In this episode Trent examines a recent New York Times expose on Pornhub, reveals the porn industry’s “dirty laundry,” and describes how we as a culture must fight “Big porn.” Trent also provides some practical tips for protecting your family from this pervasive sin.
Welcome to The Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
We’re finally here. We’re settling into our new home here in the great State of Texas. Welcome to The Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers, apologist and speaker Trent Horn, currently recording now from my new studio, which used to be a closet, and it still is a closet, but here in Texas, when you buy a home, everything’s bigger in Texas. When Laura and I were driving around looking at houses, we would joke because when you drive around in California and you look at houses, the houses are really tiny.
Our old house was only about 1200 square feet. It was four bedrooms, but it was 1200 square feet, so they’re incredibly efficient when they come to the space, but everything it’s just a lot smaller. You only see really large houses in San Diego. If you go to the really, really nice neighborhoods, which we like to do on Halloween and Christmas. Go to really nice neighborhoods, get that good candy that people hand out and see the really great Christmas light displays.
But otherwise, most of the other houses are really small, but here, everything, it’s true, everything is bigger in Texas. We drive around and I look at pictures of houses, and I would show Laura pictures of houses from online. I always joke saying that the houses in Texas they’re like on steroids. They’re like really tall and big, and they have these big attics, and we’d drive to the neighborhoods and we’d see one of these big houses, and we would say, “Texas,” like it just has to shout, Texas. Here, in our new home, my office, it’s a walk-in closet, but this walk-in closet has 40 more square feet than my old office at Catholic Answers.
And it has an entire set of windows. I showed it on Skype to the crew at Catholic Answers, and they said, “This could be someone’s bedroom.” I’m like, “Yeah. If I wanted to tuck the kids away in the walk-in, I could do that.” It’s been working out really well, though the kids do manage to find me because if you saw Catholic Answers live at the beginning of the week, it was on Monday when I was on the show, I was doing the second hour. Just trying out my equipment here and being in the office, though I still don’t have a desk.
Moving in, when you move in, have you ever moved, been to a new place and you’re in that weird in-between stage? How long did you go eating dinner on a card table? I really love to know. If you’re a Patreon, by the way, be sure to leave a comment at trenthornpodcast.com. If you had a moving experience, I would love to know how long were you in that in-between stage where you’re eating on a card table? My desk right here is just two bins stacked on top of one another with one shelf like … I can balance my computer and my microphone. The other thing, when you move into a new house is always, at first, you get this desire like, I’m going to fix everything.
Because when you buy a house, you do an inspection. You should do an inspection. If you don’t, you didn’t listen to my episode on buying and selling a home. Go back free-for-all-Fridays and check that out. I’ve actually had some realtors contact me saying they love the episode, and they share that now with their clients, to put them in the right frame of mind. When you go and buy a house, you hire someone to go in and do the inspection, check everything out, and then they give you this long list, like 40 pages of here’s everything wrong with the house.
Then you buy the house. Mostly it’s minor stuff. If it’s something gigantic, you may not buy the house, but every house has something that’s wrong with it. So, you think, okay, I could fix all this stuff. I’m going to fix it. Then a month later after moving in, you’re so overwhelmed. You’re like, ah, one of the toilets doesn’t flush. Well, we got two other toilets. Is it really that bad? You learn to live with everything. Something I am learning to live with is sharing my home office with my children. One thing I do need to do is install a little lock on the door to my office.
Now, to get to my office, you have to go through the master bedroom, then through the master bathroom, and then over to the walk-in closet, which is nice because it’s cut off from the kids and the rest of the house, so I don’t hear them when they’re a bit overexcited or running around. But yesterday, Thomas, my three-year-old decided to come and find me, and I had my own little BBC moment. Do you remember watching that viral video during the pandemic when everybody was reporting from home and there was a correspondent for the BBC at home, and his daughter, I think, came into the room.
She’s just marching in all happy and sits on his lap while he’s commenting on the BBC. At least with American television, I think we could be more laid back up, but this is the BBC, very refined, you would think. This is serious business. Then his wife runs in trying to scoop the kid up, and another baby comes in, in a walker and it’s … I kind of had that. Thomas comes in and he sits on my lap, and I just had to just keep going giving an answer to a caller who is actually a non-Catholic caller. It was the show, Why Aren’t You Catholic?
He just sat on my lap, and you could check it out, go to my social media, and it should be one of the most recent tweets or Facebook posts, and I’ve linked to the video. Thomas was a really good boy. He just sat on my lap, looked at my computer screen, Laura poked her head around the corner and kindly beckoned for him to come over to her, and so she really saved the day. So, hats off to you, Laura. I thought it’d be good to start off the episode with something a bit more lighthearted. Oh, one more lighthearted thing, as I mentioned on Catholic Answers Live yesterday.
I love Texas, except I’m still trying to learn to get around here. I think it’s going to take me like 10 years to figure out how to get around the city of Dallas-Fort Worth, because the freeways are designed like they were drawn by Dr. Seuss. They’re just curvy and go everywhere, and it’s really easy to miss on ramps and off ramps. Still learning that. But as I said, lay heart introduction because the subject for today, it’s a bit depressing. Two depressing things for me to talk about would be the issue of abortion and the issue of pornography.
That’s why I’m really grateful as a Catholic apologist. Now, I used to handle the issue of abortion full-time as a pro-life apologist. When you engage in that issue, when you’re talking about death, the killing of children over and over and over again, and you’re just mired in it, it really does something to your psyche. I highly recommend my listeners who are engaged in pro-life ministry, have a spiritual director and have spiritual and social support because you’re dealing with really nasty stuff. Another thing that’s really nasty to deal with is pornography.
Honestly, I would almost rather deal with the evil of abortion than the evil of pornography. I understand why Matt Fradd at Pints With Aquinas, Matt Fradd, that Matt, before he was doing Pints With Aquinas, he was doing Covenant Eyes and The Porn Effect. Matt would always joke with me. He said, “Trent, I don’t want to be known as the porn guy. Matt Fradd, the porn guy.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, the porn guy isn’t a great term.” He still does good work on this. His book, The Porn Myth, is an excellent book published by Ignatius Press, if you want to learn about the pornography industry and to shine light on this evil.
That’s what it is, it’s evil. I understand that with Matt, now that he does Pints With Aquinas, it’s probably good for his psyche, because I couldn’t imagine fighting pornography full-time. Just researching for this episode, I felt like I had to take a shower multiple times. It’s just so grody and gross. But at the same time, I have compassion for people who have a compulsion to view pornography. It’s something that many, many people struggle with. In fact, many of my listeners, there could be a decent number of listeners to this podcast who struggle with pornography. I mean, it’s such a pervasive sin.
I sometimes think, we get these rose colored glasses looking at the past, thinking like, oh, if only I could have lived among the saints of the past, like Saint Augusta, or Saint Jerome, what would they think of us today? Sometimes I think that the saints, they’re in heaven, they probably say to themselves, “Wow, the church militant, the church on earth that we pray for, they are facing sins we could not possibly imagine.
I sometimes think that the saints in heaven, they thank God they were not born in the time and place that you and I live. I’m sure that they thank God, Lord, thank you for sparing me from the temptations that Christians are facing today. With all their heart, they pray on our behalf for these temptations they never had to face. You think about pornography, you go back to the time of Saint Augustan or Saint Jerome, when would you be able to view a sexual act or a naked person?
Maybe if you were like a peeping Tom and looked in on someone’s home or down by a river where somebody was bathing, but it certainly wasn’t something on demand. You didn’t carry a device in your pocket that could call up all kinds of filth and depravity with the touch of a keystroke. Yet, that’s we have today. Even children, children have that. People think, well, my kid really wants a smartphone. Yeah, well, you don’t give your children whatever they want. My three-year-old asked me, “Daddy, can I drive?” I don’t give him the keys to the car.
When my children are older, I will never, ever, ever let them have a smartphone. I almost want to call it a dumb phone because it would be dumb to give someone that. I sometimes even reconsider myself having a “smartphone,” because it’s a gigantic time suck for me. Sometimes I justify it saying, oh, well, I can respond on social media, I can respond to work emails, and I’m more efficient. Well, yeah, maybe I’m more efficient in those few moments, but then I lose efficiency when I’m just dawdling around on my phone, and then Laura asks me the question, like I’m away, I’m in another room. She’s like, “Trent, are you on your phone?”
I respond the way every husband does when their wife asks them a question and they’re in trouble. “What? I didn’t hear you.” Maybe something will change your mind. Here’s where I want to talk about pornography today. I was reading an article. It was in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, and it was called The Children of Pornhub. I was thinking to myself like, oh, this is this isn’t going to be good, but I need to check it out.
For those of you who aren’t aware, Pornhub is … It’s like YouTube, but for pornography. Here’s how Kristof describes it. “Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snowplows to clear Boston street.” It’s like Playboy in the sense … In fact, it’s superseding Playboy, because pornography on the internet, that’s “free.” I think usually it’s supplemented with advertisements, but it’s from individual users who upload their own videos to the site.
It’s absolutely decimating the “traditional” pornography industry like Playboy or Penthouse, because nobody’s going to go down to a store, or order online a magazine of naked pictures when you can get all kinds of that stuff for free on the internet. That’s why a few years ago, Playboy generated controversy by doing a cover that wasn’t nude, because they just couldn’t compete with free pornography on the internet. You see all this, so Pornhub it’s huge. Kristof says here, “The supposedly wholesome Pornhub,” in the sense that it tries to be mainstream and advertise, even in Times Square.
It attracts 3.5 billion, with a B, billion visits a month. Put that in perspective. That’s more than Netflix, more than Yahoo, and more than Amazon. It rakes in money from almost 3 billion ad impressions a day. You get this free content on Pornhub. People are going there for the free content, and there’s a subsection of them that are going to click on the banners, click on the ads. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th most visited website in the world, yet there’s another side of the company.
Kristof perspective, and we’ll talk about this here later in the episode is that yeah, it’s pornography, it’s porn, and he’s not going to get a lot of people reading the New York Times thinking that porn itself is evil. They think, oh, pornography, what’s the big deal? But they’ll at least be opposed to rape and to child pornography. I would hope that the vast majority of the readers of the New York Times, the vast majority of people in general would be against these kinds of things.
But there are many, many, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people that do enjoy these kinds of things based on Pornhub’s search rankings. Kristof goes on to say, “Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content and footage of women being as fixated in plastic bags. A search for girls under 18, no space or 14YO leads, in each case, to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”
At the time Kristof was writing this article, Pornhub had minimal content regulation. For example, I’m sure there were terms that would try to be struck down like, if you just tried to upload a video that was called child sex or child porn, or even 17 year old or 15 year old spelled out, it might get flagged or struck down, but people are always trying to game the system, so they’ll spell it, girls under 18, and under 18 is one word so it doesn’t get flagged, or instead of 14-year-old, it’s 14YO, in order to be moderation and flagging.
It’s just absolutely grody. I feel bad for Kristof, he had to go through Pornhub and watch this kind of stuff. I wouldn’t do that. I can watch videos of children who are being killed through the abortion process, even that makes my stomach absolutely churn. That’s like directly handling radioactive isotopes in order to study radioactivity. I’m not going to damage my health in that way, even trying to find Kristof’s article, I couldn’t remember the title, so I just searched for Kristof Pornhub to find the article.
The first thing that comes up is pornography that is themed to Frozen, to the character Kristof, which shows there’s a rule on the internet that people joke about, with very dark sense of humor, called Rule 34. I’ve had to explain this to my friends like, what’s Rule 34? I said, “Rule 34 is this, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” If you can think of something, then someone has made a pornographic version of it, whether it’s Disney cartoons, whether it’s anything you can think of, there is pornography related to it.
The Rule 34 seems to have its origin from a 2003 web comic drawn by Peter Morley-Souter, Souter, who he came up with the rule after he came across pornography theme to Calvin and Hobbes. It’s just terrible. Reading through this, Kristof focuses on how Pornhub is related to child rape and to trafficking. In his article, he says, “Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was nine. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there.”
“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life.” Cali, now 23, is studying in a university and hopes to become a lawyer, but those old videos hang over her. “I may never be able to get away from this.” She says, “You type young Asian, you can probably find me.” Although Kristof goes on to say, “Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search, and that doesn’t count related searches for young, tiny teen, extra small, petite teen, tiny Asian teen, and the list goes on.”
Then, there’s another story in the article where … You should read it. The article, you can read. I would say that, that’s safe to read. There’s nothing explicit there, but he tells a story about a young girl in the eighth grade who sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. Once again, another reason not to give your kids a smartphone, I would never let my kids have a phone that has access to the internet, or even a phone that has a camera. Frankly, if you want a camera, I will buy you a digital camera.
I will go down to the antique store, I will get you a digital camera, or will get you a disposable camera. I loved using a disposable camera as my kid. You go through all the pictures, you drop it off at Walgreens, and you get to wait to see if they actually turned out. So, she sent them to a boy who was a year older. He passed them around to everybody, then they get uploaded to Pornhub. The problem is, when the videos are uploaded to the Pornhub, people can download the videos. There’s a direct download feature, or there was. I’ll talk about some of the “modifications” or improvements Pornhub is allegedly making to try to improve the user experience. Give me a break.
But people could download the video, so even if an illegal video of child rape or child pornography goes on Pornhub, by the time Pornhub gets there to flag it or take it down, the video has already been downloaded by people, and then can be re-uploaded and it just spreads in that way. The fact of the matter is, once something is on the internet, you can’t get rid of it. I then tried to find a follow-up to Kristof’s piece in the New York Times that said an uplifting hope, uplifting hope related to Pornhub.
So, I searched uplifting Pornhub to find the article. What’s the first thing I find? It’s a category on Pornhub called uplifting pornography. Rule 34. If it exists, there’s porn of it. Here’s what it says in the article. “Four senators, Josh Holly, Maggie Hassan, Joni Ernst, and Thom Tillis on Wednesday introduced bipartisan legislation to make it easier for rape victims to porn companies that profit from videos of their assaults. Another Senator, Jeff Merkley, is drafting bipartisan legislation to regulate such companies more rigorously, and prime minister, Justin Trudeau of Canada,” which is home to Pornhub, which by the way, Pornhub is based out of Canada.
Jeez Trudeau, you can find all kinds of woke politically correct things to go on and on about, but you can’t deal with the world’s biggest hub of child rape right in your country. I thought Canadians were supposed to be so polite, “Said Tuesday that his government was developing new regulations.” Visa and MasterCard are reviewing their ties to Pornhub, and there are calls for criminal prosecutions. When you go down, Pornhub, in response to New York Times editorial, launched their own internal review and made some changes. At the very least, it’s good to … Now, I would like all this to be banned. I would there to be, not just no child pornography, but no pornography at all.
It’s an absolute scourge. Will we get rid of it though? Well, that’s a mighty task. It’s something to always pray about. I think when it comes to pornography, first, we have to get our own households in order, protect ourselves, protect our children, and then be a witness to other people and really call out the evil of pornography just like we call out the evil of abortion. People aren’t willing to do that because pornography is tantalizing and scintillating, but we have to expose people to the ugly truth. What Pornhub has done to try to fix things is number one, they will only allow videos to be uploaded by people who have verified their identities.
That’s something that should have been done a long time ago. People who are going to put up these videos, I want them to submit a credit card, a driver’s license. You need to be able to track these people down, because if they upload child rape or child pornography, or other kinds of voyeuristic pornography, like filming people in shower rooms or locker rooms, you need to be able to find them. They can’t just be a faceless avatar or a name. I hope that it actually is the case that it’s a decent identity protocol, and you can find these criminals and bring them to justice.
Number two, it says it will improve moderation, but they’ve got hundreds of millions of video. Billions of hours of video are probably on the website. I don’t know if it’s billions, but it’s certainly in the millions. I don’t know if you have a moderation team that could handle that as well. Then three, it will no longer allow video downloads, which allow illegal material to proliferate. I don’t think that’s really going to really do any good. Even if you disable the button that allows you to directly download a video, you’ll still find a way to download it.
YouTube does not allow people to download videos. It’s actually against their terms of service, but there’s all kinds of software that people have developed that allow you to take the video that you’re watching on YouTube and download it, because if you watch on YouTube, you see people commenting on videos all the time, even though that’s kind of contradicting YouTube terms of service, but there’s software that allows people to do that. I still think that Pornhub is still going to … The videos that go up there, people are going to find a way to bring them down.
It’s kind of like with Snapchat. Teens would get Snapchat, and you would take a picture, send it to a friend, and it’s supposed to delete after 10 seconds. Teenagers, even adults will send naughty pictures of themselves to other people. Thing is, the picture’s going to delete 10 seconds later, but here’s the problem. You could just take your phone and once you get the picture, take a screenshot of the phone, and so your phone takes a picture of the screen of the picture before it deletes. Now, I think Snapchat or other programs have tried to make it so you can’t take screenshots of it yourself. But if you have, especially if you’re trying to get a nude photo from someone through something like Snapchat, if you’re really determined, you could just get a second phone or a computer.
Once it shows up on your screen, you take a picture of that screen, and then you still have the material. I think the biggest thing we need to do with Pornhub, and frankly with social media, like Twitter or Facebook, is do something about the Section 230 exemptions. Section 230 is something that was a part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. When the internet was starting to spread in the mid-’90s and people were worried about the spread of pornography and illegal activity, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996.
Part of the act and a part called Section 230, it shields people that are not publishers of content. If you publish content, you can be held responsible for the content that you publish, but if you merely host content, if you host it, then you’re not legally liable for what you host. For example, if somebody gets on their Verizon cell phone and call somebody and hatches a plan to commit a crime, Verizon can’t be held responsible for them using their cell phone in order to do that, because Verizon just hosts the ability to communicate with one another on their technology.
They’re not publishing or endorsing this content. Just because the technology is used, doesn’t mean Verizon’s at fault. That’s where the Communications Decency Act tries to help telecom companies to protect them from being sued in this way. But when you have something like Pornhub that isn’t passive, like a cell phone company or something like that, where they’re actively encouraging submitting pornography and the most titillating kinds of pornography in order to arouse people, which inevitably ends up pushing the envelope, then they need to be held accountable.
They need to have strict legal safeguards and not be treated with kid gloves. Part of the kid gloves is to say, look, it’s not just child pornography. It’s not just child rape, it’s the evil of pornography itself. You can’t draw a firm line. People say, “Well, as long as everyone’s an adult and they’re consenting, then it’s fine.” In fact, Kristof in his article on New York Times, he says, “The issue is not pornography, but rape.” Now, I agree that pornography with rape in it is a more serious … Is a worst crime than pornography where the people are consenting.
It doesn’t mean that it’s good, but obviously there are some evils that are worse than others. Think about the evil of assault. Assaulting an adult is bad. Assaulting a child or an infant is even worse because they’re so helpful. All crimes are bad, crimes against children are even worse. That’s not controversial. But to say the issue is not pornography really misses it, because pornography itself, how it desensitizes people, the drug that it is, it’s what ultimately leads to pushing the envelope. People will go online, they’ll look at pornography, and it stimulates portions of their brain and it forms a compulsion.
I truly believe, now, some people say, well, you can’t say there’s pornography addiction because it’s not biochemically the same as heroin or alcohol. People have different definitions of addiction. Some people are very strict and say, “Look, unless it’ll kill you. If you get off it, it’s not an addiction.” So, like alcohol or other substances like that. But I would say it’s at least a compulsion. Some people will say, “Well, pornography, you can’t get addicted to pornography.” I’ve seen this article from porn defenders online saying, there’s no such thing as porn addiction, because porn is not a substance.
It’s not like alcohol or heroin, or even caffeine or sugar. It’s not a chemical that enters into your body. But you can be addicted to things or have a compulsion, even if it’s not a chemical. I’ll give you a perfect example of that. Gambling. Think about people who are addicted to gambling or have a gambling compulsion. They go to a casino and they want visual stimuli. They want to hear the sound of a slot machine turning. They want to see the cards come up on a blackjack table. They are aroused by this visual stimuli, and the situation that they are in that feels like a risky kind of situation to be in. They’re aroused by that. Then, they need to get a high, so they keep going and going and going even if it causes detrimental harm to them.
It’s the same with pornography. He will go online to look at pornography and they’ll see certain kinds of pornography, but then they want to get things that are more and more extreme. When you read testimonies from people, and Matt Fradd has a wonderful book on this called Delivered. It’s a book about, published by Catholic Answers Press, about addictions to pornography and how people escaped it. It’s sad to read the stories. You start off, and people just … They think about pornography as just, oh, it’s just naughty pictures, like 1950s pinups or Playboy Magazine, but it is hardcore stuff.
Especially when children get online, it’s very easy to slide from the stuff that would be called “soft core.” I think I’ve said quote, unquote eight times already in this podcast, but I just want to make it clear, when I’m describing this, I don’t want to use euphemisms. This is dark stuff. When I had to research it for my book, Made This Way, it really shown out to me just how dark it is. I’ll give you some examples. Well, let me read what the catechism says, because when we talk about why pornography is wrong, the catechism describes it well.
It says, “Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners in order to display them deliberately to third parties.” I’d also say nude images as well. I mean, I would define pornography as anything that is created, that is designed to sexually arouse people. Some people will say, “Well, how do you tell the difference between nude art or nude sculptures and pornography?” Well, here’s how I can tell the difference. If I went to the Sistine Chapel and Michael Angelo asked me, “Hey, what are you think of my painting? What do you think of my painting?”
Why is it Michael Angelo sounds like Mario? What do you think of my painting? Eh. I said, “Wow, it’s really making me sexually aroused. You would be confused or sad.” What are you talking about? It’s not pornography. That’s not what he’s trying to do. But if a pornographer said to you, “Hey, you, what do you think of my pornography here, eh?” I imagine that all pornographers sound like that. And someone said, oh, it was interesting. It was fine. If you gave like, oh wow, you put a lot of work into this. If you gave the reaction that you gave to the Sistine Chapel to pornography, and you said, “I liked it.”
“I wasn’t sexually aroused, but it was really interesting,” the pornographer would be disappointed, because he is trying to arouse the other person. That’s the difference. There was a Supreme Court Justice, I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, “I may not be able to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” As long as when I say, well, what is, and isn’t pornography, I use the, I know it when I see it rule. The catechism goes on to say, “It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants, actors, vendors, the public, since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.”
It talked about what it does to the consumer. It ensnares them. It’s like a drug or an addiction, like a gambling compulsion, and it prevents them from relating normally with other people. Because if they’re spending all their time behind a screen, viewing people as sexual objects, they can’t help but bring that into the real world and start leering at people and seeing other people as sexual objects. I like that the catechism says that it affects the dignity of its participants, like the actors or the vendors.
A 2009 study, in the Journal of Urban Health, talked about the substance abuse and the mental health issues involved in the adult film industry. The study concluded, “Our findings suggest that female adult film performers are a vulnerable group that engage in and are exposed to many risks to their physical, mental, and social health. Although a legal industry, health risks among performers are multiple and similar to sex workers, prostitutes. That’s something I hate also in modern academic discourse. Now, this is, note, watch this when you see on television, especially mainstream, lame stream media.
Notice this language is going to start to shift in the next few years that people … it’s already happening now, that you don’t say prostitute, you’re supposed to say sex workers to make it sound more dignified. It’s all about language. Don’t let them control the language. Don’t let abortion be choice or reproductive rights or termination of a pregnancy. Abortion is the dismembering of a tiny human being before they are born. When people control the language and paste over the evil of something and cover it with a happy face, that’s when we lose. We can’t allow that to happen. We have to shine a light on it. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians said, “Do not dwell in the works of darkness, but rather expose them.”
It says here, another study found that porn actors in Los Angeles have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases than prostitutes in Nevada. Let me give you an example of exposing the horror of pornography, like we would do with abortion. Some people will talk about abortion in the abstract, but when I showed them a picture of a dismembered unborn child, where you can clearly see their fingers and toes and their face making an expression, almost as if they were screaming, or especially a late term abortion, when clearly in any other context, you would think this is a born infant, it says here, and actually I’m going to give a warning.
When I show graphic images of abortion, I give people a warning and allow them to avert their eyes. I’ll give a warning here. If you don’t want to hear this, because it’s graphic. Skip ahead in the podcast by 30 seconds, starting … Skip ahead 30 seconds if you don’t want to hear this. One female porn star in the industry had so much anal intercourse as part of her work that a piece of her muscle from her anus fell out on the set while she was filming. Another ex porn actor said, “You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It’s never ending. You’re viewed as an object, not as a human with a spirit.”
Oh, so, pray. When you’re done with this podcast, pray for the people who are ensnared by the sin of pornography. Don’t think that you’re above it. I don’t think that I’m above it. Never think that you’re above any kind of a sin. It’s something that people struggle with, it’s something that can find you easily on the internet. The internet is now a necessity of life. It’s a utility like water or electricity. When I came to move out here to Texas, I had to do a lot of work. I wanted to make sure that the water was running, the electricity was on and we had internet, because that’s how I show my kids their movies.
I don’t even own movies anymore. I rent them from Disney Plus basically through a streaming service. But even if it’s not entertainment, you use the internet, use it for research. I now use it for work exclusively. I use it to broadcast, to do the podcast, to pay our bills online. Internet has become a necessity for many people and it can infiltrate your home. So, what do we do? What do we do about the scourge of pornography? How do we break free from that? How do we protect our children from it? Let me give you some resources. First, when it comes to protecting your children from pornography, I highly recommend a book by Kristen Jensen and Gail Poyner called Good Pictures Bad Pictures.
Good Pictures Bad Pictures by Jensen and Poyner. Once again, Good Pictures Bad Pictures, Jensen and Poyner. They give techniques to help children to respond if they come across pornography, because you could do your best to try to your children from pornography, but what if they’re playing with a kid at the park, or they’re over at a friend’s house. There are kids as young as seven and eight that have smartphones, the parents give it to them. They say, “Hey, you want to see this?” I actually remember, I remember the first time that I saw pornography, I was in junior high.
I was probably about 12-years-old. It’s so weird. I mean, it’s indelible into my mind. It was the first time I ever saw pornography, saw a naked person in a sexual context, and it’s very tame compared to what children are exposed to today. But even that, I mean, it’s imprinted. I don’t dwell on it, but I can recall the memory as bright as day. I was walking down the hall and my friends at this middle school, junior high. I would almost not let kids go to junior high, I almost let them do elementary school, pass a law that says they can’t be in school together during junior high, because that’s just the worst time ever. Then they can come back together when they’re 16 and they’re in high school.
But they opened their backpack and said, “Hey, Trent, you got to see this.” They pulled out black and white photocopies of a pornographic magazine to show me. I said, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to see. I wasn’t even Christian. I didn’t like it. I had this instinctive response saying, “Oh, I don’t like seeing that.” Thankfully, most children, I think they can … There’s a sense of shame in seeing like, this is something that I shouldn’t see, but your children could be in a situation where that happens to them, where a friend shows it to them, or it comes up on television that pops up on the internet, no matter how many safeguards you put into place.
Good Pictures Bad Pictures by Jensen and Poyner. Here’s what it does. It teaches children to identify pornography as opposed to other kinds of nudity, like in a science book. They tell them why it’s so demeaning, that it lies about how we should treat each other, how it tricks your brain into feeling good and wanting more. I think it has a secular approach to combating this. Now, we can talk to you about God’s love for us and the evil of pornography. But I think sometimes when we’re dealing with trying to help people to overcome this, we need to give them tools to get their brains free from this kind of addiction, even at a young age.
Good Pictures Bad Pictures teaches kids how the brain can become addicted and caught in the cycle, how you have a thinking brain and a feeling brain. Your feeling brain will pull you in the wrong direction if you see bad pictures and you want to see more of them. Jensen and Poyner in Good Pictures Bad Pictures talk about the can do plan. Can do is the acronym, C-A-N D-O, close my eyes, always tell a trusted … if you come across pornography, what do you do, kids? Close my eyes. C, close my eyes. A, always tell a trusted adult. N, name it when I see it. So, what is it? What is this thing that is trying to get ahold of my brain?
D, distract myself with something different. Then O, order my thinking brain to be the boss. My feeling brain doesn’t have to tell me everything that I do. When I was driving to Texas, I had a 10 hour drive here, and I listened to different audio books, and so I was listening to Bright Line Eating because I would really like to lose that extra 2020 weight that I put on. It talked about how your brain, it’s like, when you think to yourself, I’m going to give up sugar, there’s a voice that pops in your head saying, “You don’t want to do that. You’re going to be sad and miserable. Just have a little bit of sugar. It’s not going to hurt you.”
That’s your feeling brain. Your feeling brain trying to get you to do something that’s not good for you. My thinking brain is the boss. You don’t always do what your feeling brain says. My feeling brain will say, “I got to go to the bathroom.” But guess what? I don’t just go to the bathroom right where I’m standing. My thinking brain overrides my feeling brain. You can do that with pornography. You can do that with food, with all kinds of things. Jensen and Poyner, I recommend for kids. When it comes to adults, there is a wonderful website, Reclaim. Reclaim is a brain retraining website for adults that goes on the same format of teaching you.
Now, of course, all of this, when I give this advice, I’m not downplaying the sacraments. Having a fervent prayer life, going to confession and never stopped going to confession. Well, I’ve confessed this in a thousand times, a thousand and one. The difference, here’s what makes someone a saint. A saint as not somebody who doesn’t sin. The saints struggle with sins, and as they got holier, they’d say, “Oh man, I’m so sinful.” When you first become Christian, you think, oh, I’m not so bad. I don’t murder. I don’t commit adultery. I don’t steal big things. I must be doing pretty well. But then, as you grow in holiness, you realize, wow. You think about James 3:2, we all stumble in many small ways every day at what I do and what I fail to do, and it can be overwhelming.
That is why, when it becomes overwhelming, that is when we say, “I’m not going to rely on myself to become Holy. I can’t do that. But by the grace of God, I can, through the grace of the Holy Spirit.” The difference between a saint and someone who’s not a Saint is not that they don’t sin. Every saint sins. The difference is, the saint, when they sin, when they fall down, they don’t stay down. They always get back up. The Holy Spirit is in their heart and they respond to the grace. The Holy Spirit is like Mickey from Rocky. Remember Rocky’s coach in the Rocky movies, “Get up, you bum.” That is what the Holy Spirit does for us when we sin. It tells us to go to confession and it gives … Even when we’ve committed a mortal sin, and we lack sanctifying grace, God gives us actual grace.
He gives us actual grace, a spiritual kick in the pants that tells us, “Get up yet bum, get to confession,” and we go. Frankly, that’s the thing that made me the most mad during the lockdowns, is when they got rid of confession. You only have to receive the Eucharist once a year, and the Eucharist is important. We should be able to receive that. That made me mad that we couldn’t come up with better ways to receive the Eucharist. I went, I defied California’s laws because they’re stupid, and I went and I sat in my car in the parking lot when mass was going on and saying, no, I’m going to try to get as close as I can to the Eucharist.
When they had the rule saying you can’t even be in a parking lot in your cars. Absolute stupidity, which is why I’m not in California anymore, but to not have confession, to not … It just frustrates me me to no end. So, go, get the sacraments, get spiritual health, but also seek out what modern science has given us to help retrain our brain. Good Pictures Bad Pictures. Reclaim is another good one. Covenant Eyes, I always recommend Covenant Eyes. You can install it on your computer. It’s not a filter. It reports to other people what you have been viewing on your laptop. You have an accountability partner.
So, your accountability buddy, your accountability partner. Your computer tells the other person, through the Covenant Eyes software, what you’re looking at on the computer. If you look at pornography, they come and talk to you and have a heart to heart chat saying, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Covenant Eyes, Reclaim is … Just look up Catholic Brain Retrain software. I believe it’s called Reclaim, so that’s good for adults. Good Pictures Bad Pictures for kids. Then, in conversations, [inaudible 00:39:51] pornography like, “Oh, what’s the big deal about porn?” Bring up the nasty truth about what porn is, what it does to the actors, what it does to kids.
Ask really, if pornography is not such a big deal, why do people hide it on their computers? If pornography is not such a big deal, why is it that if you look at pornography on your work computer, if someone sees it, or even if somebody doesn’t see it, you can be fired, if it’s not such a big deal? If it isn’t a big deal, why is it a crime to show it to people who don’t want to see it? Clearly, pornography is a big deal. It’s something that we can see. I will say, people say, “We got to get out of people’s minds this soft core version of it, that it’s a slippery slope.”
It’s like drinking saltwater. You drink saltwater to satiate your thirst, a sexual urge, or an angst. It may satisfy it for a while, but then it comes back with a vengeance. That is why we have to teach others and preach the truth about, not just the evil of pornography, but the goodness of marriage, to say that we’re not saying that sex is bad. Pornography is not evil because the nude body is evil or sex is evil. Pornography is evil because sex is so good, the human body is so good that it is deformed and defaced. The beauty of what it is, the full gift of cell between husband and wife, that full gift of intimacy that can result in a new person coming into existence with an immortal soul, that amazing ability to become one with one another, not just at the mental level or the emotional level or the spiritual level, but at the physical level, the ability to be able to do that.
The beauty of that one flesh union that bind someone together for life, it becomes ugly and it becomes sad. It becomes sad in pornography. Some people will say, “Why are you against pornography?” And they think you’re some kind of puritan. I think you can throw them for a loop by saying, “I’m against pornography because it’s sad.” Matt Fradd once told me, when he would drive his kids by a strip club, oh, well, no, he wouldn’t purposely do it. You drive down the street, and be able say, “Daddy, what’s that?” It says XXX. It’s a strip club. Matt Fradd told me, he told his kids, “That’s the place where sad people go. They go because they’re sad and they want to feel happy, but they go there and it never makes them really happy.”
I think that’s important to be able to share with others. Take heart, especially if you’re struggling with this, know the saints, they are praying for us. That we are in the battle. Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who I used to serve under in the Diocese of Phoenix, had a wonderful document he released called Into the Breach. It dealt with the sins of our day, including pornography. There’s a passage, just to allude to what I said earlier about the saints, thanking God for not being tested, like we’re being tested. In that document, he said, “Imagine standing before the throne of God on judgment day, where the great saints of ages past, who themselves dealt with preeminent sins in their own day will say to each other, “We dealt with the trouble of lust in our day, but those 21st century men, these happy few, battled the beast up close.”
My friends, whether you’re a man, or a woman, women struggle with pornography, Fifty Shades of Grey, romance novels, you can battle the beast up close. Don’t take it on, on your own, don’t rely on your own strength. Rely on the grace of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit. I hope this episode was helpful for you. It went on a little bit long today, but that’s okay. That’s quite all right. Thank you guys so much. Pray for you, please pray for me, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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