Why Consent Is So Hard (Sar Surmick)

Explicit content warning

09/10/22 • 31 min

If we know what consent is and how to do it, why is it so hard for so many? Does what I think consent is match what you think consent is? If not, why not? How does this impact how we negotiate our agreements, and how can we get a little better? Marriage and family counsellor Sar Surmick joins us today to chat about how his time leading the Consent Academy and now teaching for them impacts those questions. Let’s see what answers Sar has for us here on Intimate Interactions.

Previous Episode

What Is Compulsive Porn Use (Matt Sinkovitz)

Matt Sinkovitz overcame a 20+ year long compulsive relationship with porn, and helps similar men do the same through his online Facebook support community, ‘Porn to Purpose’, and the ‘90-Day Liberation Boot Camp’, as well as the ‘7-Day Porn Abstinence Challenge’. First, Matt’s a really nice guy. I enjoyed our talks even though I’m strictly evidence based and Matt is far more experiential in how he approaches helping.

According to a paper published in the Archive of Sexual Behaviour (JIF 3.458) by Zimmer and Imhoff published in 2020 called Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality, there is a “lack of evidence for negative health effects of masturbation” end quote where they suggest these stem from “perceived problems with pornography” end quote as well as notion these perceived problems “[stem] from a psychological and behavioral addiction” end quote where the word addiction is used in quotation marks in the paper.

Here’s the crux: the same paper goes on to say “higher abstinence motivation was related to a higher perceived impact of masturbation, conservatism, and religiosity, and to lower trust in science.” end quote Again, that was Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality published by Zimmer and Imhoff in the Archive of Sexual Behaviour in 2020. Link to the article in the show notes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7145784/

That basically summarises my perspective on it. Addiction in quotations where higher abstinence motivation is related to higher perceived impact of masturbation, related to conservatism, related to religiosity, and related to lower trust in science. The biggest argument they seem to struggle with is whether or not abstinence in men is healthy. This depends on a lot including the length of abstinence, and I’m not a doctor. However I did look up a paper.

In “Sexual factors and prostate cancer” by Giles et al. published in the British Journal of Urology (JIF 5.588), men under 70 at diagnosis with prostate cancer as well as aged matched control subjects who did not have prostate cancer were asked about their masturbation habits each decade of their life. “There was no association of prostate cancer with the number of sexual partners or with the maximum number of ejaculations in 24 hours. There was a negative trend (P < 0.01) for the association between risk and number of ejaculations in the third decade, independent of those in the fourth and fifth. Men who averaged five or more ejaculations weekly in their 20s had an odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of 0.66 (0.49-0.87) compared to those who ejaculated less often.” https://bjui-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1464-410X.2003.04319.x

Those types of studies provide moderately strong evidence that if you get off at least five times a week in your 20s already, you may be the kind of person who is less likely to get prostate cancer than those who got off less than that during their 20s. It makes no claims about masturbation in one’s 30s or 40s. All it all it seems prudent to ejaculate regularly if you have a penis and are in your 20s.

Next Episode

Support Groups for Compulsive Porn Use (Matt Sinkovitz)

Last session with Matt Sinkovitz, we talked about his story and I gave some examples from literature about my position around pornography abstinence. Since I did my degree in molecular genetics and not sex research, I first looked up journal impact factors which is how you can tell how important a given scientific publication is. The average journal is below 1, a good journal is anything over 3 but it depends on the discipline, how popular it is, how many journals there are, etcetera. And the gold standard for excellence is anything over 10.

As a brief recap, I cited the Archive of Sexual Behaviour (JIF 3.458) where Zimmer and Imhoff in 2020 wrote this article, Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality. It states a “lack of evidence for negative health effects of masturbation” stemming from “perceived problems with pornography” and “from a psychological and behavioural addiction” where addiction is in quotation marks. It stresses that “higher abstinence motivation was related to a higher perceived impact of masturbation, conservatism, and religiosity, and to lower trust in science.”

I also looked up relationship quality and pornography use. Here’s what I found. According to the paper “Is the Link Between Pornography Use and Relational Happiness Really More About Masturbation? Results From Two National Surveys”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2018.1556772 (2019)

They say quote “Numerous studies have observed a persistent and most often negative association between pornography use and romantic relationship quality.” It goes on to say quote “Controls are included for sex frequency and satisfaction, depressive symptoms, and other relevant correlates. Results from both the 2012 New Family Structures Study (NFSS; N = 1,977) and the 2014 Relationships in America survey (RIA; Ng = 10,106) show that masturbation is negatively associated with relational happiness for men and women, while pornography use is either unassociated or becomes unassociated with relational happiness once masturbation is included. Indeed, evidence points to a slight positive association between pornography use and relational happiness once masturbation and gender differences are accounted for...”

Further, pornography use definitely doesn’t seem to be a problem in women according to “Effects of Pornography Use and Demographic Parameters on Sexual Response during Masturbation and Partnered Sex in Women” published in the International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health (impact factor 3.39) https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/9/3130

So just because someone has a psychological compulsion to drink water or to exercise too much doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do those things. In fact people have literally died drinking too much water - something called water intoxication. Tragic link in the show notes. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/drank-too-much-water-woman-dies/article1069137/

However if you were a person who had a compulsion to drink water, you’d probably want a support group for that, and that’s what Matt Sinkovitz does - not water intoxication but pornography compulsion and pornography abstinence.

Quick sidebar again: I didn’t want to throw him off as this was the second session that we recorded during our first ever chat. As a result, I didn’t correct him when he used he/him pronouns for me and it was weird but not bad. He was great afterwards when I mentioned it to him, and for the record he seems super nice. In fact I left in the conversation at the end of the episode because it felt wholesome and I thought you’d appreciate it.