Factually! with Adam Conover - The Myth of Sex Addiction and the Science of Sex with Nicole Prause

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Sex expert and scientist Nicole Prause joins Adam this week to reveal the truth about sex "addiction", debunk popular misconceptions about the science of sex, and explain how difficult it is to measure whether or not a test subject has *really* had an orgasm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, but okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover, and here's a story you've heard before. A famous man gets in trouble for cheating on his partner. Of course, he doesn't want to look like a jerk in the press, though, so here's what he does. He comes out and says, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not a jerk. I'm a sex addict. See, by using the language of addiction, he's able to medicalize his problem, seek treatment, and absolve himself, right? Because he's not just an asshole. He had a disease. And here's the thing. If you've got cash, there's a network of scientifically dodgy sex addiction centers who are just waiting to help you launder your reputation.

We have seen this story play out again, time and time again in the press. Just take Anthony Weiner to take the example of one famous dick. The truth about sex addiction, though, is that it isn't really an actual medical thing. Now, look, of course, it's possible to have sexual behaviors that are bad for your personal or professional life, right? You can totally fuck up sexually in a way that is damaging, and it is quite possible to want to seek help with that. But if you look, in fact, scientifically at the way addiction works in the brain, sex addiction doesn't really measure up. In studies of people addicted to, say, drugs or smoking or gambling, their brain activates very quickly when they see a picture of what they're addicted to. Give an addicted brain a cue for its addiction and it just lights up.

But when you show a supposed sex addict or porn addict the thing that they're supposedly addicted to, their brain reacts pretty normally. Another sign of addiction is something called escalation. For something to be addictive, it needs to be more and more addictive over time. So in the case of drugs, you start off with a little bit and then you need more and more until you work your way up to what could be a lethal dose in some cases. But in porn, studies have shown no evidence for escalation in terms of the time spent looking at it or a slide into more and more extreme content. So it's no wonder then that the American Psychological Association and the World Health Organization have rejected sex addiction

as a clinical definition. Sex addiction just does not seem to be a real thing. Now, as a society, we are sex obsessed, but this misunderstanding about sex addiction is just the sexy tip of our ignorance iceberg. Sex is a foundational part of our humanity, but our conversation about it is often shrouded by superstition and pseudoscience and senseless moralism. The fact is that despite its centrality to our lives, we just don't know that much about sex at all. Well, here today to tell us more about the new frontiers of sex science,

our guest today is an honest-to-God sex scientist. Her name is Nicole Prowsey. She's a PhD and currently a scientist with Liberos. Now, I want to say we did our very best here to have an inclusive conversation about sex, but I want you to be involved in that conversation because I'm always trying to do better in that regard. So please hit me up on Twitter. Let us know how we're doing.

And with that said, hey, I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. It was a really fun one. Please welcome Nicole Prowsey. Nicole, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me on. So you're a sex scientist. Sure. You don't sound very confident about it.

I go by many names. That's a good one. Oh, okay. What else are you called? The technical is sexual psychophysiologist. So that's an umbrella for the psychology and physiology kind of joining those fields together. Psychophysiologist. Cool.

And you work for a company called? Myself, Libros. Oh, I'm very sorry called? Myself, Libros. Oh, I'm very sorry. Your company is called Libros. And you told me just before we started recording, you do what at this company? Sexual biotech. Now, what the hell is that? That's very intriguing. It's a sexier way of saying sexual psychophysiology.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, most people don't know that term. So kind of sexual biotech conveys broadly what we're doing. And it's maybe less sexy than that. It makes me, yeah, I mean, I just start, my mind starts spinning with like science fictional ideas, like nanobots that make you horny or something. That's us. Really? Well. Wait, I made that up one of the things we'd worked on is like patterns of automated genital

stimulation for an orgasm study we were working on and the question is what is that like what is an automated pattern that would work for men and women does such a thing exist and it turns out there are no data on that so we had to do some piloting and that involved automating a vibrator

on the genitals to figure out how to instantiate that response. So there are people, so I just want to get a sense of the day-to-day of sex science. You got a vibrator and what are you, you got a control group that's getting one kind of pattern, a bzz, bzz, bzz, and then you're, some people are getting bzz, bzz, bzz, some people are getting bzz, bzz, bzz, or what?

That's what I want you to think. Most of our day is like programming and statistical analysis. But the fun days are, yes, like piloting, bringing in poor friends or pilots who are willing to let us hook them up in non-threatening ways to try out different things that we're experimenting with. So sex science, you said you don't have you didn't have data on that particular thing you were looking for. Sex science, my understanding is it's kind of a weirdly undercover topic. Yeah, we have all kinds of challenges in getting our work done. And so we're very thin on some areas of development and how to test things, especially in the high arousal range. So that's kind of anything beyond a few minutes of porn, we don't have a lot of data for in the lab. Now, why is that? So some of the challenges are political, especially in the U.S.

We have groups that openly oppose us and try and stop our work. For example, the primary funding group in the U.S. is the National Institutes of Health. And there have been five grants brought before Congress in the history of the NIH, and all five were sex grants. That is, these were grants that were awarded, and Congress tried to take them away because they didn't like that NIH was funding anything to do with sexuality. So, as thin as the funding already is, you know, our grants can be taken away from us just because of the content area that we work on. And so, those are kind of solid institutional barriers that obviously if you have no money, you can't get work on. And so those are kind of solid institutional barriers that obviously, if you have no money, you can't get work done. And there are lots of protests as well. So, you know, the U.S. is a Christian nation, and we have lots of religious groups that oppose what we

do. There's a lot of Christians in the nation. I wouldn't call it a Christian nation. Well, depending, yeah, how you want to slice that. But they're certainly very vocal and very influential. And so, you know, we have people who feel very strongly about sexual values. And so, we try to reduce our bias and investigate things from a scientific perspective. But it's impossible not to step on someone's toes with almost anything you want to study in that domain. And so, you know, we regularly are getting threatened and everyone wants us fired from wherever we are. It's just, it's a tough place to get good scientists to work because, you know, if you're an excellent neuroscientist and you can go into depression where there's a path and there's funding and it's a known quantity, or you can go and have to fight your way for the rest of your career to even be able to do your research. So if you're excellent and you have a choice, where do you go? You probably go to a less resistant path where you're not going to have to fight that fight every day. Yeah. I mean, it occurs to me that other types of scientists we've had on the show, sleep scientists, all different, just trying to think about stuff with the human body, often they're university affiliated, but come to think of it, I'm like, well, it almost tracks for me that you're an independent operator doing this research as opposed to, I hear from USC today, is there also an institutional barrier with those big research institutions that maybe don't want people jacking off in the

science lab? Absolutely. So I was an academic for 10 years, actually, and I came here to work at UCLA in psychiatry. And that was my kind of decision to transition out entirely and not to try anymore in academia was we tried to get a study through to study orgasm in the lab. And the ethics board will allow us to buzz the genitals. We could put a vibrator on them

and like buzz it for a few seconds, but we had to promise they wouldn't ejaculate. And we said, well, I can try. It doesn't sound like much of an orgasm. Yeah, well, so if you want to study that process, we're like, oh, this is a no-go. Like we have to let them do that. And the ethics board wouldn't allow it through

and for not giving any good reason that we could discern. Another university- Hey, science isn't supposed to be this much fun. All right. Yeah. That was kind of what we got. We're like, you can blue balls, but you can't, this is where we draw the line. Oh, what if you go to the ethics board, like a jilted 15 year old boy, like, oh no, come on. It's like dangerous. If you don't come, it's like, it could be bad for you. Like I never thought of capitalizing on the myth. I should have tried that. It's too late. Sorry guys. That is a myth. You can't use that argument. But so you went into

the independent world. Yeah. And so I still collaborate with universities. You know, I love scientists and we get along really well. It's more the kind of deans that are hand-wringing and worried about what their donors are going to think. So yeah, we still have oversight, same oversight of ethics review that any university research has. I just collaborate with them. And I think those universities are happy to have the orgasm study at some weird independent lab in LA that's not us. It's not happening on our campus. There's just the little, it's like the science version of like the little curtain in the

back of the video rental store. It's the adults only. It's like just a little bit separate. So mom and dad can still shop in the front. But like, if you want the good stuff, you know where to go. Yeah, if I serve that function and it gets the work done, let's go. But this is so odd that it's hard to get that research done

because sex is like such a fundamental part of human life. I mean, is it the case that like we understand like a lot about eating and breathing and sleeping, but a lot less about sex? In many ways, yes. Especially kind of functionality in sex. So we like know a lot more about sex? In many ways, yes. Especially kind of functionality in sex. So we know a lot more about male anatomy, but there's still questions about female anatomy and functionality. That's where we're like gone. Like basic stuff? Yeah. So kind of like, you know, once you've got

a cadaver, you can cut it up and you can look at stuff, but you don't really know how that works when the person is alive, which seems more important. That's not the best way to study sex is just cut up a cadaver. It can help you a little bit, but you're like, how does this cadaver? Okay, go ahead. Exactly. So if you want to say, well, how, you know, when this is an action, what's really happening and how do we understand that? So the functional aspect is I think where we really have gaps in understanding, like, how does this work when someone's interacting by themselves even as one thing versus with a partner? That is infancy. We know very little about two people interacting together sexually.

Really? Yeah. You may have seen a really fun study I did with a case 10 years ago, maybe now. study I did with a case 10 years ago, maybe now, they put two people in an MRI, tiny people, and had them have vaginal intercourse and just imaged the pelvis. And they're like, oh, oh, we didn't know that fit that way. Really? What? Did no one think to look at this before? Like what fit what way? So they were describing the penis as more a boomerang shape when it was intravaginal, at least in this couple. And of course, we don't have big population samples of this, so we don't know how common that is or how much that varies.

But we, you know, you always kind of joke if you have a sexual interaction, you know, it's like, oh, this is straight. Well, it turns out it's not straight in. You know, it's like there's a lot of curvature. And what might that mean in terms of functionality of getting, you know, if you're trying to become pregnant of, you know, expelling the ejaculate into the vaginal area and, you know, how that could impact uptake. And so those are kind of functional questions that, you know, the science looks a little goofy and it made the news rounds at the time it came out. But there are real functional questions about that. You know, it matters that it's a boomerang and not a stick when it goes in. So. It's kind of striking to me that like, you know, there's famous sex researchers, right? There's, you know, Kinsey Institute. I remember seeing that movie.

That's where I trained. Yep. Really? Oh, you did? Yep. I saw that movie with my parents. It was fun. Interesting choice. Yeah. Masters and Johnson, right? These are famous names. Those are our progenitors, yes.

Progenitor, exactly. But that was a long time ago. And I'm not, you know, other fields have, you know, we know Albert Einstein. We also know Stephen Hawking, right? But it seems like with sex, we are sort of stuck in that same, like people are still like, oh, Kinsey scale. Yeah, that's the most up-to-date stuff. Like, wait, that was like, what, 60 years ago?

Yeah, yeah, about. So I think like Masters and Johnson are a great example because they have this really famous model of sexual response that like if you've taken a human sex class, like an intro class in college, you got taught this model.

You're still getting taught this model. I think the model's wrong. And I think we have data to show that part of it's wrong. But it's going to take me a while to get it out. And I don't know anyone else even working in that area. So, you know, as we continue to have these kind of repeated over and over again, you know, it's going to take us a while to correct the record, to update the record. But it's just, we are a tiny, tiny field. So, I would guess like in the U.S., there may be 12 of us doing sexual psychophysiology. Most people have fled for Canada.

Just 12 people. Well, most have left because of the climate in the U.S. Got it. And they'll go, if they're English speaking, probably to Canada. Yeah. And then Europe just doesn't have grants that are as big. So there are quite a few folks that study it in Europe, but they aren't sometimes able to have as big of a projects just because the funding structures are a bit different. So America is falling behind in sex science.

We are absolutely falling behind and it's an embarrassment. We're losing the sex science Cold War. Well, what are the big, like, the thing is there's so much pseudoscientific language about sex. I was talking in the intro about sex addiction. You hear people say with porn, for example, that they say it quasi-scientifically. Porn is ruining American men's sex lives. We've had that pitch come up in the Adam Ruins Everything writers room when writers and researchers are pitching. I read this about that porn is like an epidemic that's ruining American men's sex lives. And then I've also

heard the opposite pitch of actually that's a myth. And the fact is we couldn't find enough solid information to do the story. We just said we actually are not sure what the truth is. So we're not going to do this. So, yeah, I mean, you sighed when I was saying part of that. So, yeah, please, please enlighten me. What is the truth here? Well, so there, I guess there are two things. So one is kind of its current status in the diagnostic whatever, and then there's kind of the science issues. And so diagnostically speaking, no one recognizes porn addiction. So we have the national group, which is a diagnostic and statistical manual that does not have porn addiction or sex addiction or

anything really like that in it. And then we have the international, the International Classification of Disorders, and it does not have porn addiction in it either. It has something that looks a little more like sex addiction, but it's different that they've just introduced called sexual compulsivity, which was very controversial. I can talk about that. So no one recognizes porn addiction. That doesn't appear anywhere. You can't diagnose it. There's no code for it. However, in the scientific area,

we're having lots of debates about, clearly some people are walking into offices and saying, I'm watching too much porn. Right. There's an entire- Those people exist. You can go on Reddit and you can find whole communities of, I mean, you can find communities of people on Reddit

who are doing literally anything. You can find people who are jerking off to paperclips and they post pictures of their favorite paperclips. You went deeper than I did. But yeah, I mean, that's what that place is. But yes, there are people who feel this problem and they're like, God, I need help. Yes. So that question is when someone, you know, I'm also a licensed psychologist. If someone walks into my office and says, I believe I'm watching too much porn, my first question is, where does that come from? You know, what's the etiology? Because that's how I know how to help

you. So, the best predictor of someone identifying as a porn addict is that they were raised with conservative values, not necessarily religiously, but that their family has conservative values. And on average, they tend not to watch any more porn than people who are not distressed about their use. Oh, really? So in other words, these are people who just feel horrible. Like they're very shame-based in general, and they feel bad about lots of things they do,

and they may have some perfectionistic kinds of qualities in their personality. And that kind of a person, you know, if they present to me and say, I'm watching too much porn, I'm probably going to do education with them and talk about shame issues and family of origin issues maybe. However, you know, if someone's coming in and like, man, you know, I'm watching a lot of porn before I go out at night to the bars and then I keep, you know, I mean to be faithful to my partner who doesn't want me sleeping around

and I mean to use condoms and now I've got all these conflicts and I'm not making a tour. I'm like, okay, something else is happening. It could be lots of things. Are you depressed? So a lot of people who believe that they have a porn problem or a sex problem actually have a primary diagnosis of major depressive disorder. And that's how they cope with it.

You know, they say, well, how do I adjust my emotions? Well, then I'm not going to treat porn. I'm going to treat your depression because we have excellent treatments for depression. And if you're just using it to cope, well, that makes sense. Absolutely. Or are you doing that because it's a feature of mania and you have bipolar disorder? Or are you doing that because it's a feature of mania and you have bipolar disorder? There's so many things that you have to go through before I would even start to think about that.

And then the data we do have, specifically on people who have porn issues, they just don't fit a lot of the classic predictions of addictions in general. So they don't look like other substance addiction models. And so something's going on. We want to figure out how to best help these men and women and whomever who have these issues. But there's just so much push to stamp it with addiction. And I think there are some financial reasons for that, maybe some political reasons for that, but they're not scientific. I don't think we can call it an addiction. Well, addiction, the problem is addiction itself is also poorly understood and very complex. Yeah, I would say we understand a lot about it, but now we're to the nitty gritty of, you know,

to what extent do you think something has to have withdrawal to be called an addiction? And there's debate about that symptom. And the scientific understanding is very slow to make its way into the public consciousness. But there's all these gray areas with things that we, even that we understand better. You know, I think about, talked about like video game addiction and gambling addiction, you know, that my understanding is like slot machines, for instance, like really do can cause an actual addiction, right? I know you do disagree. Yeah.

So I think that's more compulsive. So again, there's more evidence that that looks a little bit more like we understand other substance use issues. But even there, exactly, like there's debate, like, okay, if it's not an exogenous substance, so exogenous coming from outside the body, you put it in with a pill, you know, is there some supra-physiological response? So, like if I take cocaine, I have more, broadly we'll say, dopaminergic receptors occupied than I can possibly do by myself.

You know, I can gamble all day. I can masturbate. I'm never going to do what cocaine can do. And so, at what point do I say like, there's, it's not enough, you know, like we need some supra physiological event to be motivated to call something addictive. But. Well, the, the comparison I was going to draw is like, okay, so, you know, slot machines can be compulsive at least. Right. And are sort of designed to cause that sort of behavior in people.

But like video game addiction is like a thing, is often a scary, a thing that politicians who don't understand the topic very well bring up to frighten people. Thank you. But at the same time, and when you spoke about depression, it reminded me of that

because like there've been times in my life I was depressed and I played too many video games because the video games give me like a feeling of accomplishment that I'm not able to get in my own life and I don't have to leave the house. Or social if they're multiplayer or yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that could be an unhealthy amount of overuse. That doesn't mean it's an addiction. But then there are also games in the middle that are like specifically almost trying to use slot machine mechanics in order to get people hooked right in order to where i play this and i'm like this is pernicious this is like

doing something to me this is trying to do something to me and even that is so hazy uh like where that distinction is drawn and and where we should you know draw that line how we should talk about those things um when you add sex into it which we also don't understand that well yeah sex has some nice rate limiting features that make it a bit different as well. So that's generously what I'm calling the refractory period. This is like after you're saying you jerk off

and you can't do it again for a little bit. At some point, even if you are short latency, it becomes very difficult. So, you know- Have you studied this? Indirectly. So there are lots of scientists who've worked on this issue. I've studied it kind of directly, but please tell me. So mostly it gets studied from a fertility perspective.

That is, what's the content of the ejaculate after the fifth round in as much time, you know, 24-hour period or something. And in fact, if you're trying to get pregnant, you know, the seminal content does reduce over time as well as the total volume. So, you know, probably not good to just have sex as much as you possibly can during fertile windows. So that's where we get those kind of data is exactly like having people masturbate in labs and looking at the samples. So those kind of things have been somewhat characterized.

And then there's – but the really good data about kind of – the refractory periods are hard to – dang it. You know what I'm going to say. Hard to come by. I was trying to stop it and then I couldn't find a way out of it. No, no, no. I mean, it wouldn't be a very good episode if we didn't take advantage of these moments. It just happens. Yeah.

But yeah, the data are very sparse that I would say are very robust, helping us understand kind of what the variability of that period is. Got it. Well, what about sex addiction? I talked about that at the opening of the show when there's like this. So we have these folk pseudoscientific understandings of how sex works, right? Like the public believes that there is such a thing as sex addiction. I've noticed. Mostly because people go on Dr. Phil and talk about it or they go apologize to

Oprah and they say they're getting treatment for it. And they go to some sort of place that claims to treat sex addiction. It's like, but is this a, and I'm not talking about porn addiction. I'm talking about like having sex with other people. Yeah. Is this real? Is it a myth? What's the truth about it?

It's a myth, but less of a myth than porn. So porn is very much easier to study in the lab. You can expose people to porn pretty readily. But the having people actually interact sexually in a laboratory so that we can look at the physiology is something very, very few labs are doing.

Mine's doing it, but figuring out what protocols should look like to even study that, like two people interacting, when is that abnormal? When is that not a typical sexual response? And we know we can't just go by self-report, like sex data, there are places where self-report is okay. This is not one of them. People do not accurately report, even if they want to, they don't know often what their bodies are even doing. So I can't go to women now and say, did you have an orgasm?

I don't trust that anymore. I don't even know what they're telling me. Like if you're just trying to do on a survey or if you're observing someone in a lab and you're just trying to do self-report on if they have an orgasm, you can't trust that. In the lab, I would because then I have measures that I'm making sure that they did. That's part of why I now no longer trust self-report on if they have an orgasm. You can't trust them. No, in the lab I would because then I have measures that I'm making sure they did. That's part of why I now no longer trust self-report from women. But no, seriously. So you're saying you need that physical, you've got to, whatever them hooked up to, to measure that it happens. You need some more objectives. Self-report is fine at some point, but you've got to

verify, trust but verify, bring them in. Because even if people want to be honest with you, they can't necessarily, do they have the proper sex education to understand what their body is doing in the way that a scientist means it? Right. Right. Okay. So it's very hard to study. But what is, does it, is it real? I don't think so, but I'm using a little more cautious language there because there are more gaps. Got it. Things that we had just not been able to test yet. So is this just like an excuse that people are making up for bad behavior?

I mean, that's the cynical way to look at it, right? Like, oh, no, sorry, I have an addiction. That's like a, I'm shifting it from one realm of social understanding where I'm a bad person to a medicalized one where, oh no, I just have a disease. Like no one could be held responsible for their disease. Yes. In order to evade responsibility, how much, I mean, maybe this is outside, you know, where you feel licensed to speak, but like how seriously should we take that sort of attempt to shift? like how seriously should we take that sort of attempt to shift? There are definitely people who are using it for secondary gain. That is either they cheated and they'd rather have it framed as a disease than a moral failing.

And then there are people who shall remain nameless who are sex offenders who would rather be, you know, oh, I'm just so masculine that I'm a sex addict rather than no, I'm like assaulting people. Yeah. Between those two labels, they make their choice. And within our field, there's been a huge backlash of people who treat sex offenders telling the sex addiction people to knock it off. Like, do not treat sex offenders in an addiction model. Are you nuts? So, they have good treatments. They know how to help those people and we should let them do that. That's their expertise.

Yeah. So, in large, though, I don't think most of the people who go for sex addiction treatment are those kind of folks. You know, these are people who are really upset, generally, about their own behavior. Uh-huh. And they don't necessarily understand kind of why they're doing it. They don't get their motivation. And so, we hope that they are going somewhere where they can gain insight and not just be shamed for their sexual behavior. And that's what we're concerned some of the sex addiction treatments are doing. Got it. So it's really more of a,

almost like a therapeutic concern where you've got people, yeah, there's the, there's the sex offender or the sort of men behaving badly and trying to get out of it specter that I'm raising. But then there's also the people who are like, man, why do I keep, why am I having one night stands that make me feel terrible over and over again? I think there's a lot of truly held beliefs. I don't think these are mostly people who are trying to get away with something that those exist in that group, but I think they're a small proportion. And so then the question is right. Like if I'm, so of people who are depressed, about 15% say, when I'm in a depressed mood, my sexual interest increases. Well, that's not usually how we think of depression. When you're depressed,

you can't get out of bed. You're not going to go hooking up. Well, it turns out some people use that to help themselves feel better. So maybe we should be looking at depression as a potential predictor of these, quote unquote, compulsive sexual behaviors, because guess what? Sex feels good. Yeah. I have noticed that about it. My studies have revealed that result. Extensive case series. Not as extensive as I'd like, but, you know.

So those kind of more complex ways of thinking about what's going on for those, mostly guys, is what I would really love to see is let's not kind of be stupid about it and say, oh, you know, sex is too much. Sex is bad. You know, we still, you know, have a lot of therapists who call when you have a lot of sex partners now, they know not to call them sluts, but they'll say you're acting out. You're acting out sexually. I say, well, okay, but sex feels good. So is that acting out? And do we want to devalue that and say you're dumb or you're bad if you're doing this behavior? Let's understand kind of functionally where it comes from. Yeah. God, you're really revealing how much our cultural hangups, but also personal hangups that we may not even know that we have like about this topic, like make all of this so difficult that like people are coming in with maybe some some deep rooted shame.

And so it's like difficult to tell where does the problem begin and the shame come into it. And then they're talking to a psychologist, a therapist, you know, an addiction counselor. God knows who. Yeah, it really depends who they talk to. And what model is that person using? And then what kind of shame-based thinking is that person bringing in? And all that stuff is like, how do you even begin to unpack that for one person? Yeah, publicly, we are really sorry.

We are so messed up right now, and it is not good for you. We're sorry. Well, I want to know how we get our way out of that, but I want to ask first, just going back to porn for one second. This idea that I've heard that porn is ruining young men's sex lives, that a generation of men, Pornhub, you know, the internet, all that. That's now, I've heard this as, you know, this is a sea change in American sexuality. You've got, you know, men who are on Pornhub every single night, and that's giving them a skewed idea of sexuality. But now let's say, forget like culturally, you know, just like, hey, this is like

a depiction of sex that's inaccurate, right? I could agree with that sort of sentiment of like the falseness of porn and should we be concerned. But the claim that I've heard is that literally it's like stopping men from getting erections in normal, they can't have normal sex because they can only get aroused when they're looking at these like hyper images. Is there any truth to that? We have not been able to find evidence for that. So people are calling that porn induced erectile dysfunction've done a series of laboratory studies, including one that's coming out in a couple of months that I'm dying to talk about and I can't talk about it. Oh! Sneak preview. Yeah. It's going to be the largest sexual psychophys study on the topic to date.

Cool. And so, when we have looked, the guys who are viewing more pornography actually tend not to have those issues. And I, to me, I think you just have to think about why are people looking at porn, right? This is not going to the movie theater. You're not going, well, except for you, you're not going to mom and dad to watch a porn video. You're going to masturbate. You know, the purpose is to use it to jack off at the end of the day or jill off or whatever you prefer. Yeah. And so, if you think of it like it's just a masturbation, well, why are you masturbating? Okay, well, you know, maybe my partner is annoying me or we're having an argument. And so, we're not going to have sex.

I know they're not going to have sex with me right now. I'm just going to go masturbate. I'm looking at porn while I do that. But porn didn't make me unhappy with my relationship. Like, I'm here masturbating because I couldn't get sex with my usual consensual partner. And so, again, it's one of these issues that the truth is a lot more complex. And if you actually take it into the laboratory and say, okay, you said that you're having erectile problems due to porn and I can't see it. So these guys just tend to have a higher sex drive.

That is, you know, they're saying they have all these problems. I'm like, no, like you just, you masturbate a lot and, you know, you like happen to view more porn because your sex drive is higher. And if that causes, you know, more conflict with your partner, because you are really, really trying to get away from these ideas of low sex drive and high sex drive. We're trying to say desire discrepancy. It's just a discrepancy. If you find someone who matches you, you won't be an issue.

That's how this works. So, you know, if you are discrepant with your partner, there's got to be some balance. And some people use masturbation to balance that out. And now we're demonizing that. Oh, God, you know, how could you? And, well, think about the dynamic. Like, why is this person masturbating in that relationship? And let's try and understand that. It's like, well, they probably have a higher sex drive, and they're using that to manage the discrepancy. Is there a concern about porn, about the modern version of porn that you do have, even if it's a non-scientific, but, you know, social one?

No, I think there, so the one that worries me the most is kids because they don't have a perception of you know what is normal and it's not the sex ed class that we want them to have is to give them sex ed yeah in the u.s especially and even if we give them sex ed you know we don't mandate that it be accurate uh for the most part and get mocker has great stats on that and so really like you want to take it away on both sides, you know, we're going to take away all your sex ed and then we're going to give you access to porn and not educate you about that either. But the good news is there are now three empirically supported porn literacy programs. So one excellent one out of Boston University from Emily Rothman,

who is doing a lot of work around how do we talk to kids and educate them in a way that's kind of level appropriate. And she's mainly working, I think, with adolescents. So not the young, young, but a little bit advanced. And there are programs for that. So you don't need these goofball, you know, fly by night websites that are popping up. There's actual science that will educate kids on kind of how to understand it at a level that's appropriate for them. Yeah. That is free. That is tested. That is available to the public now. So I encourage any school education person who's interested in like, how do I talk to kids about this?

I'm concerned. Things are available now. Yeah. They're available. That stuff is so, so important just to give kids any level of sex ed. I have this very specific memory. I just, I don't know if you're familiar with this. Oh, it's not that.

It's not that kind of memory. It's when I was like a teenager on the early internet, like late 90s, early 2000s. There's this website. It still exists. It's called Jackinworld. Have you ever heard of this website? No, it sounds great. It's called Jackinworld.

Like J-A-C-K. If you want to look it's called jack and world like j-a-c-k if you want to look it up j-a-c-k-i-n world.com and like it's a very like 1999 looking website it's just very basic but it's called the male masturbation resource and it's got like masturbation techniques there's no porn on the site it's just like stuff like that and i was reading it and i remembered this website i looked back at it like you know 10 years later and I was like oh this was a stealth sex ed site for like young men because what it was was it was like okay here's like a jerk off technique you could use you know etc but ultimately it was like a sex positive site and then the main part of the site was just like question and answer and it was just like kids writing in going like hey why does my penis have

a big vein on it like i'm really worried about this and then the answer was always just like you got a normal penis don't worry about it like don't worry don't worry don't worry about your penis you got a normal penis it's okay to jerk off and etc um and i in retrospect was very happy that like i just had some i read that you know, because it was like straightforward. It was scientifically, they were like, thanked Jocelyn Elders, the surgeon general who lost her job because she said that masturbation was healthy, I believe. And that was like the overall approach of it. And I don't know who the hell made this site and why. I'll hunt them down.

It's got to be one of mine. But just like that, you know that that much is like so valuable and something that we that we don't give kids at all no i always joke i say my whole career in summary is everyone just chill the fuck out like if i could summarize my research yeah it's like let's all just calm down so i think that's a great kind of way of walking through exactly like you know we have these guys who are saying oh you know i'm a porn addict because I have a sore on my penis for masturbating. And I'm like, that's really, really common. It's super common in young boys, especially and sometimes even in older guys.

There's a simple prescription. Let me tell you, it's over the counter. But you got to like figure it out. Yeah. Go to the lotion aisle. Yeah. It's not a disease. Like sometimes you masturbate too much or you try a new technique.

It doesn't quite work. And that's fine. It doesn't mean you have a disorder. You know, it just means better technique, a little less vigorous. Yeah. Well, we got to take a quick break, but I have so many more questions for you specifically about men and women. We'll be right back with more Nicole Prowse. Okay, we're back with Nicole Prowse. So another area you hear a lot of pseudoscientific information about sex is the difference between men and women. As a standup comedian, I have heard

so much ill-informed pontificating at my workplace about differences between men and women. What are some of the myths and what are some of the actual things that we know about those differences sexually? I'm sure there's a lot. Yeah. So it turns out a lot of things we attribute within sexuality to gender differences are probably more due to sex drive. So that is, on average, guys have higher sex drive, and that's cross-cultural. They're very, depending who you ask, but maybe one culture where women report having a higher sex drive. So we hear things like, oh, men are more visual. Well, not if you control for sex drive.

It's people who have higher sex drive tend to respond more to sexual images like neuroly. So speaking neuroscientifically, um, and you know, it's not that guys have some special receptors in the brain. They're totally different than pipe porn straight to their penis or something like, no, of course that doesn't happen. Um, it certainly is the case that women orgasm much less consistently than men do. That's very well documented, and I back that up in lab physiology. So it's very much more difficult, it seems, for women to get there, for what reason we're working on it. So these are actually the opposite of misconceptions. These are all sort of like our general cultural sort of beliefs about the sexes that are being held up here.

In the case of orgasm gaps, yes. But not the men are more visual, I'd say. That's a myth. Oh, the idea that men are just visual because they're hunters and they need to see a lion run. And so then they see a boob and it's the same as that. And they want to clunk them on the head with a club. There's more to this than I knew.

I mean, people really believe, I listen to some really bad podcasts sometimes where people talk about this shit. No, so it's just that people with higher sex drives are more official. Yes. But that's really interesting that that holds up. One thing that really struck me was,

I wonder if you have any insight on this. I was watching a video by a trans woman talking about her transition. And one of the things she struck me as said that was really interesting was after she transitioned, went on, you know, all the various hormone therapies you do said that she felt her sexuality change and she no longer needed to have what she called like an obligate daily orgasm that like no longer felt the pressure. Like I just must have an orgasm once a day. And I was like, oh, that's like a way to put it that I've not thought about it before that there's just like, sometimes for men, it feels like you're just like taking a crap. You know,

it's like one of the things you got to do, you know what I mean? Is that? The research currently on women in drive is a lot, there's a lot of interest in something called responsive desire. So that is the idea that we're in the past using the same model for men and women where you're just supposed to be walking down the street and kapow, you're hit with sex drive and I must go get off now. And it doesn't work that way. It seems as much for women and probably not for lower drive men either. And so by responsive desire, what we mean is like you got to have a little something first to kind of get the engine going is you can't say, I just expect lightning to strike. And that's my model. Like if I don't have lightning striking,

then I have low sex drive. That's not true. So, you know, if you need someone kind of coming onto you or touching you in like non-sexual regions or zones to even start to think sexually, regions or zones to even start to think sexually, that's normal. That is the common experience. And so we don't want people believing they're deficient or low drive because they need to be touched first in some way or solicited in some way. We just are now trying to transition to call that responsive desire and differentiating that from spontaneous desire, that walking down the street struck by lightning kind of feeling that I think you're describing. Yeah. How much do we know about when people do transition, right?

Or how much does that change the sort of dichotomy that you're talking about? Yeah. So those are interesting because they're exactly supraphysiological doses of hormones. So in general, sex drive is not tightly tied to testosterone. That's another good myth to bust. That is, in either men or women, the titers that are in our bodies at any particular time don't seem to tie to our experienced sex drive. But that is not true in the case of people who are transitioning because their testosterone levels are out of physiological range. They're going supraphysiological. So, this is, you know, I'm getting far more or far less testosterone

than, you know, within normal limits. You know, I'm now getting, not that it's a disease, but into disease territory. That is, if a doctor saw this and knew you weren't getting testosterone, they would be worried. So, you know, those are very different kind of levels and titers of hormones that they're dealing with. But within normal limits, you know, those don't generally tie to the experience of drive. Got it. And in terms of men and women or men and men or women and women together, when we're talking about... We're talking... Go nuts.

Or any combinations of folks. Like what are the misconceptions? What are we learning? What are the fascinating new things we're learning about couples or triples? I'm trying to, I'm trying to like be really, how inclusive can we be woke? Yeah, exactly.

The, yeah. So there are, there's the stuff we're doing and then some labs generally are interested in this kind of fluidity idea. So just briefly, the fluidity idea is women tend to be more broadly aroused to a variety of different stimuli. So even a straight woman, you show her gay porn of men or women gay porn, and she tends to respond to it at least a little bit in terms of her genitals at least. But if you show guys things that are outside of their stated preferred range, they tend to be very constrained to respond to just what they say they're interested in.

And there are a number of labs that are investigating those kind of sexual fluidity issues, differences that they think are there between genders. And I'd say we're kind of in the middle of that. We've got some, you know, fair base of knowledge at this point, but we're still trying to suss out kind of what some of those things are due to. Yeah. And then we're actually bringing couples into the laboratory and measuring from both of them at the same time to try and understand really what the physiology of interacting looks like. So we're getting brain measures from both people interacting for the first time ever to understand, like, when someone's providing stimulation, what does their brain look like? And what does the brain of the person who's just sitting there receiving it look like? And then are those brain states useful for anything?

You know, do they have maybe health applications? That's, you know, a strong interest of mine. You know, can we use being highly sexually aroused to help us in a way like meditation may help us? Yeah. So one of the questions is like, to what extent do we have that kind of relaxed but awake brain state when we're highly sexually aroused? Yeah.

And if that was the case with couples, is there an intervention there? Can we potentially capitalize on that and use it to even have partners helping each other if you're in a depressed state or this is a practice they do regularly together that looks meditative potentially. Yeah, the idea of sexual arousal as like an altered state that's like meditative, like really resonates with me. Because I think about the times where, you know, I've tried to, you know, be aroused and have not been able to, you know what I mean? Not been able to get into it. Right. And it's like, something's running around in my head. Like I'm thinking about work. I'm, I'm angry at somebody or I'm, you know, you're just like, you're making out with your partner and inside your head, it's just like, and they're kind of like, where are you?

And you're like, I'm not here. I'm sorry. And then the times when you're most aroused, it's like you're, it's like your mind falls away and you're just like in that moment and you're just like in this real – and that's like one of the best things about it, frankly, is that you lose yourself and that you become sort of one with the thing that you're doing. And that's a lot like when people talk about meditating. Well, yeah. So we think these are unique brain states and that's one of the kind of discoveries where we think we've made that we're trying to, you know, trust but verify.

And so we see initially when people start to become sexual, you know, the brain is very strongly engaged. You have to have a lot of effort. You have to be able to allocate attention to the stimulus, kind of as you're describing. But then if we say,

okay, you know, that's nice. You've been masturbating now and watching porn for 24 minutes or however long we give them. We'd like you to try and have an orgasm now. The brain state at that point completely shifts, not at orgasm, but long before it. And that's when we start to see kind of a loss of cognitive control or reduction of control. And that may be something that looks more meditative. So, I don't think that kind of earlier arousal stages look very effortful, like I have to try and I have to pay attention and I have to be awake.

But then later on, it shifts to something that looks very distinct. So we also see this in the sympathetic nervous system that is early on, heart rate, breathing rate, all that stuff's going up. But then we say, okay, now try and have a climax. Well, Masters and Johnson said, well, you just keep getting more and more and more and more aroused until pow, blammo, orgasm. Yay, go to bed. And our model doesn't look like that.

It's like, okay, we get breathing, heart rate up, and then we say, okay, try and have an orgasm, and then they just like start going down. And we're like, wait, what? We didn't know that happened. So now we're trying to figure out what that is. Yeah, that is, even if you interrogate your own experience of sex, it's not like, oh yeah, it just keeps going up. I think everyone's had the experience of like, you know,

yeah. Okay. Let's try to make it happen. And then, oh, it's not, not quite happening. There's something, there's something slightly amiss. There's like, um, yeah, it's like a really interesting puzzle to try to figure out like what's actually happening in that moment. As even in that moment, like you said, where you're just like, all right, let's, you know, you're having sex and you're like, all right, let's finish up. You know what I mean? Like, what is that difference? And then what actually gets you to the point of finishing up, you know? Yeah. So not everyone wears sensors when they have sex? Okay. So, yeah, it's like the, or some people I think are calling this edging.

Like I hear that term thrown around. Oh, yeah, yeah. What the heck is that? Isn't that just being aroused? This is another Reddit thing. Well, no, it's maintaining that last moment as long as you can. I think the edging is maybe not so special. It's maybe just hanging out in that second phase of arousal longer, which is great. You know, it looks like fun, but I don't know that it's anything special to call it edging. It's just, yeah. Is there any sort of researching that,

you know, this part of this, like, is there any, you know, therapeutic advice that you have for folks? Like, hey, one thing I've learned that's like, here's a tip, you know what I mean? That can help people with their, you know. This is a good one. So I think, you know, people tend to have problems with one or the other. So sometimes they'll say, oh, I get turned on just fine,

but I can't get over the hump. Like I can't have a climax and I don't know why. I'm just stuck. Other times they're like, well, yeah, like if I can get turned on, I can climax easily enough, but I can't get into it. I was like, well, now it makes if I can get turned on, I can climax easily enough, but I can't get into it. I was like, well, now it makes better sense because those look like two very distinct brain states.

And so maybe you're much better at one than another. So if you're having trouble kind of getting over the hump, so to speak, with orgasms, you know, that may be that helping reduce your kind of frontal or cognitive control at that time may be helpful. So do not pass yourself out. But if you want to experiment with hyperventilating, that could be something that's helpful to experiment with because that can help reduce frontal control. Seriously, just like breathe a lot? Yes. Like, I'm not going to do it now. I don't want to pass out on the show.

That's why I preface, like, do not make yourself pass out. You will scare your partner. They will call an ambulance. How do you experiment safely with hyperventilating? Well, that's not, right? This is not someone else controlling. It's you controlling.

So if you get out of, if you get out of hand, you just pass out. Yeah. So, okay. Be somewhere safe. Just take some deep breaths

and don't go too nuts. But, but, but try, try. Well, also again, like meditating,

focus on your breath. Faster. That's what people, but during meditating, no one's like, yes, breathe faster, faster, harder, harder. One question I have about this is you're talking about, again, getting back to, hey, differences between men and women, and you said men's sexual fluidity is lower. fluidity is lower. How do you think about the differences that might be biologically based versus, you know, societal gender role based, you know, that, like you say to me, hey, men show less sexual fluidity. And I'm thinking, okay, is that like a hang up, you know, because as a man, I experienced that hang up, right? Or is that like something about, you know, people with those chromosomes? So there is no nature or nurture, right? This is all kind of fused together at

this point. And maybe the best example of that is we used to have guys monitor their erections during the evening as a way of telling if their erectile dysfunction was due to psychology or due to physiology. And then we find out years later, decades later, that it turns out like if you're an anxious guy, you also don't get erections at night. So we can't really use that test anymore. And we don't use it for that purpose. But it just tells you like, even if you're, you know, not in mind, so to speak, your brain is still having your kind of psychological reaction or your psychology is still impacting your biology. We can't be dualists here. Yeah, that's, that's the thing. I understand you're trying to study

people as they are. And so like, you know, American men are like live in a society that creates things in their psychology to some extent, and psychology is going to affect biology in this way. And so we're all one organism. But so you think just eradicate that distinction that I made. Is that the answer? I mean, I think they're just, they're together. So, you know, it's when you address one, you're addressing the other. So for example, there are lots of physical determinants, genetic determinants of female orgasm consistency. So like the distance of the clitoris to the urethral opening, it turns out is predictive of how consistently you orgasm during climax. Well, we can't change that. Wow. Not yet. And so what does that mean, right? Like,

okay, well, if they're farther apart, you probably don't even know that because we don't provide it. if they're further apart. You probably don't even know that because we don't provide that. And it's also genetically heritable to some extent. So ask your mom, ladies. How consistently she climaxes is probably related to how consistently you climax. And so it's not that those predictors don't exist.

It's just like they exist in this context of how aware of that even am I? If I have that conversation about sex with my mom, I probably have a pretty open sexuality more generally. More open and flexible and accepting and not shameful. So, that's going to help me, you know, in another way that may impact the genetic impact. And, you know, we can push things around from either direction, either, you know, from biology or psychology. Yeah. It's such a, it's such an interesting area to think about. I think again about the trans woman who I spoke about earlier,

and it's like, how much has that changed that she experienced due to, you know, hormonal treatment versus to like now identifying as a woman with all the societal, you know, different, like what, you know, which, where is that line? Do we even care about where it is? Or are we just going to say, hey, this, yeah, I mean, this is what. And she probably had some expectancy of what would happen too, because I doubt she just decided to have surgery that morning. She probably read about it a lot, if she did that. Yeah, yeah. You know, probably read about it a lot before she started taking hormones and just saw it coming. and we're and that just speaks to like how complicated sex is because it's not just uh i've been asking you a lot of biologically based questions right

that's what i do yeah right but at the same time like sex is not just about us like it's not just about genes and penises and hormone amounts and things like that. It's also about thoughts and feelings and the things that we generally put in this social box. And they're all sort of like mushing together in this really complicated, bespoke way for every single person. It's enormously complex. Unfortunately, I guess. So, yeah, it's like the best predictor of erectile dysfunction has and continues to be anxiety. Well, anxiety also manifests in the brain, like we can measure that.

We can measure it in questionnaires. We can, you know, so. Yeah. But ultimately, it's just anxiety for the most part. And so that's where we intervene, you know, when we try and help folks with that. And anxiety is something that, like, you can take a pill for, you can talk to a therapist about, and it's like both things.

Yeah. There are different ways to intervene that can be helpful. I think what this conversation is doing to me is it's helping collapse the mind body dualism into one. Sweet. We've solved it. Well, as a, yeah, I mean, as a person who's always been interested in that question, it's like, it's really cool to, yeah, this is like, this is all one thing.

And even half of the questions I've been asking you, I feel like are almost off base because I've been separating them into these two boxes. How much is it one? How much is the other? And this is reminding me like, no, this is one organism that we can talk about in multiple ways. But this distinction is somewhat of a false one. No, this is why I love psychophysiology. multiple ways, but this distinction is somewhat of a false one. No, this is why I love psychophysiology. We sometimes call it a hub science because it really brings together these different ideas where if you're just psychology and you're just

asking self-report and interviews, blah, blah, blah, that's limited. And you're just a biologist, you're just an anatomist and cutting things up. That's very limited because you don't know the function. So we're trying to get it in the middle and be a hub to bring those sciences together. So what in this field, which is I just learned about today and I'm now so fascinated by, what are the big questions that remain to be answered or what are the frontiers you're the most excited about? What are we just starting to learn about?

I'm very interested in health applications of sex stimulation. So I don't care too much about sexual endpoints, like getting you off more or helping your penis. I mean, that's great if we help with that. But I really want to know, like, how can I use orgasm to help you sleep at night? Or how can I use genital stimulation to improve depression? And so, you know, we're in the vein of those kind of applications. Two of the things we're really interested in are the couples research.

So actually having two people in the lab at the same time who are interacting sexually and understanding what that dynamic is like. And if it looks like porn, which is the model we've been using for decades. And then also trying to understand orgasm physiology. We don't know how orgasm is triggered still. And it seems like that would be useful to know if we're going to potentially use it as a health application. And also just for understanding basic physiology. So some of the questions that are still there about, you know, our basic anatomy and physiology have not been answered, I think. And again, it's a lot of that functional, like, I need to see the orgasm

in action. I need to see not just the first two minutes of arousal, you know, not just afterwards, you know, did you spoon, did you cuddle, did you pillow talk? That's fine. But like what happened in the 15 minutes that the scientist left the room? We need to get in there. Like we need to know what's going on and understand what that process is like. And are there pieces of that we can pick out to use in health applications. And along the way, that's kind of how it happens. It's like, okay, we've got this end goal. We're doing a study on post-orgasmic illness syndrome and we're trying to understand that.

Well, to do that, we- What is post-orgasmic illness syndrome? So these are mostly guys who say they have flu-like symptoms for two to seven days after every time they climax. Wow. Yeah, terrible. Like flu-like, that's bad.

Yeah. So they're knocked out and they have to figure out how sexually active they want to be based on having those kind of problems and symptoms. So in the process of trying to figure out how to study this patient sample, we realized like, oh my gosh, we're going to get inflammatory markers. And this is going to be the first time we've ever gotten inflammatory markers before and after climax. What's an inflammatory marker? one marker. And there are inflammation theories of depression, for example, where some people think major depressive disorder may be due to kind of these inflammation problems broadly throughout the body. And so I said, well, gosh, you know, if that's true, if this continues to be supported for depression, and we know that orgasm affects the same kind of inflammatory markers that we think are causing the depression, we've got a new intervention.

Wow. That's really cool. Right? That's why I keep thinking as much as I hate hitting my head against the brick wall and getting attacked all the time, there's gold in there. There is potential for us to take this so much farther and we just have to fight to be able to do it. What is your, you know, what, what are the prospects for the field getting attacked less, right? And the, the sort of social barriers to doing the research that you were talking about because I'm convinced that this research is valuable to people and that we need

to know as much about this as possible. Yeah, you got me. I mean, look, I was obviously a receptive audience. We invited you on the show. I'm not in here going like, I'm sorry, you study what now? Like, obviously, this is not going to be that interview. Okay, well, I'm sorry for you that that has happened. But how do you, you know, are there, are these barriers going down?

Are you optimistic in that regard? How do we push that along? In our case, the biggest barrier is our size. We're a very tiny field. And so when climate scientists get attacked by groups that have kind of those motivations, they have groups to advocate for them. They have people working on Capitol Hill. They have attorneys that work with them. We have none of that.

Capitol Hill. They have attorneys that work with that. We have none of that. And so I think part of our challenge is to enjoin with some of these groups that have similar issues to what we do, you know, who may be willing to get sullied with our presence, you know, sex researchers and say, like, you know, we've got similar problems here. We're all scientists. We're trying to get our work done. And, you know, we're being stopped in ways that we shouldn't be stopped that are not reasonable. And, you know, how do we work together? And so, there's like a new free speech union that some scientists are joining so that we stop getting deplatformed places. And maybe that's going to be helpful. So, I'm not sure what the magic bullet is, but I think the particular challenge in my field is just our size. We're very small. And we need to be enjoining, I think, with other scientific groups that have similar challenges.

Where can folks go to find out more about, like, where's this research happening if they want to? Where's that study that you talked about that you're really excited about coming out in a couple months? Oh, well, that one, I'm sure it will be making the news rounds at the time. Oh, great. So my website is LibroCenter.com. And so I post things there as they come out. I'm sure the study will be up there. That particular study we're actively recruiting for the post-orgasmic illness syndrome.

If you think you have that, you can come to the website and find out if you want to volunteer in Los Angeles. So that's a good repository to see what we're up to. want to volunteer in Los Angeles. So that's a good repository to see what we're up to. And if for folks, for folks at home going like, man, I got a sex problem and they didn't talk about it specifically. Right. Do you have any, like, how do you think about those things differently? Like, do you, do you, you know, do you have a message for, for folks at home worrying about their, worrying about their parts, worrying about their, worrying about their parts, worrying about their bits, worrying about what goes on at night or in the day, you know? Yeah. I think in general, it's good to keep in mind that, you know, the way people make money off of those kinds of things is by saying there are problems, you know? And so

if you go online, if you go television shows, exactly, they're going to be pushing that direction always because that's how they make their money. You know, it's through patients or if they're coaching or whatever that is. And so it's just being a critical consumer of information, you know, and saying like, okay, all I've read here is that this is all bad all the time. Is that really true? You know, and do I have good sources? So, there's a group of American sex educators, the acronym ASECT, A-A-S-E-C-T, gets you to a group of sex therapists and educators who are science-based. And so, they tend to have good information.

Looking for sites that are just, as ever, I think we're dealing with a fake news issue. A lot of bad information. Just thinking, what is it that I'm reading? What are the sources? Who's contributing to this? And being sure you don't just watch that one news channel. Well, thank you so much for coming in, Nicole. This has been a really awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to Nicole Prowsey for being on the show. I had a blast in that conversation and I really hope you did too. That is it forsey for being on this show. I had a blast in that conversation, and I really hope you did, too. That is it for us this week on Factually.

I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Brett Morris, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK, for our theme song. And, hey, you can hit me up on Twitter or anywhere else. You have an at symbol, at Adam Conover. Check out my website for my mailing list and tour dates at adamconover.net. And until then, I'll see you next week on Factually. Thanks so much for listening.