Audio only:
In this episode Trent discusses how to help female members of the Body of Christ overcome a sin 60% of women engaged in last month.
Transcription:
Trent:
It’s easy for people to talk about toxic masculinity and where men need to man up in the church, but what about women? What do they need to do? In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about a widespread female sin that almost everyone ignores and what we as a church need to do to help our sisters in Christ. So what is that sin? It’s cornography, corn, adult, explicit materials. Look, I can’t say the P word because I really want this episode to reach as many people as possible. And YouTube’s algorithm is really persnickety about that word and throttles videos that mention it. So you’re going to hear a lot about corn in today’s episode. Thogh, ironically, literal corn is also bad for you, but I’ll save that for a future episode. And big thanks to Matt Fradd, author of The Korn Myth and our anonymous female panel for reviewing today’s episode.
First, we need to bust the myth that only men consume corn. According to a 2018 study, 91% of men and 60% of women consumed explicit materials in the previous month. And some of the most popular books for women selling hundreds of millions of copies and appearing in thousands of popular TikTok videos are explicit, even though people try to euphemize them as just being spicy or smut. So in today’s episode, we’ll talk about the unique ways corn affects women, how through God’s grace, women can overcome this sin, and how we as a church can help our sisters in Christ. And of course, disclaimer, this episode deals with mature content, so be advised if this topic may be a stumbling block for you. Now, the first way we can help people overcome this sin is by acknowledging the problem and rejecting stereotypes that keep people hooked on corn.
For example, some men consume explicit media because they buy into the stereotype that all men do this, which is not true. Likewise, some women get stuck in this habit because they’re ashamed to tell anyone about it, since they think women do not struggle with this problem, which also isn’t true. Across the world, women make up 30% of the hub’s audience, one of the largest corn sites in the world, with some countries being as high as 40 or even 50%. This also shows the problem for women isn’t just confined to so- called romance novels, which is a term, by the way, we shouldn’t consistently use because euphemisms are one of the devil’s favorite tools to deceive us. Like how we call all of this stuff adult content when adults should be known for their virtue. But for this episode, the terms make for a nice reprieve from constantly shucking corn.
Now, the Barnard Group published a study showing the top five reasons men and women consume adult media, and the majority reason for both was personal arousal, no surprise there. But the other reasons are interesting. The most common secondary reasons for men were saying it’s fun and to escape boredom. But for women, it’s curiosity and assisting arousal through ideas for intimate behaviors or as an aid to intimacy. Women’s use of corn tends to be rooted in building emotional connections, which is why almost all so- called romance novels are written for women. The written word allows women to make sexual fantasies more intimate, private, prolonged, and have a greater emotional connection to what excites them. And this stems from women’s sexuality being more rooted in emotional connection in general. You can see this in the fact that men are way more likely than women to have relations with a total stranger.
In 1978 and 1982, researchers conducted a study where a man and a woman would ask strangers on a college campus three questions. “Would you go out tonight? Will you come over to my apartment and would you go to bed with me? “In both studies, about half of the men and half the women were interested in going out on a date. But while about 70% of the men were interested in going to bed, none of the women were interested in going to bed in the study, and only one study showed 6% of women saying they would go to the apartment. The whatever podcast recreated this experiment with a man asking 100 women to have sex and not a single one of them said yes. This is kind of random, but I was just wondering if either of you would be interested in having sex with me.
But when a woman asked 100 men to have sex, 30% of the men said yes, and many were ready to seal the deal at that very moment. Do
CLIP:
You want to have sex to me, please?
Trent:
Like right now?
CLIP:
Let’s go. Sure. I have nothing to do. Yes? Yeah. Let’s do it. Yeah? Let’s go. Right now? Yes. Of course. Let’s go.
Trent:
And many of the men who said no only said no because they have a girlfriend. And I suspect more of them would have said yes, but were worried that the offer seemed too good to be true and they would get scammed, killed, or arrested. That doesn’t mean men are just animals who don’t desire emotional connection. One reason modern sites like the one that’s only for fans, hint, hint, have become so popular in spite of free corn being widely available is that it gives the illusion of a personal connection with the adult content creator. But emotional connection is a stronger element to women’s fantasies than for men’s. For example, while male adult videos might have a cliche plot about a wife committing adultery with the male man, female novels will go into detail about things men never think about, like, why did the male man choose her over the other women on the block or what broke down in her marriage to drive her to this act?
Books like The 50 Grades of Shade Trilogy are popular among women because the medium of writing allows for greater emotional connection with characters engaging in arousing sex acts. This graph on popular genres shows that so- called romance fiction is the most popular set of books for women and the least popular for men. So that’s the problem, but how do we move towards a solution? The most important truth I would share with a woman who struggles with these materials is the same truth I would share with a man who has the same struggle. God loves you and he wants you to rejoice in the gift of your sexuality. No matter how many times you fail at rejecting this sin, never give up because God would never give up on you. God loves you and he wants you to be happy and corn will not help you achieve true happiness, literal or euphemistic, to be honest.
However, since men and women’s sexuality are not identical, explicit materials attack men and women in different ways. For example, men have a good natural desire to want to pursue and woo a woman they love. Through the marital act, they direct their strength and competence towards being a full gift of self their wife joyously receives. The beauty of men is their strength put into action. In John and Stacy Eldridge’s book Captivating, he talks about how he went to a museum with his wife and notice there are barely any paintings of nude men lying in bed, but there are many, many historical paintings of nude women lying in bed. He explains this fact the following way. For one thing, men look ridiculous lying on a bed buck naked, half covered with a sheet. It doesn’t fit the essence of masculinity. Something in you wants to say, “Get up already and get a job, cut the grass, get to work.” For Adam has captured best in motion, doing something.
His essence is strength and action. Women are attracted to men who exhibit competence and their resilience is exhibited in what they do. Studies have found that women in all cultures, even wealthy women, prefer men who make more money than they do. This is why women aren’t attracted to men wearing Speedos in the same way men are attracted to women wearing bikinis. For most women, a man becomes more attractive when he puts on more clothes and is wearing something like a three-piece suit rather than a Skimpy Speedo or a mankini. But in adult content, strength and action is corrupted, so the competence itself is sexualized. Arousal centers on extracting pleasure from a woman instead of being a gift to her. That’s why videos for men focus on male pleasure and usually involve demeaning women through acts of violence, humiliation with bodily fluids, et cetera. Now, when it comes to women, they have a good and natural desire to want to be the object of a romantic chase, to be pursued and wooed.
A woman has a desire to be so captivating and beautiful that she is able to receive a worthy man’s strength and power. That’s why love triangles where multiple male characters fight over a captivating female protagonist are so common in young adult fiction marketed to women. Think of Gail and Peta’s rivalry for catniss in the Hunger Games or the Love Triangles in Jane Austin’s works like Pride and Prejudice and Emma. But in so- called romance novels especially, the good and natural female desire to be pursued by a man who makes a gift of his masculine competence that’s corrupted. These novels for women usually center on a dangerous man dominating sometimes violently a woman who is initially opposed to him or even an enemy. That man might be a pirate, champion, rogue, or some other dashing Fabio-like man whose only flaw is that he can’t taste real butter.
I can’t believe it’s not butter. I can’t believe it’s not butter. The taste you love without the cholesterol. What a work of art. Well, at least if you’re a woman putting on shoulder pads in 1988, but the tropes still exist today. Novels called Bodice Rippers are set in lavish historical periods like the Middle Ages or Old West and climax, pun intended, in a scene where the woman initially rebuffs the male protagonist until he rips her clothes off and she submits to his advances. Women also gravitate towards stories that have beauty in the beast archetypes where the woman conquers a bad boy, be he an aloof businessman or a literal monster and uses her feminine strength to civilize him and make him a tamed monster that is competent but not erratic. Those are the best protectors. Though because of animation issues in the 1991 film, I think the Prince looked better as the beast, frankly.
And this is a good desire that God gave women. Author Brad Wilcox says that marriage is good for society and good for men because women civilize men when they are united to them in matrimony. This explains why married men engage in less antisocial behavior, work harder, make more money, and in general, are happier than unmarried men. But adult material for women corrupts this good desire in women, and it focuses on the arousing elements of male power. Just as adult material for men corrupts a man’s good desire to woo a woman and focuses on the arousing elements of the female form. This happens in books that glorify women being excited by navigating dangerous kinds of male power, be it the bondage elements in 50 shades of gray or literal monster stories like one popular book that focuses on a millennial woman getting a job pleasuring minotars to pay off her student debt.
Yes, that is a real book with tens of thousands of reviews. And when I first came across it, this literally was my response. What the hell is even that? And if you want to learn more about how this is infected contemporary women’s literature, Hillary at Second Story has a great video I’ll link to below on what she calls the absolute degeneracy of modern female writing. She points out that these books aren’t harmless. They easily become gateway drugs for women to be addicted to more perverted fantasies.
CLIP:
A quick perusal of the book recommendation section of the romance book, subreddit will destroy any remaining illusions you might have had that these books are about anything other than sexual arousal. Just take a moment and look at some of these. Can you honestly say that this attitude towards women’s fiction has to do with anything other than sex? I spent a little time while I was researching this subject, talking to women and reading the accounts of women who were struggling with the addiction to hardcore content. A solid 90 to 95% of them started with erotic fiction or smut, as they often called it, and fan fiction. A few stated that they didn’t really ever get into videos often because videos couldn’t feed their precise needs. Several mentioned that they had quit the video content only to fall back on erotic fiction and had happily arrived at the realization that there was functionally no difference between the two.
I read an account from one woman who noted that she preferred written smut because within books and fan fiction, she was able to find things that would have been illegal in video form. So that’s nice.
Trent:
As Hillary notes, the same thing happens to men who consume adult material and require more violent, more extreme material to get the same level of initial arousal. And to be fair, it’s not just women who are into monster corn. Men’s good desire to pursue women is corrupted in animated pornography that features monsters violating women with their appendages, which is one of the most popular search terms on the hub. But that doesn’t mean that less extreme forms of adult media are okay. The catechism of the Catholic Church says this sin, quote, “Consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other.” So even if the videos or books are about a monogamous married couple, if they are created with the purpose to arouse, then they are evil.
Now, there will be borderline cases where an artist is just trying to communicate the beauty of marital love in a true romance story or the beauty of the human form in authentic visual art, and it might become arousing for some viewers. But as Justice Potter Stewart said of adult material, “I know it when I see it. ” So while married couples engaging in tasteful fantasy may be permissible, the problem arises when arousal is sought for its own sake outside the marital act, or if you think that corn will spice up your married life when it actually robs the act of its sacred intimacy. Christians also need to guard against falling into stereotypes where we finger wag the men and just coddle women. We need to equally admonish men and women if either thinks that adult media is harmless, especially women if they think something in the written form couldn’t be that bad.
But we also need to graciously offer healing to both men and women who are probably scarred by adult media when they were children. When it comes to women, they should recognize that despite disordered evil feminist ideologies, God made women for submission to a husband who should love them as Christ loves the church. That’s why women have a natural excitement to give themselves over to a man who orders his sexual power to become one flesh with them. Both men and women who experience strong sexual desires outside of marriage should practice recognizing it, valuing it, and redirecting those desires. In many cases, what a person desires in explicit media are morally neutral things like elevated heart rate, sense of danger, exertion of physical force and breaking tension, things that can be found in other good things like vigorous exercise. But it’s not just about finding substitutes for sex because many married people struggle with this sin.
In some cases, this may be due to sexual frustration in marriage, which is something the church cannot ignore. St. Paul certainly didn’t ignore it when he gave this advice to the Corinthians. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise, the wife to her husband, for the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another, except perhaps by agreement for a season that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again, less Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. Sexual frustration within marriage never justifies sins like seeking arousal outside the marital act through self-pleasure or adultery. However, we should seek to understand the roots of this frustration and help married couples experience the fullness of marital bliss that God intended.
Before he was Pope, John Paul II wrote a book called Love and Responsibility, which discusses these themes. He even writes the following. “It is necessary to insist that intercourse must not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in one of the partners, i.e. The man alone, but that climmax must be reached in harmony, not at the expense of one partner, but with both partners fully involved. When we look at online adult media consumption among women, it’s striking how different it is to men’s use of that media. Traditionally, the most commonly searched term for women is lesbian, and the numbers show that many women with opposite sex attractions prefer to watch two women engage in sodomy than to watch a man and a woman engage in sexual acts. But why is that? I suspect it’s because men identify with the active participant in these acts.
I want to do what he is doing, they think. But women identify with a passive participant in these acts. “I want that done to me, ” they think. And in materials created for men, the sex acts are harmful to women since they’re only men to pleasure men and boost their egos. Matt Frad’s book, The Corn Myth, not the real title, but you’ll know where to find it, documents how women in corn fake excitement and suffer awful injuries, including things like parts of their anus falling out of their bodies to promote these fantasies through unrealistic sex acts. That’s why I appreciate the catechism of the Catholic Church says these materials immerse all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. That’s why many women who are attracted to men consume lesbian adult content. This genre focuses on female pleasure and usually doesn’t promote female degradation.
And citing the statistics from the Barna group I referenced earlier, women who view this material may be genuinely curious about how their bodies achieve sexual pleasure, and so they resort to corn as an unfortunate source of education on the subject. So I’d recommend for women struggling with this vice to seek many of the same resources men used to overcome it. First, get rid of the near occasions of sin. Delete the web browser on your phone or get a dumb phone. At the very least, don’t sleep with a smartphone next to you. Second, install accountability software when you do have to be on the internet so that your internet history is sent to a friend who can intervene if they see you are visiting inappropriate sites. You can get this through software like Covenant Eyes. When it comes to finding an accountability partner, this can be difficult because as a church, we’ve normalized men finding strength through the bonds of male friendship to overcome this sin, but we haven’t done the same for women and that needs to change.
You should also consider seeing a licensed Catholic therapist, especially one who focuses on marriage and sexuality to help with issues related to sexual desire or sexual frustration, especially in marriage. It’s important to cultivate healthy ways to learn about our sexuality so we don’t resort to adult materials out of boredom or unhealthy curiosity. If you like a good book to start on the subject, I recommend Holy Sex by therapist Greg Popchick. Therapy may also be helpful in navigating past trauma that manifests in the desire to view explicit content. According to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, one in five girls and one in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse, and 20% of adult females and five to 10% of adult males recall a childhood assault or abuse incident. For good resources on overcoming corn addiction, I recommend Matt and Cameron Frad’s book Delivered, which contains testimonies from men and women who struggle with this sin.
For women in particular, check out the free ebook, New Fruit that I’ll link to below and the resources at Magdala Ministries, which I’ll also link to below. And for all other corn related problems, see the Corn Free Cookbook and Dr. Scholl’s Corn Remover available online. Finally, there’s an issue of modesty that needs to be addressed. When women hear men give a testimony about struggling with this sin, they aren’t likely to be tempted to fantasize about the man engaging in that act, since it lacks many of the elements we discussed earlier of what excites women. However, if a woman shares about her struggles and especially struggles with self-pleasure, even if she’s not explicit in her language, that can be a stumbling block for men. And so modesty would mean not sharing this testimony in a situation men cannot avoid or catches them off guard. However, this kind of testimony is still important and it should be shared in venues and platforms geared towards women.
Even if men may encounter it, there should just be a disclaimer about what’s going to be discussed. On the other hand, I’ve heard some men say that women shouldn’t even say the word corn in public because that tempts men, which is like saying that women need to wear burkas because women’s bodies always tempt men. Layla Miller and I wrote a great book on teaching moral issues to kids called Made This Way, and it would be such a disservice if a gifted woman like Layla didn’t share her wisdom on this particular evil because of an arbitrary rule about female language. In fact, I highly recommend the advice Layla gives in our book made this way for explaining this sin to little children in case they stumble upon it and explaining it to older kids who may be ensnared by it. And I love how Layla discusses the issue because some women can be grading when they talk to men about adult content, but that doesn’t take away from the good ways that women can exhort men on this issue.
After all, there are pigheaded ways that men can tell women to not have abortions, like by saying, “Well, pregnancy isn’t that hard,” but that doesn’t take away from the gracious ways that men exhort women to not commit the sin of abortion. And the same is true for women who use public platforms to exhort men to not consume adult content. But honestly, what would help is if we stop saying men should reject this and instead said, “People should reject this, ” because the numbers show this is still a huge struggle for women. Instead of setting men and women against each other, we need to unite them together to carry each other’s burdens, as Galatians six: two says, “So we can help one another hold fast to the gift of eternal life in Christ.” Thank you for watching, and if you like to meet other like- minded Catholics who want to spread the gospel and liberate people from modern evils, then register today for our April 11th conference in Dallas.
Over half the available tickets have already been sold, so get yours today at conferenceofttrent.com. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.