Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - Our Teenage Years: Growing Up In Purity Culture | Ear Biscuits Ep.302

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

You better not. From a message on Rhett’s bedroom ceiling to meetings out in the Walmart parking lot, listen to R&L talk about their sexual experience during their teenage years while growing up in purity culture on the second episode of the Sextember miniseries! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is mythical. Shop Best Buy's ultimate smartphone sale today. Get a Best Buy gift card of up to $200 on select phone activations with major carriers. Visit your nearest Best Buy store today. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I'm Link. in particular, we are talking about what it's like to be two boys turning into men and all the confusion that comes along with that. Basically just, you know, sexual stuff in the context of purity culture. We are not currently boys becoming men,

but we're gonna go back and walk through our high school. You never really completely become a man. That's true, especially after maybe some of the criticism that came from last week's episode. I don't know, we're recording this before last week's comes out, so there's some conjecture, but we're gonna talk through our high school experience and college experience leading up to, I don't know, I think leading up to,

but not including, our first time having sex, which for each of us was on our wedding night with our wives, unless there's something you- Wedding nights, we each had a wedding night. Yeah, you do. Unless there's something you haven't told me that maybe you'll tell me today. Did you lose your virginity?

Is that even a thing? Hmm. Oh, well, teasing, that's a good teaser. Yeah, purity culture, we'll get into all that. We'll also describe what it is, but I mean, first you should sing the theme song. Oh. Give it another chance. Okay, I don't really.

Sex-tember. If you like the idea of two straight cis white dudes talking about sex and the fact that they waited until they got married to have sex and this is coming from a very particular perspective of these two dudes who are not trying to be prescriptive about all the stuff that they're saying. They're just kind of telling their story and trying to be prescriptive about all the stuff that they're saying. They're just kinda telling their story and trying to be honest about sex. If you're into that idea, tune in for Sextember.

It's happening now. Oh, that's good, that was good. I like that, yeah, that's good. Yeah, this is it. There's no real cadence or rhyme scheme. In fact, I don't think any of that rhymed. There weren't a lot of notes either. It's probably a great metaphor for this entire exercise.

Kind of pounding the same note again and again. Or should I say sexercise? Okay. I do wanna say before we move into today's episode that having only recorded episode one. Yeah. That was all about our, you know, first thoughts about sex and then first-

Getting the sex talk or not. And then moving into like our introduction to what sex was and how we kind of pieced that together. I bet you they remember. By the way, hashtag Ear Biscuits, continue to let us know what you think and also send us your sex questions or things you would like for us to discuss

in episode after next. Yeah. I gotta say I've been struggling. I've never been that honest about sex publicly. I've never told, I never have told anyone, maybe besides my own wife, the story of the first time I masturbated. Yeah.

So there's, I was filled with, and still am a little bit like filled with this trepidation of having been so honest about it without really thinking about, like again, the whole point of this whole exercise is to just put another point on the perspective out there. Two guys who come from this particular background, we're not trying to tell you what to think about anything.

We're just telling you, this is our story. This is what we thought, but because we've never taken the time to be this honest or vulnerable about anything that, well, this sort of, you know, about sex, something that is, there's just so much stigma attached to it. Stigma?

Stigma attached to it, not only within the Christian culture, but just culture in general. Right. That I'm just, I'm like, man, even though we warn people and we continue to warn you, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of us talking explicitly about sex, do not listen to this. Do not.

Or, you know. Because that is what's going to happen. Unless you're like, yes, I want to be uncomfortable, but did I make people feel so uncomfortable who decided to listen that now they forever see me differently or like I said something and I had no idea how it was gonna be interpreted. Again, I haven't seen the response yet.

And so I was literally sitting there that night thinking, oh man, should I just edit that? I talked about how much I liked vagina. I gotta go back and take that out. I thought about a few things that I said and that you said and I lost a couple of winks of sleep over it. I don't know, it's out there now and it is what it is.

And I think that, yeah, there is a bit of a fear of like, is something gonna come out wrong or have an unintentional effect? Or is it gonna hurt somebody? Is it gonna grow somebody out? Is it gonna change someone's view of you or me in a way that like, I don't know, that elicits judgment?

I think it's part of the fear too. It's like, oh, now he means this to me. Like my opinion of him has changed. It could be me, it could be you. You know, and- But it's probably me. I'm just concerned. So yeah, I have been concerned that somebody might not know that,

I don't know, I just don't know. I did, you know, we're, oh God. Let's just keep going. You just never know. We, you know, we're, oh God. Let's just keep going. You just never know. We, you know, it's an interesting time. The thing that we want to do, as you said, is help to dismantle the stigma around having open, responsible adult conversations around the topic of sex,

sexuality, and the good and bad and the ugly of it. But we're only doing that through telling our experiences. And again, I hope that it will be two points of view for anyone listening to take into account, but I never hope or expect that someone's just gonna listen to what we say, even if we do give an opinion and just say, okay, I agree with that.

Hook, line and sinker. Right. You know, it's, and that's what, I'm trusting the process. We want that to be true of this podcast in general, but it's a real test. I'm trying to trust the process, you know. But, and I do think that one of the things

that we're trying to keep in mind and we would love for you to keep in mind as well, especially as we get into talking about purity culture this week, is that, you know, nothing that we're, we're actually trying to be conscious of this about Ear Biscuits in general, right? And especially, this is a note for me

more than it's a note for Link because I tend to get, I tend to go into like prescriptive advice mode and I tend to go into like persuasion mode. It's my personality and, but I don't want, neither of us want this podcast to be about that. You know, this is not a well-researched podcast unless the research is the life that we have lived, right? This is kind of a,

this is a conversation between two friends that the internet is invited to be a part of. And so we speak from our perspective and we know that our perspective is specific as we said in the theme song, but also- We also know that our perspectives have evolved enough over time to reserve the right to change our minds and to continue to grow as people.

Yeah, and even as we talk about something like purity culture in the context of like, the way evangelicals think or we thought in that context about sex, we're not here to indict that. Now, some of the things that we say will be indicting because that's our perspective, but that's not the point is to be like,

and here's why this is bad and that's the point of this episode. It's like, no, if you are doing your own research about what you think about sex and what you think about purity culture, here's another data point for you as we give our own personal perspective, but we're not trying to give our opinion.

And I think that maybe in the fourth episode, when we get into answering questions, we may get into a little bit more of like, well, okay, you asked me what I thought about this, I'm gonna tell you, but we're trying to kind of keep this centered around telling our story. Yeah, I do wanna lay the groundwork

for what purity culture is. Lay it. So I'm just gonna lay that pipe. Yeah, there you go. Right now. So the purity culture is a 90s evangelical movement So the purity culture is a 90s evangelical movement that discouraged dating and promoted virginity

until marriage. And it did that through what I'll call gimmicks, purity pledges, purity rings, purity dances, like father-daughter dances. They call them balls actually, ironically. Purity balls. Yeah. Yeah, that's- The only ball you can have, girl. Purity ball.

And there's, so it's seeking to take what the Bible teaches about purity and sexual immorality and apply it especially to developing preteens and teens. And as it exploded on the scene in like the early 90s, it was directed at us. Like we fully experienced it as the target demo of purity culture. And the biblical roots of it, there's a couple of teachings

that at least stand out for me in my memory. And as I did a little bit of dusting off my Bible on Google and a couple of articles, but there's this principle that your body my Bible on Google and a couple of articles. But there's this principle that your body is a temple of God that God in the form of the Holy Spirit actually lives within inside of each Christian. And so a pledge of chastity to remain a virgin until you get married is a form of chastity to remain a virgin until you get married is a form of allegiance

and or love for God and worship of God and saying, okay, my body is like God's living with inside of me. There's places where Paul talks about, if you take your body and then you go to a, and you unite with a prostitute, if you have sex with a prostitute, you're basically bringing God into that equation.

And that is not a good thing. That is a sinful thing. So that's the first part of it is that there's this, God's within inside of you don't do anything that is wrong because you're bringing God along for the ride, I guess, no pun intended. The second point is that when it comes to sex, there's this,

they never use the term mystical. That's how I would describe it now, but I'm gonna describe it as a, there's a mystical component to sex where you have a soul bond with somebody that you actually have sex with. In Genesis, it talks about the two shall become one flesh, talking about Adam and Eve.

Like that's the reason why you should leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife or husband. And so when you get married and when you consummate that marriage in sex, there is some mystical joining. Your souls are literally intermingling. And then you got Paul talking about things like, well. And apparently the soul goes directly through the penis

into the vagina. I mean, just to be frank about it. And maybe one comes out. How else does it happen? I think the female soul comes out of the vagina and then they like become one, the two shall become one. Yeah, I was just speaking from the male perspective, but I think it goes both ways.

And of course, all of this is within the context of a heterosexual relationship only. Right. You know, maybe that goes without saying in terms of talking about this evangelical movement, but I wanted to point that out too. So there are these biblical teachings that again, in the same way that when we talked about

our deconstruction episodes, there's this foundational principle of you're born sinful and separated from God and you're destined for hell unless you accept Jesus' payment for your sins, his death and resurrection on your behalf, so that then you can have an active relationship with God and eternal life with him and escape hell.

So that foundational principle of hell is within the purity culture, that is akin to once you have sex with somebody, you're giving up a part of yourself. You're doing something that separates you from God and potentially, or I don't think the takeaway was that it was potential, it was that it was actually damaging to you for giving up that part of yourself.

And so that's kind of like the biblical underpinning as far as far as I remember it, but there was also, you know, a lot of practical motivations. The people who came up with this movement, and then it went through the Southern Baptist with all the purity events and rings and all of that marketing stuff. These are children of the 60s of the sexual revolution.

And then you've got AIDS is, I mean, within a certain demographic, a lot of people are dying from AIDS and there's STI, other STIs floating around and teen pregnancy is a shocking problem that people just wanna get a handle on it. So it was a confluence of taking biblical teaching about purity and combining it with things

that we wanted to protect, our parents wanted to protect their children from and being informed maybe by the sexual revolution and just saying, okay, if from a practical standpoint, if I can keep my kids from getting an STI or becoming pregnant as a teen. We just called it STD. Yeah, we did.

We didn't even call it that. Well, it hadn't even happened yet. So protecting them from that, protecting them from unwanted pregnancy, teen pregnancy, and also protecting kids from heartbreak that goes to all the way to the core of your soul. I mean, it felt to us as we were experiencing this teaching, it carried just as much weight as going to hell or not,

or almost as much. That's what I'm saying. Well, and I think that it was, for most Christian teens, it was the most applicable sort of moral teaching because, you know, let's face it, not a lot of Christian kids were doing drugs. I mean, some of them were,

but it was much easier to avoid drug use, even alcohol use, than it was to ignore the constant horniness that we were all experiencing. Right. You know, this is something, you don't wake up every single day and be like, I need LSD, you know, it's like, but you do wake up every morning,

look, well, sometimes literally, you know, with an erection, you know? So it's like, you're faced with this desire on a constant basis. And so, yeah, I think what you're getting at is that, and also you said the 90s, I think that obviously, the idea of purity had been around for a while, but it took on a new focus and structure.

There was a marketing. And effectiveness. There was a marketing plan that was launched in the early 90s that had, with the purity ring and the purity pledge and the purity balls, all that stuff happened then. And get what you're getting at with the sort of the complexity of this whole thing, which I think will kind of come out as we keep talking

about it and how we think about it now. And especially, oh, newsflash, hey, we're bringing our wives in. Kiko, we haven't told you this, we're bringing them in via a phone call, which we'll work out the tech on that, not to freak you out right now, but the wives will be coming in next episode via the phone.

And- We're gonna give them a ring. We will maybe begin to explore this, but the wives will be coming in next episode via the phone. And we're gonna give them a ring. We will maybe begin to explore this, but there's a lot of complexity to this because all of religion and all of sort of religious framework, for the most part, is still designed, like the people who are adhering to it

and the people who are trying to implement it in their families and with their children, most people are doing it out of a motivation of love and what they believe is right. Most everyone is motivated by doing what they actually think is right. Even though their actions may be interpreted as hateful and they may be hateful and they may be harmful,

they don't see it as hate and they don't see it as harmful. They see it as this is the best good and this is what society should have. And so- And an obedience to God is not something that in their minds they're making up, even though there's certainly a lot of extrapolation beyond what the Bible actually says

to what the practices they put in place. I mean, there's no purity ball ring or pledge in the Bible, but there's concepts like losing your virginity. A lot of analogies came out of the movement in order to get these, what I'll call good-hearted results. Like it's good-hearted motives to get good results, but you've got these like analogies,

like pulling the pedals off a rose pedal in order to help middle school kids understand what happens when you- Are deflowered. You're deflowered. And you can't put those pedals back on that flower. No, you can't. And who else would want that flower?

That flower's ruined. I mean, analogies like chewed up gum. Who wants to re-chew chewed up gum? These are actual things that were, techniques that were taught in order to help. Almost always these analogies refer to the woman, which is very common. It is the woman who suffers the brunt of purity culture

and she's the one that is the flower and she's the one that's the chewed up gum. There's a double standard. Yeah. And the principle of whatever you do with someone that you're dating and that you don't marry, you're robbing your future mate of that experience. And that ultimately there's this message of,

if you do something you shouldn't do, then you're damaged goods. And then maybe, you know what? And you know what, that's why Jesus died and you're forgiven and you need to experience grace and you need to, and you can move forward. But it's kind of like when you say part A, that tends to stick in your mind a lot more

than the grace part B does. And I think that ultimately a lot of people, and we can talk about our own experiences, there's a takeaway of fear of something happening, spiritually, physically, or otherwise, and shame associated with everything that you're actually dealing with and trying to discover and develop through. So I will say that there's an entire spectrum of people

who grew up like we did under purity culture who have now landed in different places about how grateful they are for it or how damaged they are by it. And so I just wanna acknowledge that, that maybe there could be some really ugly parts of it and then there can be some parts that are really, that could be helpful and it varies from person to person.

And I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle on that spectrum. You know, I've experienced some good and some bad, but I know that it's been a lot worse for other people. And some people, they still swear by it, I guess. One thing I'll add to that before we get into, you know, talking about our stories, is that I do, while these are two points on our perspective, I do think that there is some compelling

sort of holistic data in the like, how effective is it in telling kids these things and trying to get kids to adhere to these things when you think about, it could be some other correlation that I don't understand, but I do find it interesting that a lot of these places where culturally purity culture is very, very strong, where there's a sort of evangelical stronghold

tend to be places where there are also high rates of teen pregnancy and STDs or STIs. You know, whereas a lot of places that kind of take a little bit more of a secular approach where there's a lot of sex education and there's birth control, those places in sex, you know, in protected sex, those places tend to be like the Northwest, there's less teen pregnancy

and STIs in the Northwest than there is in the Southeast. The studies are out there. Yeah, again, that's not the point of what we're talking about, but I just wanna make, I think what you're ultimately saying, which I agree with, is that we're not here to say that every single thing about it was bad. We're gonna give you our perspective

and talk about the ways that we may have been damaged and the way that we may have escaped some damage, whether or not we still adhere to any of those beliefs, the sort of the spiritual underpinning as we've made clear on this podcast before, we are not Christians. We do not call ourselves Christians anymore. We do not subscribe to the ideas of purity culture.

We do not have a biblical, I do not have a biblical worldview when it comes to sex and that's not what I teach my children, but you know, it's complex. Yep, I'm coming from the same place. I do wanna take a second just off topic, bear with me. We're celebrating the 20th season premiere of Good Mythical Morning.

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A virtual taste test with us is the second prize. And then the third prize is a signed check for $20,000 in honor of season 20. Giveaway starts off today, runs through 9-17. Only US and Canadian beasts are eligible to win. So just like last year, we're offering a $5 discount on the silver tee exclusively for Mythical Beasts outside of the US and Canada.

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So last time we ended up kind of talking about essentially the process of going through puberty, becoming sexually mature and what was happening with us and how we were beginning to understand what sex was. Going into high school, I think I speak for both of us when I say that we both did understand what sex was. I did, yes. And we're very enticed by the idea of it.

But the other thing that was happening was we were getting very serious about our Christian faith. Like that was something that was happening. You know, we didn't, I didn't get, you got the pamphlet, I didn't get the talk, but what I did get was my parents were, you had me in church and they had me in a youth group and they had a good idea of what was being taught in said youth group.

And they were talking, our youth pastors were talking, you know, pretty directly and explicit, not explicitly, but directly about sex. And so it wasn't like we were just walking around having no idea what we were supposed to be doing. They were going, they were taking the steps to connect what was being said in the Bible with like, okay, but what does this mean for 1990 kids?

And we were just soaking it up. It was very much don't have sex until you get married. And here are the reasons why a lot of, which I've already gone over. I remember we talked about, but then how far is too far? You know, we'd be given books and we'd have conversations about, well, and it would be analogies like,

well, don't get so close to the edge of a cliff that you might fall off. You wanna stay back from that cliff a good number of yards, at least, in order to protect yourself from what might be near that cliff, which would be, I guess, an accidental falling over. And the campaign around- And so it was like, don't do anything if you can help it.

But the campaign around like keeping you from the act of sex, you covered a lot of that with sort of the spiritual stuff and sort of the biblical framework that was added on. I would say the other piece of this is something that was very common, which is there was this sort of information or might I say misinformation that was added onto it

from a practical perspective. Things like condoms are not effective, right? Like it wasn't like, okay, well condoms are like 99% effective when used properly. It was like, no, no, no, no. Condoms are not effective. Condoms are not the answer. In fact, the HIV virus can, which is repetitive,

it's like saying ATM machine, I understand, could go through, right through a condom because it's so small. Things like that that are actually not true, that you begin to absorb, you're like, well, my friends are having sex using condoms, but I already know that like, basically, they might as well be having sex without condoms

because I know that those are not effective. Like it was that sort of misinformation that began to take place. Even things, and this was a little bit later that began to take place. Even things, and this is a little bit later that we started getting this information, but the idea that even the birth control pill was capable of inducing abortions. Do you remember this?

Oh yeah. I actually held onto this belief well into even the beginning of our marriage. It's the reason that Jesse didn't go on birth control pills was because- It would prevent the implantation of the fertilized egg in the wall of the placenta. And since life began at conception,

the prevention of implantation of a fertilized egg in the lining of the uterus, that itself is a form of abortion, which is murder, right? That was, so- I didn't have to worry about that until I was married. We were engaged, but then I went to the library. Like I started reading things. That's the only time I've gone to the library and pulled out medical books and read stuff

and then took that to my pastor at the time. And basically I was just losing a lot of sleep over that. Yeah. And just trying to get my pastor to tell me, you know what, it's actually, you can go on birth control, it's okay. Right. But we didn't.

We used condoms for a long time in our marriage. Yeah, that's all we used up until like a few years ago when I got a vasectomy, because by that point it was like, what, you're gonna go on the pill now? Exactly. Now the reasons changed, but- We waited all that, but we waited so long to have sex without a condom.

That's- Yeah. Well, we can come back to that. Another thing was the idea that if you have sex without a condom. That's- Yeah. Well, we can come back to that. Another thing was the idea that if you have sex with somebody, you're having sex with everyone that they've ever had sex with, you know, in terms of, and that's just not a purity culture thing. That's like a 80s and 90s sort of sexual education thing,

which is not exactly true. I mean, there's these cultural constructs of virginity in general that aren't just an evangelical or a Christian thing that's like, you know, I guess you could care about that. It can make sense that like, oh, I want the first person, I want it to, you want it to be special. You want it to be special.

I think everybody would want their first sexual experience to be special and meaningful, definitely not a negative experience, but also it seems kind of sweet for it to be, in the least sweet, to be their first and your first. Or if you have certain opinions about it, it's like, I don't wanna be second to anybody. But purity culture really leaned into that because it said that like, God is there

and this is, it's implied that it's irreparable. Yeah. That there's some sort of damage that is gonna be lasting. My application to this, as you getting back to what you were saying with the, you know, well, where do you draw the line? Like, how do you do this?

Because we weren't at that point. We'll talk about once we got to college, it got even more explicit and straightforward in terms of being advised as to what you should do and what you shouldn't do. We were still a little bit on our own. We knew we shouldn't have sex. And we knew that it was, they would say,

it's like lighting a candle. It's like lighting a fuse. And once you light the fuse, the bomb is going to explode, right? So don't even light the fuse. Meaning like kissing. Right, well, or potentially dating. It was up to your own interpretation at that point.

Yes. For me, I did a little bit of like internal thinking on this and I came up with my own standard. And my own standard was, okay, it feels like I can't get AIDS from boobies and I can't get a girl pregnant by messing with her boobies. Now, I also wanna preface this with the fact that I did not have a lot of opportunity,

as much as I liked women, I did not have a lot of success with actually convincing any of them to be in a relationship with me. There was, you know, it happened a few times, but it wasn't like I was a Casanova by any means. But in the few relationships that I did have in high school, I think, and again, it's implied, but I'll say it just because consent

was always a part of this. It was not something that I was doing to someone. It was something that we were doing together. But I think that a lot of the girls may have been like, wow, he's really into boobies. He must be a boob man. And it's like, well, I'm not really, I mean, I like them, I'm not a boob man.

That was you going all the way. But it was like, all your way. That's as much sex as I could have at the time. And so there was a lot of focus on the boobies, probably excessive, but it was because I had drawn this imaginary line at the waist. Okay.

And that was my application to that. But you weren't having conversations with your girlfriends to like about those boundaries? No, at that point, I wasn't saying that- And it was certainly a corrective thing from what you- I'm not really a boob man, but I'm gonna seem like one. I wasn't having those conversations. But this was a tightening up of your standards

from the previous episode. Yeah, I had done more at a church lock-in than I was willing to do later. Once my own personal standards started, I started like kind of waking up and saying, oh no, I'm heading down the wrong road. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic?

Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show. With the best celebrity guests.

And hot takes galore. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. We were really tight with our youth group within our church. And then we go to high school and we all start, you know, dating people. But you know the people from our youth group

and like, there's like this, oh, they're keeping an eye on us, we're keeping an eye on them. There's like this built in accountability, like, well, you know that we were kind of all praying together at our church meeting and like agreeing that like, yeah, true love waits and we're gonna stay as far away from temptation and sexual immorality as we can. gonna stay as far away from temptation and sexual immorality as we can.

So there were other people from other schools and other churches who were doing different things. And it was easy to say, we're not like them. We're gonna serve God. We're serious about this. And if you really love God and he's inside of my body, like I need to honor that and I'm serious about it. And we were serious about it, increasingly so.

I mean, when we started the band, the Wax Paper Dogs, it was a Christian rock band. We would like preach from the stage, like give an invitation. All the songs were written about our relationships with God. In very- In one form or another. In very weird ways. In very weird 90s alternative rock ways.

But we kind of set ourselves up, first with the youth group and then in the mission trips we would go on and just our identity was very wrapped up in our Christianity. And then in being in a band and inviting all of our friends to our concerts by the time we were in our junior year of high school, I mean, we kept holding ourselves

to higher and higher standards. We couldn't be going around having sex with our girlfriends because it would have been super hypocritical. But what we could do and what I was doing regularly was masturbating, right? Which again, we had not really started to talk about. Now, what we did know is that Jesus said that even when you just look upon a woman with lust, you basically have had sex

with her in your mind, like you're guilty. So Christians take that verse, which I did not quote, I just paraphrased, and they say basically, this is why masturbation is wrong, because in order to masturbate, there's gotta be a lustful sort of seed of a thought that you're acting upon, right? And so masturbation is seen as sinful in most,

especially back in the day, but most Christian circles. So- And then when it's something that's wrong, it's something that needs to be confessed because anytime you sin, you are putting, you're building a barrier between you and God that then the way you remove that barrier you're building a barrier between you and God that then the way you remove that barrier

is you confess your sin, you acknowledge, yes, I did this. I mean, in Catholic circles, they'll go to a priest in the closet or whatever they call it. But we would just do it in the privacy of our own bedrooms every night before I'd fall asleep. I would say, all right,

I need to clear the slate of everything I did that I know of and I'll also confess the stuff that I don't even know I did, just blanket confession, in order to remove any of that barrier so that I can still have a relationship with God. And so that, and then I guess that starts to bleed into so that I can be good or so that I can experience the benefits of that.

I wasn't making those connections as much as I was like, you shouldn't be doing this and you should feel guilty and shameful when you do it. To the point that I actually remember writing on my ceiling, a popcorn ceiling in my room. And I was able to write on my ceiling in pencil, as I'm lying in bed, I can look up and see it. And I wrote, you better not.

Really? Yeah. You better not. You better not. Masturbate, didn't write masturbate because I knew that's what I was talking about. And so- Did that work? Hell no, it didn't work. I mean, yeah, it mean, here's the thing. You better not.

This is where we're gonna talk a little bit about shame because the thing that was happening for me is that you begin to operate in secrecy because at this point, we'll talk about college in a second, but at high school, we were not confessing to each other or other people about masturbation. We were just struggling with it on our own,

feeling horrible. Like the moment that you're done, the clarity that comes, right? Comes is probably not the right word. The clarity that arrives. I guess there's an evolutionary reason for that. That's like, oh, you better get your wits about you and just be ready to defend yourself or something.

But the clarity that arrives in that moment, when you're an evangelical Christian or just someone who believes that masturbation is wrong, that's where the guilt comes in. That's where the shame comes in and you keep it to yourself and then you go back to the struggle. And it hits you like a brick. You feel horrible. It's like back up the truck.

I mean, sometimes you get to a point where it's like, I mean, you would know, you're just seconds away from just being hit with the shame and guilt of it. But it wasn't, I mean, and then that might be enough to say, I would say, I promise I'm never gonna do it again. I don't want this to be the reason that I can't talk to you, God, and that I love you more than this.

But what you're beginning to do- What you're beginning to do is you're- But then a few days later, here we are again, because it was such- It's biological, that's what happens. Yeah, it's- That's why you're back there, not because something's wrong with you, but because- It's an, that's what happens. Yeah. That's why you're back there. Not because something's wrong with you, but because- It's an irresistible instinctual draw.

You're a human with sexual desire. Now, and you're also of an age when from an evolutionary standpoint, you would have been using these tools to propagate the population. I mean, that's just the biological history of it. But we didn't have any tools to cut ourselves any slack because there was no communication.

The only person I was confessing it to was God. Yeah. And then I knew that there was grace and forgiveness technically, but I knew what it meant. I think the bigger thing that was happening. I think to God. The thing that became a long-term thing

that I feel like is still a part of my brain today is that in a, you know, I read an article recently, I'll make the connection to this in a second, about some urologist was saying, "'Here's why you shouldn't pee in the shower. It's like, well, I pee in the shower on a pretty regular basis, let me read this. And he was like, the reason you shouldn't pee in the shower

is because you're basically reinforcing this Pavlovian response of feeling water on your body or hearing the sound of water making you wanna pee. And so this is gonna become more difficult because you're associating this sensation with needing to release the pee. I don't think that's that big of a life problem. If you hear running water and you need to pee,

I think it'd be okay. But when you think about when you are masturbating- Thank you for letting me off the hook with that. When you are masturbating in this purity culture framework, what you're doing is every single time that you are experiencing sexual pleasure, you are heaping the most intense portion of shame that you have is available to you onto that

and associating shame and sex together. Well, that is not something that you easily get rid of. No, well, first of all, I'll say, now it makes a whole lot more sense why whenever I hear running water, I jerk off. Right, exactly. I was hoping you would make that connection. I mean, the shower is the place to be.

Well. At least, I mean, that was, like, my mom's not gonna walk in the shower and catch me. Right. And so I was really concerned about that, especially after leaving the Victoria's Secret out last week. But you don't wanna get soap and you don't wanna get soap in the urethra.

That can cause problems. Yeah, if we were trading notes, I could have learned that the easy way. But the point that you're making is that, yeah, you associate shame with that experience, with a pleasure and also an exercise in self-discovery. You know, masturbation is an important part of self-discovery that leads to empowerment of and control of yourself

whenever you start to engage sexually with somebody else. It's like, you know what works and you, first of all, you don't require anybody else. There's a line in the first Wonder Woman movie that basically says that. You know, I don't have to have a man to experience pleasure. I don't know how exactly she said it, but I was like, I love the fact that that was a part of the movie.

Let's keep going. There's more masturbation talk to be had, but yeah. Well, the other- Continue to point what you're making now about it. Well, the other P, I mean, obviously there are some neurological things that I don't fully understand that are happening as well when you're associating so much shame with sex,

you're putting things into your brain that you can't just get rid of. There's a physical manifestation happening in your brain tissue when you do those kinds of things. But the other thing that was happening was I was continuing to look at porn. And there's an interesting evolution of what was happening just with porn And there's an interesting evolution

of what was happening just with porn and the internet in general that we happen to live through. Like as we were literally maturing and going through adolescence, the nature and the availability of porn was going through, like we were right in sync with these monumental changes that you basically had to be about 43, 44 years old in order to relate to this. Because it was very clearly just physical magazines

that you had to have a source. In the woods. You had to go to the woods, you had to go to the grok and work for a dollar an hour to just look at porn in the bathroom. You had to find the porn. But then in high school, there were a few rich kids who had computers that had an internet connection. And at this point, you basically could look at pictures,

not videos, talking the mid nineties, pictures of porn on the computer. And now you had to have a friend, which we had a mutual friend, I'm not gonna name him and I don't know if you ever partook, but he was my source for both additional porn mags that I would, he would be like, I'm done with this one. I would take it, I would take it home,

I would put it under my mattress, now I had porn like on standby in my own bed, in the bed where on the ceiling it says, you better not. Don't you do it. You better not. You better not. You better not pull that porn out that your friend gave you. But the other thing that I now have- I bet it was like the princess and the pea.

You could feel that porn just under that mattress, man. Well, I could put the magazine in front of the, you better not. And just look at the boobies and not have to worry about that you better not. Eventually I did a- I never got any of this. Like it was never offered to me and I never asked for it

and I never got it. Well. And we never talked about it. I was- Well, I was ashamed of it, but I was going, you know- I mean, we looked at porn together at the Grok, but yeah, I don't know. Well, we kind of took turns in the bathroom.

Yeah. So not really. But at that point, we were a little bit more serious about things and this friend was not a Christian. And you couldn't tell me because I would be like, you got, you better not. Yeah. You better not. But then his computer, which it was funny

because it wasn't like we went to a website. I don't think I understood what a website was in like 1994. But what I did understand is he was funny, because it wasn't like we went to a website. I don't think I understood what a website was in like 1994. But what I did understand is he was like, I've got this folder of all the pictures that I've downloaded. Because you had to wait a fricking- And he didn't have any shame about it. You had to wait five to seven minutes.

He was like, I'm done with this, or hey, here's my folder, right? To get a high res picture, you had to wait five to seven minutes and it would like slowly unfold. But oh, there's the nipples. Okay. Like a dot matrix printer.

There's the bottom of the booby. All right, how long is it gonna take to get to the vagina? You know, it's like. Because I'm waiting for it. Because you know that's what I'm waiting for because that's what I'm about. Yes, Rhett. I think I established that in the first episode,

but that wasn't good enough. So he was like, listen, I've gone through the trouble of downloading all these. You can just look at them. And sometimes he would be there and sometimes he knew I needed my own time. Oh gosh. No, but I did not, no, to be clear, just, you know,

you might already think I'm a freak and a creep, but I did not then masturbate at this dude's house, just so you know. I just kind of took these images in my, and implanted them in my brain and then took them back home. But there was a lot of that happening, like seeking out those opportunities, which were still, we live in a completely different world now,

where you have access to it and it's explicit and it's any sort of flavor that you want and it's on your phone at any time, which we'll get into like what that might mean and what that might be doing to society or our opinion on that. At this point, it was still difficult to access, but it was still this thing that I was like,

I wasn't in any relationships where I was sexually active. I wasn't gonna do that with an actual woman for two reasons. Number one, I didn't have much opportunity. And number two, I was pretty good at holding myself to the not below the belt standard in any relationships I was in, but it felt different. I was like, well, I can go and kind of literally release

a lot of this tension by looking at porn and masturbating. And so that's what I kept doing, even though I felt horrible every time it happened. For me in high school, I mean, I was just frightened of conducting myself in a dating relationship. And so I never worried about, I might have sex with some girl.

I knew that wasn't gonna happen. But even the physical relationship, it was kinda like a, high school was kinda like a reset for me. The few girls that I dated right at the beginning, I was just so in my own head, like I couldn't kiss them. I got dumped because I didn't wanna kiss a girl who really wanted to kiss me.

I did eventually dabble in physical relationship with I guess a couple of girls I dated and it was a cycle of, is this okay? Do I feel guilty? I'm just gonna confess to God anyway, but it wasn't, I just wasn't, I still had so much trepidation that it overrode most of my drive.

I got in a serious relationship my senior year of high school. And that's when, I mean, it's like we were in love with each other and it was really serious and it was going really well. And then within the safety of that relationship, all of our physical relationship progressed. And yeah, it progressed further and further.

And of course we were in the band, we were preaching from stage. We would talk as a band when we get together and rehearse. We would have like basically accountability. And if you're not from the evangelical movement, you hear that word and you know what it means, but it means something more specific within our world. It's more systematic and it involves saying,

like you say what you need help with it's more systematic and it involves saying, like you say what you need help with and then you basically, when you get together with your accountability partners, then they'll ask you questions. You've given them permission to ask you questions about it to hold you accountable that you're keeping your commitments. You better not. So I have to think, well, I don't know if we talked

about masturbation in those meetings. I don't think we did. I don't think we were comfortable enough. But we talked about like, I'm struggling in my relationship with my girlfriend. Like I wanna make sure that like I'm honoring God. And we were just so serious. And we had put ourselves out there that like, if we were just so serious and we had put ourselves out there

that like if we were hypocritical, then it might ruin someone's chances of coming to Jesus. We were very serious about it. And I brought that into this very serious dating relationship. But we were making out and trying to just stop it at that. So my line was at the collarbone. Whoa.

Yeah. Wow. That's where my line- You should have asked me where the line could be. That's where my line was and- The line has a tendency to move down, I will say that. I remember we were having conversations, but you had had girlfriends earlier

and then the well kind of dried up for you. Like by senior year, you weren't dating anybody, right? Not senior year, junior year, yeah, but not senior year. I remember we would hang out in the Walmart parking lot and we would talk about like, we would talk about like the hypocrisy that's on the line. We would encourage each other to be chaste. And you were like, man, I've, you know, you would talk, I think you would talk about your line

and you would tell me about some of the things that you had done and then we would encourage each other not to do those things and then within the band, we were really, we were trying to do that too because the band was kind of on the line in this. If I screw up literally with my girlfriend, does the band fall apart? And does my relationship with God fall apart?

I mean, one thing I will say about us is that we have always been, and I actually think this is the thing that drove our deconstruction. We have always been pretty concerned about truth and integrity. Like, you know, it is something that has, the idea of saying this and doing something

that was different and not representative of that thing was something that we couldn't really live with. So it wasn't just this sort of pressure of the culture that we were in, because listen, there were lots of Christian kids who were part of that same culture and were like, "'Guys, you actually, you mean you take, "'you literally take this seriously?

"'I'm screwing my girlfriend. "'I mean, of course, I know I'm not supposed to, "'but I'm not gonna not do it.'" But we were like, no, no, you like, you can't do that thing, because it's wrong and you're not supposed to do it. And it would ruin your witness if you were to do it. And I don't hold, I mean, I think that that's,

I'm proud of us in that way. Yeah. Because I think that we took it very seriously. It was the framework that we had committed to and it came with consequences and it came with standards that you were supposed to follow, you know? And at certain points they felt impossible. I mean, and so there were times when,

if you're making out with your girlfriend, when I was making out with my girlfriend, it would get, you know, your body- Your collarbone gets old. Your body kind of takes over because your body is telling you what it wants and you can find yourself doing things that it's almost like an out of body experience,

especially when it is such an existential crisis. Like I was making out with my girlfriend and I was having this internal conflict and I felt like it was Satan versus the Holy Spirit and it was don't do this. The cycle of shame with masturbation would happen in our relationship whenever we would cross a line but we were so infatuated with each other that we kept,

we would make rules. You keep doing it. We'reatuated with each other that we kept, we would make rules. We keep doing it. We wouldn't, we're not gonna touch each other. And then it's like, it was just hard to keep your hands off of each other. Well, sometimes they don't, I mean, setting that boundary and drawing those lines, it's human nature to then go and cross the lines.

So on a physical level, it was a complete struggle and so frustrating, but on a spiritual level, it was just as much anguish, definitely more, because every night after I was hanging out with my girlfriend, it would just be like, all right, I've got to confess and make these promises to God and to myself.

Our relationship continued through my freshman year in college. So every weekend, we'd make sure we spent time together and it was just, I look back on it and I just feel so sorry for us because it became this obsession. Like we were motivated to connect, but yet, and we had all these struggles

and we would slip up and we'd go too far. And then, you know, I would be like, I'm not only sinning against my own body and God, but I feel like I should be stronger and I should keep, now I'm dragging her down too. Because every time I did something, it put up that wall of separation with God that then I had to have a conversation with him

in order to tear it down. And after a while, it's like, God has to be getting tired of this. I'm freaking tired of this. That'll smite you. I also think when you're just making out, and you could do it, we could do it for hours, and it would be so much tension and struggle.

And then the other way I just look back and I'm sorry for us is that like, if we'd have just gotten it over with, we probably could have had a much more vibrant relationship, but it actually began to completely define our relationship because it was, I wanna be with you, I wanna enjoy you relationally, not just physically, but the desire is so strong.

And the rules we put in place, it was torture. It was a form of torture. Well, the interesting thing, again, kind of looking at this from a strictly biological standpoint, if you think about what is actually happening, you're doing something that the two human bodies are not really, have not adapted to do, which is to just live in this foreplay place

just indefinitely, right? Which is where the whole I kiss dating goodbye thing came about, which we got more into in college, where it's just like, don't even do anything physical because, and that was a Christian application was, you're basically just sitting there with the end of this burnt fuse, just lighting and lighting and lighting it

and it's getting super old and it's not even that fun anymore. And it feels like all the focus of your relationship is on not letting the fuse burn down to the bomb and blow up, right? But it's just interesting to think about it in a secular context. Now, it'd be like, you got these two sexually mature people

who have all the equipment and all the hormones in order to then move towards a procreative act who believe that they shouldn't do that, but are kind of just starting in this place that naturally leads to sex, but they don't go there because of this other philosophical framework. What does that, I mean, that's a hellish place to be, ultimately is what I'm saying.

It definitely was. And then, so by, at a certain point, it became, this struggle became such a cornerstone of our relationship that I began to believe that it was creating an insurmountable barrier. Like I couldn't confess at a rapid enough rate to keep that wall between me and God down.

And I assumed that I was doing the same for her or that again, there was consent. She was on the same page. So she was having a similar experience that defined our relationship to the point where we broke up just because we couldn't handle that anymore. And you know what it did? It absolutely broke my heart

because we broke up because we were so into each other that we were doing things that, you know, we're dismantling our relationships with God. It wasn't about anything that happened between us otherwise. You know, and I probably spiritualized it at the time and said, well, if I can't be someone who keeps my standards and my boundaries and also does my part to keep her pure as well, then I don't need to be in this.

I don't need to do this to her and I don't need to do this to God and I don't need to do this to God. And that's the reason why we broke up. It's really tough to, it's like when, it felt like you're really in love with somebody that you, and you think maybe you wanna spend the rest of your life with them, but then it's like, okay, they move away and you don't,

and so you break up for some tertiary reason. Yeah, you didn't actually have a, you didn't have a normal breakup process of like realizing that you weren't right for each other. There was some insurmountable conflict. It was like a sort of emotionally stunted process because of this other factor. It consumed our relationship and just like a wildfire.

I just feel like it burn us to a crisp. And so we broke up and that was probably the, and I've said this before, I feel like that's the most prolonged experience of depression that I've had in my life, except for parts of COVID and lockdown. And so you can see as I, that entire experience going into my sophomore year and then like we broke up

at the beginning of the summer before sophomore year and then the first half of sophomore year was like this depression and then I first half of sophomore year was like this depression. And then I met Christy. And everything from that experience impacted how I would approach it. So, you know, and we laugh about all the things that, and Christy and I can look back and we do laugh when we tell people, our kids and other people,

or write about it in the book of mythicality, the things that we didn't do. We didn't kiss until we got engaged. Well, I wanna stop you there. All of that type of stuff. I wanna stop you there just because one of the things that's hitting me, I'm gonna throw this out there to you,

is that we haven't even gotten into the college experience, which was a completely different level of focus being in campus ministry. And we haven't talked about what it's like to be people who come from that environment and then get engaged and try to keep from having sex with your fiance during that. I feel like we've just crossed the hour threshold here.

We're gonna go either, we're gonna go another hour and this is gonna be a two hour episode or we can make this episode a two parter and just sex timber becomes five episodes. I think the next episode, we're gonna be having the same conversation. So all of a sudden you're talking about. Well, but I think we're gonna be talking a lot about,

you know, when we finally had sex, or our wives are gonna be talking about when they finally had sex, we're gonna be talking about parenthood, we're gonna be talking about when they finally had sex. We're gonna be talking about parenthood. We're gonna be talking about sex within marriage. I mean, listen, I think sex-tember is just too much to contain. In September?

In September. I think sex-tember lives in September, but then the Q&A actually reaches out into October. I mean, I think that's what's happening. It's like the sex cannot be contained. There's just so much of it. We haven't even gotten to college. We haven't even gotten to college. We haven't even gotten to college

and I don't wanna give that short shrift because I gotta tell the whole reason that me and Jessie became boyfriend and girlfriend, which is largely related to the standards that I had set and how she didn't even understand them. Like there's a lot to unpack and I just think that you gotta give it its own pace. All right, I think that's fair.

So what is your takeaway from this? Because I feel like I might be saying, since we have some more time now, if I go back to that high school relationship, I don't know, there's part of me listening to myself and saying, well, if you'd have just put more boundaries in place, like you would have a better relationship. It's like, you're not the victim here, you're the problem.

And that's definitely what I felt at the time. I strongly believe that if someone is committed to an evangelical worldview, then they will use the stories that we tell to reinforce their position, right? Again, our point is not to make you question what you think, it's just, we're giving you our perspective. I think that your story about your relationship

where you got to this place where it became consumed by trying to hold each other, hold yourselves back from each other physically to the point that you couldn't even have a real relationship and it literally killed your relationship. To me, like I was saying earlier, that's the reason that you couldn't even have a real relationship and it literally killed your relationship. To me, like I was saying earlier, that's the reason that the whole Josh Harris, I kiss dating goodbye movement happened

because it was a recognition that like, hey, the whole problem is dating. The whole problem is relationships. Like you've got these people who are ready to have sex and everything about them is geared towards having sex with each other, you just shouldn't be in a relationship. And that's where dating became a bad thing and the idea of courtship became the thing

that we started talking about in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was the idea that you really shouldn't engage romantically with someone until you're in a place where that process will over a relatively short period of time actually lead to marriage and the consummation of that physical relationship. And so that's where the idea of having your parents involved

in the courtship and helping you think through this and the whole idea of like spending time on the front porch with a girl that you might be, it's the old way of thinking about things, right? Sp spending time on the front porch with a girl that you might be. It's the old way of thinking about things, right? Spending time on a front porch and seeing if you and your families get along and are we right for each other? And if we are right for each other,

let's begin dating or let's begin courting with the idea that we're moving towards marriage and we're moving towards that physical relationship that we know that it's gonna happen, we're getting ready to set a date really quickly so you don't end up in this place where you're just burning the end of the fuse all the time.

Now here's what I'll say. I think that the whole I Kissed Dating Goodbye movement did irreparable damage to a lot of different people and by the way, Josh Harris recognized that and went on a whole like, you know, apology tour and he's since is deconstructed and I don't know Josh and I don't know his story and I'm not speaking on his behalf.

But he's taken the book out of print. He quit printing the book, yeah. I think, and I think a lot of people recognize that that mentality was actually not an effective way to really meet the needs of young men and women, but you understand why it happened. It happened because of the story that you just told is a story that was happening with so many young people.

I mean, and there's totally different type applications. Like you hear about the backdoor policy where it's like, we didn't know about- The Garfunkel and Oates. Yeah, where girls won't give the, they feel like they're dating a guy that they have to give him something. So they have anal sex instead of vaginal sex.

And then that's okay, cause that's the loophole. Yeah, literally. That was the joke in their song. For, yeah, for putting them in a position where it's like, well, I gotta conduct this relationship, but I gotta be right before God. I mean, there's all types of horror story applications

where it's, that aren't our stories. I mean, you talk about someone who's queer and they're coming to grips with that. Let me just acknowledge, we're talking about all this within a very strictly heterosexual context because that's our experience.

If you were anything other than that going through this environment, this evangelical environment, like they weren't writing a book for you. No one was even willing to talk to you about it. Like if you were like, and the way that we would have said struggling with same sex attraction, struggling, right? Like that's how the evangelicals framework puts it.

It's like, that is just strictly a sin. And that's a whole different thing that you got to deal with in a different setting, whether that's like, you know, now we got to pray the gay away or whatever. So we acknowledge that we're not talking about that, but that's a very real and by the way, much more difficult experience than just trying not to screw your girlfriend.

Not having had that happen to me, I'm just saying I can imagine that being in a place where your very sexual identity is not even acknowledged as anything other than a sin. Like, because the benefit and the privilege of being, you know, a heterosexual person in this context is like, the youth pastor would say, "'Listen, your desire for your girlfriend is good.

"'It is natural. "'And one day you will be able to consummate "'that physical relationship, "'but it only should happen in the context of marriage.'" So you've got to, so again, your desire is validated. Yeah. If you're queer, your desire is invalidated. Yeah. Which is a completely

different amount of damage that happens in the Christian context a lot of times. There were so many ways that we were spoken to in order to just, it's like, well, it was kind of like, try this analogy on. Try anything that would keep you from slipping up. You know, they would just invent all types of things. It's not easy.

But like, I remember thinking when I was making out with my girlfriend, it's like, if she's not my wife, my future, like picture, there was like advice to picture your future partner, picture your wife of the future and what you're robbing her of by doing this now. And I was like, maybe I'll try that.

This is someone's future wife. What if this was my sister? Well, I probably wouldn't be kissing her. Well, the interesting thing, we'll get into a couple episodes from now, is that this is not a problem that is only being addressed by the evangelical community, right? Yeah.

We live in a culture where, again, the biology is such that you basically, you know, you go through puberty at what? 12, 13, 14. And then if you've rewind 10,000 years, at that point in like your early teenage, mid teenage years, you're basically pairing up or maybe getting into some sort of polyamorous,

you're having sex at or maybe getting into some sort of polyamorous, you're having sex at that point, right? That's why the sexual maturity happens at that point, because from just a pure biological standpoint, that's when you're ready to, right? But a cultural framework, apart from any sort of Christian ideas, has been put on top of that where it's just like,

hey, you know, you definitely as a 15 year old in the year 2021, shouldn't be going out and making babies, right? Like just culturally, this is not the way that we're doing things right now. People don't get pregnant when they're 15 for a lot of really good reasons. So you have to deal with that.

Like there has to be an answer to that. Cause the answer is not do whatever the hell you want to and deal with the consequences because the consequences of sex continue to be STIs, which continue to get even more and more scary with just the way viruses and bacteria evolve, but also unwanted, or just, I could just say team, I could just say pregnancy, right?

So there's gotta be a framework. Just because we're not Christians anymore doesn't mean that we don't have a framework for trying to address these things personally and for our families. It's just the underlying framework changes, right? But the intention, the intention of like, we kind of want people to avoid these risks

is sort of the, is the underlying motivation. And you just, we have experience with this very specific expression of that and all these other mess that got put on top of it, where it's like, we gotta get the shame on top of this, we gotta get the shame on top of this, we gotta get the guilt on top of this. And then you just had the, you know, I didn't have, I wasn't in a relationship at that point

in my senior year. It wasn't until later once we got into college and a whole new set of standards and a whole new level of accountability and transparency was put on us because we got in campus ministry that it began to impact my relationships in college. That's what we'll talk about next time because it was a whole different world at that point.

Yeah, yeah, so we'll get into college. I think you can see where this is going. The systems that we had in high school and we're just amped up on a collegiate level. And the things that we put in place, the systems that I put in place in my dating life and with Christy and all the systems we put in place

for accountability, it's just kind of mind blowing. Charts, there's charts. Charts involved. Yeah, if you're interested in charts, listen next week. I'm sorry to frustrate you, to give you listening blue balls, so to speak, to push half of this to next week.

It's all part of the analogy. I don't wanna give our college experience short shrift because I think there's a lot to explore there. And as we keep going, I guess we're, I want to fully process this. Well, we're slowly revealing. We're slowly, just like- Striptease?

Just like a picture of a naked lady in 1995 being downloaded by like a modem. 56K modem? 56K modem. We're revealing ourselves to you over time slowly. I've got a rec for you. This is just another gentle nudge. I know you might roll your eyes, but you know what?

It might be time to pick up that journal. Try journaling again. I feel like if I just had a reminder every six to nine months it's like, you know what? Why don't you try journaling again? Hmm. So I'm taking this wreck spot to just say, you know what?

Just try it. You know what, maybe you try journaling again. I'm definitely gonna look back through my journal and experience some of this anguish as I prepare for the, cause I was journaling hot and heavy in college. Oh yeah. And so I'll go back to that with the sex filter on and see what I can come up with.

All right, keep the questions coming. Hashtag Ear Biscuits. It extends, and I'm talking about the podcast, Sextember, it extends. It's gonna go through October at this point, or into October. It's going to penetrate October. Yeah, right, yeah.