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Welcome to Sex Afflictions and Porn Addictions. I am your host, Craig Perra from themindfulhabit.com. I’m the founder of The Mindful Habit, a world-class at home program for men struggling with sex and porn addiction and their partners. I’m a former addict whose shame brought me to the lowest of lows and near suicide. I almost lost my family, literally got fired from two jobs, and since I’ve picked up the pieces and changed my life, I’ve personally worked and inspired over 1,000 men and their wives from 27 countries. The Mindful Habit has been translated into Spanish. We train therapists. I’ve appeared on the Steve Harvey Show, the Katie Couric Show, and Lifetime TV. This is a science-based structured path to create healthy sexuality and a great life. Welcome.

Today we are going to talk about porn, specifically Pornhub and specifically the recent New York Times article on it. And let me just quote from the article. “Pornhub is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynistic content and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.” But this is not a podcast about Pornhub, brother. This is a podcast about you. This is a podcast about me. Is anyone shocked? Is anyone surprised by this revelation? Kind of wondered why it took so long. But first it’s rare that I cry getting ready for a podcast. This was one of those times. We are going to be blunt today. We’re always blunt.

We’re going to talk about some very difficult and potentially trauma triggering topics, rape, child sexual abuse. And this is going to be very triggering. And I’m worried about the ladies who are listening. And I beg of you to please forgive my bluntness. Please forgive my directness. Because this content is hosted on Pornhub does not mean this is what your man is watching and he’s probably not, but today I am coming off the top ropes with a flying elbow to the face and throwing in your face what you, brother, know to be true. This is going to be an emotional podcast.

First, a moment of levity, a moment of levity. I want to shout out to Eric. Eric recently submitted a Trustpilot testimonial for the self-study program. And I am so, so proud to be changing lives and getting verified and authentic testimonials from people who’ve been through the program. Here’s what he said. “I signed up for the self-paced program and found it very manageable and with a clear structure.” Thank you. You’re welcome I mean, that’s the point, right? Definitely a point. “As you work through the exercises, you can really see how each piece builds on the next. This program is built on foundation learning.” That’s intentional. Thank you, Eric. The first exercise involved reflecting on your porn use. That’s why I picked this one today. Well, it’s recent too.

And it can be confronting. We are going to confront what you’re watching. I’m editorializing. You get the part that’s him. Listen, here’s what he says. I’ll finish. “But the program is eye-opening. If you’ve struggled with porn use for a long time and have tried multiple options, do this program. But you do have to make the effort to get results.” Thank you for saying that, Eric. My success rate with men who don’t apply themselves is zero. “I let my guard…” Eric tells us, “I let my guard down a few times. I relapsed. I am only now just restarting the program, but it is designed in a way that makes it easy to start over.” And designed in a way to start over because you’re learning skillsets that help you grow and help you evolve and skillsets of which you get better.

Here’s what he said. “Keep at it, be consistent and you will get results. There may be ups and downs, but The Mindful Habit is a great framework to be using.” Thank you, Eric, for taking the time for your feedback. It means an awful lot. Now we got to shift gears. So Pornhub, and I’m going to be really quoting from this incredible article by Nicholas Kristof. Okay. This is an opinion piece for the New York Times. The article is dated December 4th, 2020. Google it. You will find this article. You will also find the article on MasterCard, which has launched an investigation into Pornhub. And I’m going to talk about some resources at the end. But Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery winking face of naughty.

This website bought a billboard in Times Square and it provides snowplows to clear Boston streets. How thoughtful? It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through the COVID-19 shutdowns. This company attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, more than Yahoo, more than Amazon. Pornhub breaks in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. And by the way, by the way, for this company that is alleged to have hosted child sexual abuse and child rape, I was not allowed to advertise on Pornhub because even… There wasn’t blood in my content. There wasn’t child sexual abuse in my content. It was because I was advertising to help people with porn addiction. Fuck you Pornhub.

There’s another side, this one ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th most visited website in the world, but there’s another side. The site is infested with rape video. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos, racist and misogynist content, women being asphyxiated, a search for girls under 18, no space or 14 YO leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are. After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, do you know where her mother found her? Her mother found her on Pornhub, 58 sex videos, sexual assault on a 14-year-old California girl were posted to Pornhub and reported to authorities, not by the company, not by this billion dollar company, but by the classmate who saw the videos.

Pornhub has escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and has escaped responsibilities for profiting from them. See, Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each month according to the New York Times article probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and non-consensual violence. Unlike YouTube though, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from the website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late. The video lives on as it is shared with others, uploaded again and again.

“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a 23-year-old woman named Kelly told the author of this article. “I’m still getting sold,” she said, “Even though I’m five years out of that life.” She’s now studying in university hoping to become a lawyer, but those old videos hang over her. And by the way, guys, we’re not even on the rogue sites. We’re not even on the off the beaten path strides. This is the king. This is the king. This is the major player. This is the company that’s producing technology that’s impacting other areas of online commerce. This is the master. These are the best. This is the biggest. She said, “I might never able to get away from this. I may be 40 with eight kids and there’re people still masturbating to my photos.”

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like, screaming teen, degraded teen, extreme choking. With suggestions for she can’t breathe. Pornhub of course, declined to make executives available on the record. I believe and I hope that there will be a regulatory response to this and there’re some things that you can do to help make that happen. But there’s more. At 14 years old, Serena Fleites, F-L-E-I-T-E-S was an A student in Bakersfield, California. She had never made out with a boy, but in the eighth grade, she developed a crush on an older boy and he asked her to take a naked video of herself.

Parents, come on, we got to pay attention. And I’m not saying this woman’s mother didn’t pay attention. I’m saying that we got to pay attention. She sent it to him. This changed her life. He asked for another, then another, nervous but flattered. Then she starts getting strange looks in school. He had shared the videos with other boys and someone posted them on Pornhub. Her world imploded. People were texting me. If I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom. She was being extorted. Now the boy was suspended. She began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, not without significant effort. She switched schools. Rumors reached the new school the soon the videos were uploaded again.

She began cutting. She tried to kill herself. Didn’t. Woke up three days later in the hospital. Tried to hang herself. Unsuccessful. Her little sister found her and the medics revised her. She downward spiraled. A friend introduced her to meth and opioids and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless. At 16, she advertised herself on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. She thought, and I quote, “I’m not worth anything anymore because everybody has already seen my body.” Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. She’d asked for them to be removed. They’d be uploaded again. One video of her at 14 had 400,000 views.

So today she’s off drugs for a year. I know how hard that is. Unemployed and traumatized. She is living in a car in Bakersfield along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. I’m reading from the article. So that is so in your face, right guys? It’s so like, it’s shocking. I have a 14-year-old kid, daughter, shocking. But here’s the part that’s shaking in my brain. And I’m trying to go back to when porn was like a major part of my life. If I’m being honest, I knew this shit was out there. None of this is a surprise to me. I tried to be a responsible citizen. I wouldn’t purchase something from a company if they were abusing the environment, if they were treating their workers poorly.

But I’d watch porn on Pornhub and think of… I’m picturing this conversation, this open and honest conversation between a father and a daughter. And I can imagine in this conversation, the daughter says, “Dad, do you use this site?” And the answer’s yes, of course he does. Well, how many billions of views per month? “Yeah, I do. No, no, no, no, but I don’t watch the rape videos. I scroll past them. Yucky. I hate that stuff. I don’t watch the extreme teen stuff. That’s repulsive.” That conversation is just so stuck in my head because there’s the rationale that we use to justify, to ignore this sickness, this cancer, this disease that is infecting our society. That is infecting our families, fifth… Divorce lawyers, people who handle divorces say porn is a major contributing factor in over 50% of marriages.

That was in 2009. I think they got their next study coming up. Can you imagine what it must be today? And what I love about that statistic is there’s no bias. You know what I mean? If you go out there, you’ve got the sex positive, doing battle with the sex addiction community and statistics. And some of them are good. Some of them aren’t so good, but that one, there’s no bias there. These are the people just saying, “Hey, this is the issue. This is what’s killing families. This is destroying fathers, taking them away from their wives, women contemplating legal claims, loss of affection because the man is not showing up anymore because we only have so much energy in us like a video game. You want to get to a level. We got a meter, a sexual power meter.

And when that energy is going in an unhealthy direction, it’s not going towards a healthy direction. And science tells us that sexual health equals physical health, mental health, and obviously relationship health. It is critical to direct that energy in a healthy, constructive way. So I want this podcast, I want this podcast to inspire you to action. I want this podcast to give you some information to look, take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself some very important questions. Does this offend me? If it offends me, what am I going to do about it? And I’m going to give you some specific things that you can do about it. I want you and invite you to challenge the rationale, the logic, the internal defense mechanisms that justify this. It’s only porn. It’s only porn.

Now, for those of you who choose to watch porn, and there are people listening to this podcast who say, “I’m not stopping. I’m sex positive, and it’s helping me. And science says it helps me relieve stress.” Okay. That doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. Dr. David Ley wrote a book called Ethical Porn for Dicks where he raises these issues. There’s things that you can do to make sure that you are not watching rape, that you are not watching videos of women and men whose consent has been violated in unspeakable ways. There is actions that you can take.

However, if you are of the place, if you are looking at this and looking at your life, and looking at the intimacy in your life, and looking at the mediocrity, and looking at the malaise, and looking at the underachievement, and you’ve come to a place where you say, “You know what, this childhood hobby, this secret, this holy grail when you were a kid and you found that magazine on the side of a road, this aspect of my life, my porn use is fucking up my life.” If that is you, then I beg you, I hope to inspire you to do something about it because none of the information in this article is shocking. I put a face to it, it put a name to it. We know, we know what we’ve scrolled over. We know what, oh, [inaudible 00:20:30]. We know it’s there. Shame on us. Shame on me. And there’s an opportunity to do better.

And that’s what failure is all about. Don’t get down. Don’t feel bad about yourself. Let this be a call to action. Let this be the moment where you regain control of your powerful, evolutionary sexual energy. Let this be the time where you stop with the rationale. You stop with the fullest justifications and you do something about it. Do not let shame get in the way. Because oh, I mean, dripping in and I am feeling shame from up to here here all the way down. And I’m going to discharge that shame and continue to discharge that shame as I talk about this article and take action. I’m going to be donating to a victim support fund. I’m going to invite you to do the same.

So first, depending on where you’re listening to this or watching this, you may or may not have access to the links. If you do not have access to the links, you can Google, Serena and Child Victims of Pornhub Support Fund. There is a GoFundMe campaign and I’m going to send the links out to everybody who’s on my lists so they have it. But don’t wait for me. Go, go, go, go. Google Serena and Child Victims of Pornhub Support Fund. They are $48,722 raised of a $50,000 goal. We can do better. We can help her. Look at her, look in her eyes. We can help her. So take action. That’s one thing you can do. Number two, the second thing that you can do, sign the petition, traffickinghubpetition.com. Traffickinghubpetition.com. Shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking. Okay.

I hope there is civil liability. I hope there is criminal liability. I hope there is financial ramifications because they had an obligation to do something about it and they did not. And by the way, there’s a simple solution. In order to upload, you have to verify your age. That’s it, simple, simple solution. And Senator Ben Sasse, you can send him a thank you. You can read about what he’s doing. And forget about Democrat. Forget about Republican. Let’s talk human. Okay, this guy is doing something about it. Let me tell you what he’s doing. So Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican has called on the justice department to investigate. PayPal has cut off services for the company. And I believe that Ben Sasse is proposing legislation that requires age verification for upload.

We put a man on the moon, brothers and sisters. We can’t fix this problem. We can’t prevent child rape from being on the most trafficked website almost in the world, making billions of dollars. We can’t solve that problem. Again, fuck you Pornhub. You can, and you chose not to. And you chose not to. So sign the petition, traffickinghubpetition.com, and you can stop watching porn. You can educate yourself. You can read, you can ask yourself, is my life better with it or without it? If it’s better with it, God bless, you do you. You do you. I’m not talking to you. You’re not my client. You’re not the person who… I don’t even know why you’re listening to this podcast. Is it bringing value to your life? Do it responsibly. Do it ethically.

Can’t use Pornhub, not with this shit there. Not with this shit there. And if you choose that you had enough, you had enough and you know that you need help, by the way, everybody needs help breaking this childhood habit. It’s one of the first major lies we’re told to tell. It has been our primary, brothers, numbing, coping and escaping strategy since we were young. There comes a time sometimes in my program where… I have a program where I talk to the partners and these amazing women are trying to heal and trying to move forward. And I get the question, “How could he? How could he?” I respond, “How could he not?” And let me explain, let me explain the origin of our power of our sexual growth and development, growing in secret, growing in shame, being one of the first major lies we’re trained to tell.

Being one of the primary numbing coping and escaping. Being conditioned into your development as a young man how awesome it is and how fun it is, and how exciting it is, and how great it is. And how sex feeds, not just the physical connection, but significance. How could you not? Literally wired into us. And here we are brothers, our relationships on the brink of exploding. Divorces at an all-time high. Porn traffic at an all-time high. Gambling at an all-time high. Drugging at an all-time high. Alcoholism at an all-time high. Mental illness at an all-time high. Get help. Get help. The behavior is the symptom. And so I want to give you a way to get help.

So I have my group coaching program and we have a self-study program. So if you are on a budget and you still want powerful tools, teachings, and techniques to break free, that is my group coaching program. If you go to my website and you click on, if you click on programs and then you click on self-study, that is going to bring you to my self-study program. And it’s more than self-study though. We are literally, we’re going to do a dummy trial run this Thursday, next Thursday. And we’re talking right now. So if anyone’s reading late, we’re December 8th, 2020. We are coming out and closing 2020, that’s, we are adding a webinar call to the self-study program. Right now there’s one. Coach George is running that call.

I’m going to be joining him once a month. And so you’re going to get support. You’re going to have a place to ask questions. You are going to have a place to learn deeper lessons to help you create self-control, help you elevate your EQ, your emotional intelligence. Empower you to create healthy sexuality and build sustainability. The cost of that program is 500 bucks or three monthly payments of $185. We’re going to cut that in half. Until the end of the year, we are going to cut that price in half. And the coupon code for 50% off is the letter F, the letter U, Pornhub. So let me say that again. F, the coupon code to get 50% off my self-study program now with the weekly webinar call is FU Pornhub. The letter F, the letter U, P-O-R-N-H-U-B. That is the coupon code for 50% off my self-study program.

I believe that for some of you, this article, this realization, this point where you are in your lives will represent a transformation. This I hope is the area in your life where you have altered your trajectory, where you no longer are able to keep the reality of what’s also on the site. It may not, but when you watch it, but you can’t shop in a store like that. Can you go into Target and buy the big bag of MnMs and get your Ben and Jerry’s ice cream as you walk past the Ray pile? No, you cannot. You cannot. Think long and hard about your decisions. And remember brother, sexual health has been scientifically linked to a good physical health, a good emotional health and relationship health. Thank you, captain obvious.

Thank you captain obvious, but sometimes it helps to state the obvious because when your life is falling apart and you’re not sure why, well, you’re listening to this podcast. So you probably have a pretty good idea why. I hope this inspires you to honor, respect, and nurture your powerful sexual energy. It is a force that must be curated. That must be nurtured. That must be directed. And when it’s going over there, it’s not going where it should be. So take action. Embrace your power of choice. Feed the right wolf inside you. Go to themindfulhabit.com. Click on the self-study program. Use the coupon code FU Pornhub, and you get 30 days to try it out and take action so you can be your best self. Thank you so much for listening. See you next week. Bye everybody.