Hear Dr. Joe and Fr. Frank talk about sexual health, human sexuality from moral and physiological perspectives, the importance of abstinence, the impact of pornography, and the challenges of modern relationships.
Dr. Joe’s new book that was discussed: https://www.cognitoforms.com/HeartbeatInternational3/WomensSexualWellnessHandbookPreOrder
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, friends, we have a great discussion ready for you today we are going to talk about sexual health we are going to talk about how people can understand human sexuality better from a moral perspective, but even just from a physiological perspective, bonding relationships, timing in relationships, marriage and having children. And we’re going to talk to an expert in this, doctor Joe Malone, and about his new book that is a great tool for all of us to understand these things much better for the health of individuals, families and marriages and of our whole society.
Welcome to the pro-life team.
Podcast i’m Jacob, and I’m here with Doctor Joe and Father Frank.
We are here to to learn about Joe Malone, Doctor Joe Malone’s new book. Joe, go ahead and get us started actually, before we get started, Father.
Frank, would you open us in?
Prayer and then Doctor Joe, would you share, share a bit about your book so we can get the conversation started?
Right, gladly. But then that has a nice ring, by the way, Doctor Joe and Father Frank that’s I think that’s that. But in any case, yeah, let’s turn to the Lord and pray. Father, we thank you for creating us you have written your word and your will in our very essence, in our bodies, in our souls, and Lord also in our sexuality. You have created human sexuality, Lord God, for your purpose, to reflect you, to be the arena in which love flourishes and which life flourishes and in which health flourishes. And you give us these gifts you, you entrust these gifts to us. And yet, Lord, we have so lost touch and, and, and been obscured in our understanding and failed in our stewardship of these tremendous gifts. And we pray for your Holy Spirit now, the same Spirit by which we were created, that in our conversation we may come both to a deeper understanding of these gifts that you have given us and to a deeper commitment in our heart, in our will to defending, celebrating, preserving these wonderful gifts for the good of humanity and for the health of us all. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen amen.
Amen thank you, Father Frank. Thank you. Well, I guess it’s my turn to to describe the book and again, it’s been about a two year process. The good folks at at Heartbeat International asked me to put something together of a resource for the for their centers nation and wide and also I guess worldwide, something that would help bring to bear the science on this whole issue of, you know, sexuality in this case, particularly hetero heterosexuality. They did request that I do a section on same sex attraction, that type of thing I did. But the vast majority of the book is is on heterosexuality and in particular preventive type of approach as far as helping especially these young women that mostly they’re working with to understand themselves, how their mind and their bodies work and then also how these the young men that they’re interacting with, how their mind and bodies interact. And then things about they need to know about themselves as as young women and things that that again, the young men, if they’re dealing with the young men in a relationship where they’re talking to a much where they could help them to understand about themselves as well so, so the book is, I think it’s a really well done. They had a lot of help with with it from the staff of Heartbeat and as you know, they have a great deal of experience in this area. And really it’s really built on the shoulders of giants as we’re standing on the shoulders of giants because there’s been folks working in this area, you know, in the abstinence, I guess they call it abstinence only arena, you know, for years and years and decades. This is an additional step. It would be, you know, including that because as we’re going to discuss abstinence is this is the key to sexual health, premarital abstinence or chastity, but also it brings to bear the science on it and it that wise as opposed to what you need to do, but also why why it works this way, why success comes from following the biblical approach.
You know, Doctor Joe, I this whole topic is so first of all, it’s so powerful, and secondly, it’s so relevant our whole society seems to be just caught up in this utter confusion about sexuality i mean, look obviously at the, you know, this whole and I see it as a rebellion against God’s truth you know, we, we can’t say a man is a man, we can’t say a woman is a woman. We don’t know what marriage is anymore family has just been completely redefined and it’s like, what, why why are we finding this so hard and, and you know, to me, it’s the at root, it’s the same lie as saying a baby’s not a baby, right i mean, for 50 years we’ve been pretending with abortion. Oh, but it’s not really a baby or it’s only a baby if you choose that it is. And now we’ve come to the point where that same lie has just been kind of shifted over. Oh, you’re only a man if you choose to be. You’re only a woman if you choose to be. Why is it just taking a like a very broad, broad look at the whole scenario we’re living in? What is it about human sexuality that is so I, I guess you would use the word powerful to begin with it’s so utterly powerful. And, and, and, and it’s like this in some ways the center of attention of every battle that’s going on, even the political battles now that we have in this election.
Excellent question, as always in dealing with you Father, right? Well, and I’ve been thinking about that too recently, and I’ve done a lot of research on this, as you can imagine, and I think a lot of people are questioning that. But when you think about the way the Bible lays out and the way God, you know, interacted with us starting in Genesis, the very first thing that he said, and I know I’m definitely preaching the choir here with you, He know exactly what I’m going to say. The very first thing that he said to humans was go forth and multiply you know, he could have he could have said so many different things but obviously, if that’s job one, it’s sexuality and proper sexuality especially is very important in God’s eyes and, you know, again, he was going through the garden and he was creating things and you know, he did, he created this and he said, you know, he found that good and he created this and he found that good. First thing he came to the wasn’t good in in the whole process of creation was he realized that man was alone, you know, so creating a a mate for man was the first remedy that ever had to take as far as, you know, something that wasn’t perfect with him starting it off so when you have those kinds of, I think situation, the circumstances in our creation from the very beginning, sex really does sit up high as far as as far as an important issue. And I agree with what you said i believe that the other side and that goes all the way to the satanic element of it. They, they know that there’s a vulnerability there as far as human behavior goes, and they know that there’s a, there’s a way to destroy human relationships, destroy human culture, destroy, you know, countries, you know, you name it communities by imposing an evil approach to, to sexuality and outside of God’s design so and also, you know, I mean, again, it was the first thing he talked about. There’s a powerful reward system to it. Obviously the only thing that really we’ve found that’s maybe stronger reward systems are are chemical, you know, the things that they’ve been able to come up with in the last especially hundred 200 years that hijack that that dopamine reward system in the brain so, so it is very motivational as the highest natural motivation that we have above food by quite a bit, especially for the on the male side of things. So very, very vulnerable and I think that on to your point even more, I think the people that have on the other side that really thought this out and realized that, especially at the female side of things, because the females are the gatekeepers, as we all know, they’re also the deciders when it comes to sexuality. And so if you can mess them up, if you can mess their role up, and I’m talking about radical feminism now, I don’t want to mince any words, but I know you’re not going to mince any words. And I like that, you know, radical feminism was very strategic i believe in, in pressing women be way beyond, you know, the vote and, and all of the things that you know, were good in the very beginning, pressing them to to the point now where they, you know, you’re supposed to be like a man you’re supposed to have all the same sexual appetites, the same sexual behavior. Your brain is so much different as as what I what I could tell you, but that really, it really throws them out of the position of being the, the more reticent, the more choosy. You know, men being the chasers, women being the choosers and, you know, forcing men to well, encouraging men, I guess would be the way word. I say it because it’s not negative. It’s just encouraging men, if it’s done right, to fulfill their, their natural, their natural role, which is to be a protector and a provider, you know, for, for women, for the starting with their their wife, but then also for their family as it develops so anyway, all that said, I’ve, I’ve come to the realization over the years I’ve been doing this that radical feminism has been a strategic move that’s really like knocked out one of the legs out from underneath our maybe our three leg stool. And again, it was none of this has been by chance and none of it’s just been, you know, human nature getting more and more evil and that type of thing it’s been, there’s been a plan to it and you know, it’s been carried out and here we here we are, you know, so.
Oh, we are, yeah.
Yeah, but and also before we move on, agree with and this is really, you’ve made really a big impact in my life with this. I agree with your thoughts and your philosophy on the fact that Roe versus Wade 1973 and even before that in some cases where we bought the lie that a clump, you know, this, this conceived being, this conceived human being in, in the, in the womb can just be a clump of cells, you know, maybe till a certain point, maybe not, maybe all the way to birth. And you can just do with it what you want. You know, that’s actually another little, its own little body in there it’s only DNA And buying that lie and playing along with it has kind of has led to all the craziness that you, you mentioned earlier where you can just decide, OK, you know, they decide it’s not, it’s not another body inside my body. It’s, it’s, it’s my body and so I can just scrape it off if I want to, at any point that I want to. Well, it is just a, it’s not very far down the road to, well, I can be a woman if I want to, if I’m a man, you know, if I’m physically a man and I could be a man if I’m a physically a woman so it’s giving into the nihilistic, I would say just fallacy and and, and fallacious thinking and delusional thinking. So it is delusional. It starts there, I think. I think you’re right. It starts there, yeah.
You know, I say something in my talk sometimes that I’d like to to, to let you expand on it and build on. I say this, I don’t think people are afraid of sex. I’m sorry, the other way around. I don’t think it’s so much that our society is obsessed with sex, as many people will, will, will say and will evaluate. I think they’re afraid of it. And, and, and what I mean by afraid of it is, as you already pointed out, you want to understand sex, sexuality you start with God. You don’t start with the human body, male, female. You start with God because he, as you related to us already. This is foundational to creation. So when I say I think our society is afraid of sex, if you look at what it really means, it’s tied up with self giving love, a total donation of yourself to the other and a donation then of the couple in generosity with a lifelong commitment. We’re afraid of a lifelong commitment we’re afraid to give ourselves away. A commitment then that they’re supposed to have to their children and to the wider human community. Ultimately, I think people are afraid of sex, even though they might not realize or think of it in these terms, because they see that it is a force so powerful that it’s going to kind of suck them up into the very life of God Himself, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Constantly giving themselves, pouring themselves out for one another, and then pouring themselves out for us. Not obsessed with, but afraid of. How do you how do you see that?
Yeah, I had not thought about that way before, but I agree. I think it is very intimidating to a lot of people and I think, you know, on the female side of it, again, which is what I’ve dealt with mostly in my career, they’re they don’t want to be in the position that they’re in. They think they’re in, which is they think they have to play along they think they have to hook up and have to have casual sex in order to be able to, so, so to speak, compete, you know, with with the other women. They don’t want, they don’t want shallow, superficial and short relationships. They really want deep, intimate and long relationships. And they think that they have to have casual sex in order to get that. They think they have to compete and play the game, as I was saying, but actually, father Frank, what the research is showing is that that’s the that’s the last thing they want to do if they want a deep, deep, intimate, long relationship. Because the way that the way God created our biochemistry and our brain anatomy to work is with men when it comes to bonding, they don’t, they don’t bond unless they’ve been get, there’s been a certain time, certain amount of time, quite a long time that they’re around this young woman that they’re attracted to. You know, they’re, they’re practicing for when they’re married of how, like you said, self giving love, they’re practicing self giving love with her, treating her like a queen, you know, and all the, all the old school things help as far as opening the door and just treating her very, very reverentially, reverentially like that. This chemical named vasopressin now some people pronounce it vasopressin, but proper pronunciation is vasopressin in the brain of the young man. When it’s in there long enough, it actually creates receptors for itself and a receptor brain receptor looks like that only a million times smaller. And when, when this process of courtship and being attracted but not having sex, it goes on long enough, the molecules and it’s millions of them, of course, the molecules actually, you know, go in and bond. And when that bonding takes place, it’s what we call falling in love. Now that’s just one step for the male. This is more complex for the male than for the female. When that when that vasopressin bond happens, then it allows his testosterone to drop a little bit. And when it drops a little bit, then the oxytocin he also has is able to to lock molecules are able to lock in as well so for it doesn’t happen though in the typical hookup situation where, you know, first time they go out, you know, maybe nothing physically happens maybe the second time they physically, you know, have sexual intercourse that vasopressin has the has the property of of leaving when sexual intercourse happens and you know, the sexual completion happens, but not when they’re just around each other and, you know, hugging and be kissing and that type of thing so God has designed into our biochemistry, into the male biochemistry, in this case the pattern, I guess I would say intelligent design of of why chased courtships work the way they do this.
Is fast. This is fascinating. If I if I could pause on this point for a little bit. So you’re talking about the physiological dimension of falling in love, correct? Could you go back to that point where you were saying that the receptor, the vasopressin it, what is happening? What did you say has to happen before you get to that point where as you said it’s called falling in love? What is it receiving the receptor is receiving what?
The receptor is receiving a signal from the vasopressin being in the brain, being present in the brain that it needs to be created. And once it’s created, again, there’s millions of them, they’re being created. So it’s not just one, it’s, it’s many. But once, once they’re created and that lock can take place, that molecule that’s been in there, sitting in there and causing this reaction to take place. Once that lock takes place of the molecules going into and locks into the receptor, then the falling in love, the bonding happens for the male. And then like I said, it dropped the, the testosterone level, his testosterone level and then his oxytocin, which you know, he has less oxytocin than than her, but still has some. It’s a double bond then it, it bonds it as well, but it never, it never happens. The vasopressin never, never locks, never finds the lock and the oxytocin lock doesn’t happen if they have sex because vasopressin leaves the brain at the on the end of a sexual, sexual completion, let’s just say orgasm and orgasm, the vasopressin drops yeah. Now, on the other hand, on her part of it, This is why Father Frank and every all of our listeners, This is why we have such a mess in hookup culture and otherwise going away from again, the way we, the way tradition tells us to do it and also our Christian faith, especially our Catholic faith on the other side of it, her bonding process is less, it’s less complex, much less complex. She all she needs, he needs dopamine, OK, And that’s we get dopamine for anything that we crave testosterone and vasopressin to bond oK, So all three of those are present when he’s around her and you know, they’re dating, that type of thing. She all she needs to bond is dopamine and oxytocin and she’s got a ton of oxytocin she has three times that oxytocin that he has. So when they’re together and they, you know, hook up culture that soon, soon they they go into a sexual relationship, casual sex she typically bonds with him she bonds with him, she falls in love with him. And just to give you an example, OK. Because of the way that it works with the males and males have a tendency to categorize females because of all this too not all males, but most males, OK, especially the ones that are sexually active, they categorize them into either the for a good time only or marriage categories to those two categories. And of course, we know you can probably presume what gets you into which category. The other thing is once unmarried sex happens, especially if it’s early on, again, the research shows that again, not all guys, but maybe most guys, they’re in that situation that are doing this consistently they’re having casual sex consistently. They, they start seeing within 10 seconds, father Frank within 10 seconds of orgasm, the male start seeing the female as less attractive, less, less funny, less intelligent, all the less things that you wouldn’t want to be OK. Now, on the other hand, because of her bonding mechanism, because her body mechanism is more, is more simple with just the oxytocin and and dopamine, she’s seeing him after the orgasm takes place. She’s seeing him as more intelligent, better looking, funnier, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera so you can kind of see how hookup culture works. And again, ironically, the radical feminists pushing women, young women in this direction has really made them extremely unhappy. Starting in again, I’m a product, I’m a came of age in the seventies. So this kind of rings my bell some but starting in 1976 seniors in high school girls, girls that are seniors in high school, their happiness level started dropping since 1976 and it has continued to drop it. The girls used to be happier before that. Girls used to be happier on average as high school seniors then then boys were. They passed the boys in the in the mid nineties and then they just continue to drop. So we had, we had, I’ve got the stats here, 2020 two fifty seven percent % school girls felt persistently sad or hopeless. And in nearly actually 2021 nearly 60 % increase. And in comparison, so that 57 % of high school girls felt persistently sad or hopeless. And in comparison, 29 % of the boys of the same age reported the same feeling so about twice, about twice as much. So we’ve had a problem with this for a long time. And again, I’m, I’m hoping that things are starting to turn in a better direction but it’s because we’ve gone against God’s design and yeah, you know, his design is, is in US down to our biochemistry i guess it’s the message that we’re.
It’s fascinating, Yeah. We are truly body and soul.
Yeah, it’s all combined.
Yeah, some people want to over spiritualize love, you know, it’s just sort of just the spiritual thing. But that’s not a Christian view that’s not a biblical view, biblical view, is it body and soul And and and so it’s not just like, oh, I can love whoever I whoever I want to love and of course that leads then into the the gay culture and everything. It’s like, no, no, no, the body matters the body matters. And this this is so fascinating that one other question about the the the vasopressin. Sure what does it have to do with that particular person that you’re bonding to in other words, this is a biochemical reaction in the brain that you’re describing. So you know, the guy gets together with his the girlfriend and it’s like, OK, these chemical react. So the in other words, the brain is saying, OK, this is my reaction specifically to you, not just in general, but to this person. And that’s the bond is created when that person is in his presence frequently, frequently enough to for that, for that bond to to. In other words, I guess what I’m asking is how does that chemical bond connect with that person individually?
Well, the key thing, as you can imagine, is a strong for one thing, sexual attraction between the two of them and the other is a romantic attraction. You know, when you think about it, father Frank, romance kind of went out with a hookup culture too, because romance isn’t really practiced very much these days in within hookup culture, because once you hit the sex part of part of a relationship, romance is not necessarily you’re you’re, you’re practicing generally you’re practicing romance on the male side of it, you know, or if they eventually someday, you know, get to get to the sexual part of it so that’s the way it’s set up. That’s the way our chemistry is set up so it takes it takes a strong, I would say even above sexual attraction for this to work. I would say a romantic attraction because the young man has to be willing to these days at least forgo, you know, any immediate sex or even sex in the near, near future and and show that he is really interested in her as a person and is willing to subsume, you know, his his carnal desires, you know, a sex drive and all that. And so it’s kind of modeling that self giving love that you mentioned earlier so it doesn’t happen with just anybody you know, that a young man goes out with is one of those things where, oh, wow, you know, this, this, this woman isn’t one of my dreams. And it it puts her into the category of for for marriage and not in the category for a good time only so you know, the thing behind that, the principle behind that is something, two things. There’s something called female choice. So not only our species, but you know, God pretty much created this across species there’s some exceptions, but not very many, where female choice means that the female, as we said earlier, you know, has the power of decision in in the relationship. And again, in most other species, the males have to do something they have to provide, they have to provide provision, they have to provide this, that or the other maybe fight another male, you know, just to show they’re strong enough to defend the female. And so there’s all these other things that that in God’s creation show male interest and male fitness, I guess you’d say to for the female, she’s looking not only for, you know, physical, you know, attraction and that type of thing, good gene, so to speak but she’s also looking for character because as a relationship goes on, you know, she’s not always going to be the hot babe, so to speak, that she is now and I think again, women know this intuitively i mean, they’re going to be pregnant probably more than likely someday and is he got to still stick around so it’s really dual there’s a dual element going on in a woman’s in a female choice so they’re looking for not only the attraction, the good genes for the be the father of their children, but also the character and the and you know, that’s why intelligence, humor, all these different things are more important in research on the woman women’s side of things on the other side of it. So female choice for the females, paternity certainty is the side of it for the males, because in our species we have where we have internal fertilization, internal gestation. And so when I’m talking to a group of college students, I always, I have them, you know, split into male and female so I’m kind of talking back and forth from one side to the other so you can envision my normal what I do. But the, the, the, the females are the only ones in our society and in our species that know for sure who the father of the, of the child is. And so human males have had this situation our whole, you know, our whole existence so it’s become really important to male human males to be able to rest assured and know that this woman that they’re getting ready to maybe, you know, commit themselves to and marry and spend their whole life working with towards the goal of a great family and all of that. They want to know that they can, they can trust them and, and know that it’s going to be, you know, their child for sure that that when she gets pregnant is going to be, you know, that they’re going to care for and that type of thing so, so really both sides, both male and female, most woman and man, they want a trust to be able to have a trust relationship with the other one, if maybe more important though, even on the male side of it so that’s, that’s, that’s the way it works out in the research, the out of 67 possible traits, character traits of, of a female that a male wants to marry, the top two are sexual integrity and sexual loyalty. Those are the top 2 out of 67 So, so I say that all that to say again, what’s been told to our young people these days of, oh, you got to get out there and you got to, you know, you got to try it, try. It’s like buying a car you got to try the car out you got to test drive, you know, you’re not going to get me i had actually literally I had two young women I was working with when I was teaching college, teen guys at the university, their students. And they told they shared with me that one of them was their mother and one was their father. But a parent on each, each case, two different families here. They were told by this parent that they had to get out there and have sex with people, with guys in order to get one, in order to get one to consider them for a, for a marriage. And what I, what I found out was it wasn’t a usual situation for these parents. On one side of it that the, the wife had had cheated in her marriage and, and ruined her marriage. And so she was given this advice to her daughter. And the other side is the man that had cheated and, and had ruined their marriage. So they were kind of giving advice from where, from where they were at. Of course, I, I told the young women the truth, what the science shows on it so as you know, there’s a lot of broken people out there this this society that we’re talking about is broken so many and, and just and hurt so many people. And that hurt is getting spread around a lot as well so.
You know, you you you were delving into here the and I want to get into a moment into what you cover in your new book. But but first I wanted to ask you this i mean, for those of us who are working to counsel people away from abortion, these these physiological relational dynamics that you’ve been been been educating us in here. Tell us about what happens there that leads to a situation of being abortion minded in other words, that, you know, there’s a lot going on here with binding, the rapidity of binding, the kind of unequal rates at which the the man or the woman might feel like, Oh yeah, I’m bonded now with this person or I trust this person and there’s a physiological basis to it. Tell us what what goes wrong or what leads to the situation where she ends up feeling like she has to abort the child that they conceive together.
Another excellent question. You, you are just full of excellent questions and I, I really appreciate the the opportunity honor to to interact with your father Frank thank you. Thanks. Well, right at the top of my head, the first thing is that 86 % of women who consider and have abortions, and again, you know, this probably better than I do, but they’re unmarried. So being unmarried is the probably the biggest risk factor. The other risk factor is most of them are under, you know, they’re, they’re between 15 years old and 29 years old. And then the other risk factor is there’s a high proportion of them that are from minority ethnic groups. So with that said, and I think the biggest factor to it is being getting in find themselves in a, in a pregnant situation and not having a husband, number one. Number two is if this young man that is the father is not supportive, you know, of, of her having the, the child or even worse, if he’s actually encouraging her and urging her to have an abortion. That’s a huge factor and family support I think is another, another big factor as far as if it’s not there, I think think you’re looking at a much higher chance of, of her having the abortion of course, you know, and I know that her witnessing her child, you know, with, with a sonogram is a is a big factor as far as helping her to see the mistake it would be to have an abortion. So really it comes down to I think Father Frank that it’s again, we’re, if they’re out of kilter with God’s design for it and so in our society, what we’ve come to and you get everything it stems back from that very beginning of 1973 Roe versus Wade. They can just pretend like this is not a, you know, we don’t really have a real person here we just have cells that aren’t, you know, anything more than like a whatever, a wart on your arm or whatever so, and again, we are at that point because we gave in on the the reality, we didn’t insist on reality back back earlier, Ryan. And so it’s just gotten more and more unreal the different things that are going on. But to ultimately answer your question, I think that again, the biggest factor is the not being married and if not married, not otherwise not having a male, the male that’s that is the partner not being in support of her having having the child so it.
Kind of goes in with what you were explaining about if they have sex too quickly and before their relationship has developed, right? He ends up looking, he’s less impressed with her if I understood what you were saying before, whereas she more quickly comes to the point of feeling bonded to him. And, and, and I’m thinking of that now in the abortion context, where in other words, if, if they don’t let the relationship develop pre sexual intimacy, then it seems to me the risk of abortion is going to increase. And, and I think everybody has the understanding, oh, you know, the more they have sex, the more the the risk of abortion is. But but, but going beyond just that physiological thing, what you were saying, I think is so important for people to understand that that bonding isn’t, isn’t there that trust, if that trust isn’t there, if that feeling of you might say that feeling of responsibility on the part of the man, like I really have to take care of her. If the sex happens too quickly, obviously then that the risk of pregnancy happens very more quickly than the relationship at a time to to mature. And so doesn’t this then feed into this phenomenon of, OK, then the guy feels like he can walk away. I don’t want to deal with a baby. And then she feels isolated and the isolation increases the temptation to abortion.
Absolutely yeah, I couldn’t. I could not have expressed that any better. Yeah, I think absolute logical steps that you took there are exactly right so it’s so unfortunate because again, it’s again, it’s clear that that marriage is very, very important next to whether we serve Christ or not. It’s the next, the next most important decision we make in our lives. So, and as you, as you pointed out so well, the time factor, the, the amount of time that’s going into it or not not time going into it for the relationship to develop. It’s just so important and for them to get to know whether they connect, when they, whether they can actually trust each other, her. And presumably he will be the one pushing for sex more than her in our society. But her not going along with it is showing him that not only can he, he can trust her, you know, with this issue, but probably a lot of other issues as well. And again, it’s also both is building the muscle that they that they need in in both cases to not once they’re married and been married for a while, to not want to wander to somebody else, you know, outside the marriage so that I guess you’d say ethical muscle or discipline muscle as far as being able to resist sexual temptation so it all works well in that direction for the if the sanctity of marriage, the sacrament of marriage, as as we say in the Catholic Church, if it’s respected the way that should be respected and you can imagine on college campuses, Father Frank, as I’m giving, giving this talk, you know, invariably from the back, there’ll be Doctor Malone. How, how long, how long does it have to be? How long did it take to for the vasopresin to to lock?
Right.
And boy, I hate giving this up, but but I want them to be able to believe that I’m telling them the truth even even when I don’t like it necessarily. But it’s about, it’s about four months it takes at least four months for this process to take place so interesting yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, when you’re when they’re hitting this casual sex the second or third time, you know, they’ve been together. It just, it just destroys the whole thing and not doesn’t mess up, you know, the woman’s life and possibly a child’s life, but also the the young man too, because young men were designed, they weren’t designed for that. It literally in my my way of viewing it and my study of it, Father Frank, it really puts and especially if you throw in, you know, a pornography, a pornography habit along with it, which you know, both of those pop the dopamine and, and and testosterone, but not much else and just spike it continuously and, and, and again, we know that anytime you have something like that spike spiking your dopamine consistently, your dopamine, the way it works is that your dopamine level is spiking like that and then coming back down the same way, which is what it does. The the baseline level of level of dopamine gets lower each time that you do that so basically what we got with hookup culture and porn on the male side of it is this similar situation to a cocaine addiction, because cocaine hits the brain. You need more each.
Time, in other words, correct and.
In the case of, you know, in case of porn, you need more extreme porn all the time scary. Yeah, it is good.
Remind us, Doctor Joe, what’s the prevalence of of pornography among males? well.
Father Frank, that is a question that I don’t think we’re getting good answers to right now because it’s much more prevalent than than I believe that they’re giving it credit for but it’s they’re supposed to be about between 15 and 20 %. But the, and I won’t get into the female side of it, but I believe it’s much higher than that i believe that the people that are the quote, quote, unquote sex positive people, which is another really bad name, really inappropriate name. I believe they don’t want pornography to appear like it’s a problem they want to actually, you know, say that it’s actually a positive, you know, in our society. So here’s what here’s the thing about pornography that our listeners could can benefit from. Pornography like food, you know, it’s a natural, well, it represents a natural drive sex is a natural drive as we pointed out earlier and sex with it within love and marriage. And then food, food is a natural drive. And so there’s rewards associated with those and like we said around the highest reward is the sexual reward system be in a natural state. But because both of those are natural drives that we have. And because our ancestors at times needed to be able to, you know, they didn’t have refrigeration and for instance, on food and that type of thing and in some cases, you know, we have a pretty strong history of polygyny, meaning 1 male and several maybe harem, harem females especially like in royal situation, that type of thing. Being able to binge on on on food for one thing, it has been a really bad thing for our society now that now it’s so prevalent, now that it’s so bad that food is so bad. You know, we’re looking at about 7374 % of of our people that are either over obese or overweight because we have a binge override system is what when it comes to food. Same thing with with sex or pornography in this this case. So what it comes down to, to answer your question, the percentages of people who get addicted to, let’s say to alcohol, to cocaine, to heroin, etcetera, it runs about 10 % of the people that ever try it. And so it’s only about 10 %, one out of 10. But the estimations by, I think the more honest scientists as far as either food, well, you can look at the food situation with 70 percent, 70 % being either overweight or obese, 50 % or over obese in the United States now. And with porn, you know, I’m going to make my own estimate here. But with men, you know, I would say it’s probably 6070 % as far as young men go. I mean, when they started trying to do the research on this back in 2009 at the university, they couldn’t find a control group because they couldn’t find, they couldn’t find anybody that was, that wasn’t, you know, watching porn.
Wow, wow.
Yeah so I think it’s much more widespread and it’s because it’s a natural, it’s not not a not a heroin or alcohol or you name it, you know, substance abuse addiction with these behavioral addictions, it hits a lot more people as far as the potential to addict them so.
And that and that and that video or that picture, it’s not going to make any demands on you, right isn’t that one of the things that makes it so easy to fall into that you get the pleasure and absolutely no responsibility or demands coming. But if you have a group of young men in front of you, what do you say to them in answer to this question oK, well, how’s pornography gonna hurt me? I mean, to them, it’s like I’m not hurting anybody. I’m getting a lot of pleasure from this. How’s it gonna hurt me you’re saying it’s gonna hurt me? What do you say to them?
And you just keep giving me great questions thank you. I would say to him that it’s really there’s no difference the brain doesn’t know any difference between a substance abuse addiction and in a corn addiction in this case, except it’s able to, like I said, overrides or able to binge on it in more cases so this there’s more people that are susceptible to it, but in the brain there’s these processes father Frank, where the brain literally changes itself physically in response to an over stimulation, in this case by porn or another case by heroin or whatever, whatever, you know, substance you want to stick in there. There’s a there’s a transcription factor they call named Delta Phos B that literally changes the the in the reward area of the brain it literally changes the tissue where it it it makes you crave it, crave it more and more and more the same time there’s another chemical that works in kind of concert again, God has put these miraculous things, these systems into us. It’s, it’s an acronym called Kreb CREB that OK, we got one part of the brain that with this continued exposure to these super, super stimulus that way above what your normal human being would ever, ever see in a lifetime. And again, novelty is totally available, multiple people involved. These people are not real people in many cases as far as you know, they’re not somebody you see out in society normally just on an average basis. So this crab at the same time you’re being sensitized to it and craving it, it makes it makes the effect like you said earlier, where it’s less of an effect and you have to you have to have more and more of it or more, more extreme versions of it so it is absolutely, it’s absolutely. And by the way, heroin or any of the other ones you can fill in the blank, cocaine, etcetera, math, they all have the same exact effect on the brain and so the brain doesn’t know any difference between where there’s a substance abuse situation or a behavioral situation. And so they end up they, if I was talking to a room of guys, I would say you’re going to end up, you know, addicted to this stuff and it’s going to affect because there’s another thing that this the other side doesn’t want to admit yet. It’s coming though, that as far as having a normal and healthy sex life, let’s say that they’re married, you know, and then they’re they’re watching a lot of porn it’s getting more and more and more, you know, it affects erectile dysfunction rates. Now the proof of this is just beginning to come forward, but in the UK, which is they’re further down the slippery slope than we are as far as the sexualization goes and have had more exposure to all of it. In 2000 they had a 2 to 3 % EED erectile dysfunction rate in their under 40 pop male population. So it’s 2 to 3 % in in 2000 Now they’re looking at between 20 and 35 % erectile dysfunction rate with their younger younger men population so it definitely, it definitely done, done long enough and done, you know, often enough, it definitely ruins, I guess you say it ruins a, a man’s natural sexual response system. Yeah, there’s even, again, this is anecdotal, but one of the guys that works in this area, you know, share this with me there there are reports of, of men in, in, in the UK that are so addicted to porn that they’re, if they’re with their wife and they’re trying, you know, they’re in a sexual situation. They’ve had to, you know, look at their phone screen with porn on it in order to be able to perform, you know, with, with their wife. So I don’t think any young man probably wants to end up there so, but it’s, it’s so easy to end up there because it’s so tempting it’s so, you know, within 5 minutes a young man these days could see more sexual situations than in five lifetimes of the of their of our ancestors, you know, so.
So, Doctor Joe, your new book, and I’m sure the contents of it intersect with things we’ve been talking about here already but tell us about it, the title, how people can get it and what are the things you cover in the various chapters.
I will be glad to i’ll be honored to. It’s called Women’s Sexual Wellness, Women’s Sexual Wellness, and it’s actually a women’s sexual Wellness handbook and especially designed for teams and and Staffs at bring see help centers. And it has several, I think, important elements to it. And again, the bottom line on on it is helping these these Staffs to be conversant with all of this science we’ve started talking about, believe it or not, there’s a ton more, you know, that we could talk about further, but and put these tools into their hands, you know, equip them with these tools now you asked about, you asked about how it’s laid out. There’s three sections to it so we talked about in the first section the biological reality. And so we’re going right down, right down the center there as far as challenging some of the things we’ve talked about as far as in the past, accepting, you know, biological unreality. So we bring the reality, the scientific reality to bear their things along the lines of human sex differences. You know, how the male’s brain is, for instance, there’s three areas in the male’s brain that are twice as big as in the female brain, twice as densely packed with neurons and extremely sensitive to testosterone. Testosterone runs about 20 times more in your average man than it does in woman and woman South. I won’t go into the details and on that, but but just a lot of things along the biological reality side. I’ve got the manuscripts or so I’ll just kind of page through it here a little bit. Another thing we do is we try to layout for the young women their what’s happening in their menstrual cycle, because with their hormones, the way way that they’ve ebb and flow and there’s they’re higher one size higher than at one point, you know, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone do have a little bit of testosterone. The way that the different amounts of it and the different parts of the cycle, it affects the way they feel and the way they behave. We call that one spin cycles, the profound effects of women’s menstrual cycle so, and there’s that one other thing too that you know, we should probably mention here is it also brings in like exogenous type chemicals like alcohol, for instance, and how alcohol a woman by raising her testosterone by the way, and you know, inhibiting the prefrontal cortex, especially if it’s in that fertile time, the fertile window they call it, or the ovulatory time. So about a six day period from about day eight to about day 14, if she’s drinking during that time period, it doesn’t actually take that much for and it raises her testosterone. She’s already getting 200 times more more 200 times, not percent, 200 times more estrogen than she has normally so it’s those types of time periods and I think, you know, in the college, college situation, I work with fraternities having these, these functions and parties and that type of thing. There’s always alcohol involved and I think that they don’t know the science on it, but they, they know the behavior, how that behavior hooks up so things like that as far as a young woman realizing when she’s drinking and she’s especially if she’s near that around that fertile window time period, she may be a whole different behavior, have a whole different behavior pattern and not really realize that you know what’s what’s causing it. So other things we go into, we go, I’ve got we got one of the one section called she’s quite the pill. And so we try to lay out all the bad news about the hormonal concept contraception world that you won’t hear anywhere else either so there’s a ton of it, depression, anxiety, just there’s just all these different problems with it, cancer rates being blood clot rates being raised. Another chapter I guess you say is just and we’ve you know, they’ll know folks that are listening to us will know why I named it this the humiliation of hookup culture. It really is a humiliating thing for a lot of people, especially a lot of women. Tons of information on how that whole thing works. The Tinder trap as in Tinder, the dating app we talked about that and how that has really changed and not in a good way. Relationships between I would say most young men and young women that are that are using Tinder because, you know, it really sets up father Frank that the whole kind of commercialization of of another person you know, that their looks, all the surface things are available on the Tinder app. Swipe right, swipe left. And it really, I think what’s led to is a small percentage of males being inundated by a large number of females because the females find a much smaller percentage of the males attractive and the males find a much greater percentage of the females attractive. And so it turns into a kind of again, a creating kind of a harem situation for the for the that those small percentage of males that that these women find attractive and of course, again, many of these young women I’ve worked with have said, you know, it’s never like what they look like with it in their picture, and it’s never like that when you show up and then again, it keeps people keep them on the on the surface things rather than the character issues that they really need to be looking at in order to create that bonding process that we were talking about earlier, the pain of pornography. We’ve got a ton of information on that. And again, believe it or not, you know, I’ve been working with a group that’s helping men get off, stay off and get off of pornography. But also I’m working with a group of females now that are also that’s becoming an issue with them. One quick thing I should mention that I think is an important part point in the book with females, what’s been shown is that the age at which they first experienced sexual arousal, if it’s young, younger, has a big effect on their, their level of their openness to promiscuity and, you know, pornography and that type of thing. Unfortunately, in a lot of our cases of our young, young girls, they’re, you know, they’re abused and so they’re experiencing it that way or they’re, they’re coming across pornography, you know, so that’s, and with the, with the males, it does, it doesn’t show that, you know, they don’t have that reaction the, the, the, the younger sexual arousal so females need to understand there’s a, there’s a number of different things that kind of lead to them maybe being unusual as far as the female approach to sex. And that can be something that happened to them maybe earlier in their early in their life and it’s having an effect on now so those are the kind of things I try to help help people with as well. The stigma of STIs or STD’s however you want to, however you want to express that then the women are at twice the risk of of contracting them and you know this as well as I do, but much more damaging. There’s lots of reasons for that having to do with anatomy. They have a special section on what’s called marriage Mia missing in action and trying to make the point in that section of all the huge benefits i’ve got pages of benefits here to it and the fact that you know that we are going we’re continuing to drop in our marriage rate and marriage. The other thing we try to show is that marriage is the number one predictor of life happiness. Marriage quality is and the number one predictor of marriage quality is number of premarital sexual partners. The number being lower the better you know, so often times in these talks I’ll have with college students and others, I talked a lot a couple weeks ago in Kansas City with just some young adults that were they were all out of college some of them were married, but most of them weren’t. But the term body count came up. You know, and these these days the body count for anybody that might not know what it means is number of premarital sexual partners and just, you know, working that towards 0. Keep it at 0 if it is and keep it as low as it has as you can otherwise. But the other thing I tried to always emphasize these crowds and whoever is listening to us should know this too, that, you know, Christianity is all about redemption it’s all about, you know, doing it as well as you can going, you know, in your present life but like, for instance, every, every crowd of young people I talk about, I tell them I’ve gone through all these things with them. That’s pretty clear how important it is sexual integrity, how important it is for success in our lives. I tell them, you know, it isn’t about yesterday. It isn’t about, you know, what you did last night. It’s about what you’re doing today, what you’re doing tonight and all the rest of your tomorrow’s and tomorrow nights. So, you know, hopefully leave them with with a direction there We go through another section how men fall in love differently than women and we’ve talked about that fairly extensively. That’s that’s kind of the headliner everywhere I go, especially with the young women. What what, what are you saying? Not, not giving sex leaves men to marriage and giving them sex doesn’t. Yeah, the bonding. By the way, research has shown that the shorter the time to sex in a relationship, the shorter the relationship i’ll say it one more time, the shorter the time to sex in a relationship, the shorter the relationship. So you can just, again, you can just see sex happens early, the relationship ends early. So again, again, especially women should know that men categorizing women according to their according to their sexual permissiveness that’s another section we talked about women’s sexual Wellness lifestyle i just real pause real quick on this because I know I don’t know how much more time we’ve got, but I almost called you Doctor Frank. I’m used to calling the other doctors around me. Father, Father Frank. This is really what got me. That really caught my attention and and I ended up converting to Catholicism i’m happy i’m happy about that. The Catholic approach to this, the Catholic sexual theology, if we can express it that way, or moral, moral theology is just, it’s just very, very accurate as to what I found in the science and let me give you this, for instance, so on women’s sexual Wellness and again, lifestyle, and again, that’s kind of what the whole book is about. Young women’s sexual behavior effects their future health. Beginning OK early promiscuity leads to higher chances of vaginal and cervical cancer. None or minimal number of pregnancies and none or minimal breastfeeding raises her lifetime chances of developing ovarian and uterine cancer. Delayed childbearing and fewer pregnancies raise the risk of lifetime development of breast cancer. Matter of fact, a young woman who has her first child closer to age 20 as opposed to closer to age 30 has half the chances of breast cancer as one who has her first child closer to age 30. There’s something in our women’s fertility process that really, really that twenties is an important time period. Actually, peak fertility for a woman is age 19 to age 29 OK, I just said that woman who has her first child around the age of 20 has half the chance of developing breast cancer as a woman who has her first child around the age of 3010 or more lifetime sexual partners raise a woman’s chances of of of of cancer 91 %. So it’s about 10 % for every sexual partner and that can be cancer at any any time, not just reproductive and for and for the information mends it raises 64 %. So when I realized that, when I realized that you’re Catholic families that are, you know, if you’re getting married younger and by the way, you know, this is really, I’m not throw this research because it’s really important in as well. You know, for a while here the other side has been saying, you know, get your get your get your academics together, get your profession together and wait until you’re about 30 years old you know, you’re stupid if you don’t wait until you’re about 30 years old to even think about start getting married. But again, we’re wasting that we’re wasting that fertility there that 19 to 29 years old. So but what we and they had research on it as far as OK marriages that are done closer that are, that are enacted closer to age 30 actually have a better track record as far as as divorce and happiness than the ones where they got married sooner, like, you know, twenty one twenty two twenty three whatever. But here’s the key thing, Father Frank and everybody, what they weren’t counting in whether what they were lumping all in together was. The typical situation these days where they, they cohabit, they cohabit with maybe one other person, maybe two other, you know, 2 times 3 times a lot of times it’s, you know, two or three times they’ve cohabited with different people before they actually get married to one. What they found out. And again, that is taking, you know, that’s taking the time in their twenties up to somewhere around age 30 before they finally, you know, decide they’re going to get serious. The ones that did that they had they had a lesser, the ones that that were cohabiting and they got married earlier, they did, they did have more higher divorce rate and they did have they did have unhappier marriages. What they found though, was that they get on a study on women, they had 50.000 thousand in on this and, and so in meaning, you know, sample size. What they found was that the young women that didn’t cohabit and, and very pretty much didn’t have sex, you know, before, before marriage had the most successful marriages they had. They were getting married from age 22 to, you know, some of them went all the way up near 30, but mostly it was a twenty two twenty three twenty four. And so the old school approach of cherishing sex for marriage, you know, saving sex for marriage, not not cohabiting with anybody and being that your husband in this case, being the first person that you, you know, have sex with and live with, that was the most successful model model of all. And in the earlier ages. And I say that because here’s another little piece of wisdom that I’ve discovered. We used to have 100 years ago, we had a seven-year gap between puberty for a woman and marriage. It was about a seven-year gap. Puberty as you know is happening earlier it’s happening four years on average earlier and we’re getting married eight or nine years later so it’s, it turned from A7 year wait for marriage, wait for sexuality to into an 18 year we have about an 18 year. So all that all that said, the old school again, the biblical, the Catholic approach, however we want to express it is very, very wise so I’ll start with that but that is really that that Catholic early, earlier marriage again, saving, cherishing sex for marriage, children soon having lots of children, being open to life, procreative and unitive breastfeeding. The healthiest i used to be a personal trainer, the healthiest women I’ve ever I ever worked with that were in their forties. One was a Mormon, she had eight kids and the other one was a Catholic she had eight kids. So I observed right then that that old, the old wives tale and the old, you know, urban lived legend that more than two kids ruin a woman anyway now the sign, the science backed it up positively pregnant is another part of the book. There’s so many things about being pregnant that is are positive for both the mother and for the child. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t, as you know, to get, it’s just dessert. Desserts as far as the way it should be looked at, finally.
In, in, in, in our, in our medical ethics courses, our professors said good morality leads to good medicine. And I think what summarizes what you’re saying is good morality leads to good sexuality and.
Good yes, it does. That summarizes very, very well. The very last chapter kind of goes kind of finishes with that romance revolt back to romance and so nice that’s what I do a lot in my work is I encourage young people and get especially young women to take these, you know, take these principles and apply them and it’s going to be, it’s going to be very positive result but really the theme of the book along with what you just described is sexual Wellness equals sexual integrity. So a mental integrity leads to marriage, marriage leads to family, family leads to great community. Great communities lead to a great country.
And what’s the best way to for people to get the book and the name of it again?
The name of it is Sexual Women’s Sexual Wellness Handbook. It’s available only from Heartbeat International and I actually I sent Jacob a pre-order form it’s not still not officially out, but it should be soon they can get it from Harvey International and again he may post with our conversation sure yeah OK the pre-order yeah so so yeah.
That’s awesome i know that we’re getting to the end of our program and so I’m going to bring it back to our primary host, Jacob Barr sure, but but Doctor Joe, this has been fantastic what a great conversation we could talk all day and a lot of great material and I look forward to reading the book myself and thanks for the work that you do. This is a goes right to the heart of what we need in our society today we need common sense about sexuality we need sexual health. We need good sexual morality and thank you for leading us in that direction.
Thank you Father Frank for all the great work you do and you’re an inspiration to me thank you.