Slides. And in summary, sexuality is a public policy issue that we need to address more. And of course, communication is very important and this is a perfect example. She says, no, I said I've got acute angina. Thank you very much.