“All too often when men talk about sex,
they speak in proverbial locker-room talk
or dirty jokes.
And that lack of healthy conversation
becomes an embodied ache or frustration
we carry within our sexuality.”
~ Sam Jolman
Therapist and author Sam Jolman weaves into The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality golden cords of compassion, curiosity, and kindness for all.
“…we all experience harm to our sexuality.
And these stories are part of why
you got rid of your innocent awe,
why you’ve disowned and exiled the lover within.”
Reading The Sex Talk You Never Got - an act of self-compassion
“Your sexuality as a man was meant to drive you
to awe and gratitude.”
For many who struggle with porn, rebuilding healthy sexuality and intimacy in your relationship might feel like an impossibility. You’ve lost – or never experienced – your sexuality with wonder and awe.
“Our hearts and our sexuality have become disconnected. Disassociated. Forsaken. We’ve lost our awe and wonder and innocence toward life, beauty,
and sexuality,
and exchanged them for
a masculinity that is
moveable as stone.”
If rebuilding healthy sexuality and recovering intimacy matters to you, reading this book is the next best thing to visiting a skilled and compassionate sex therapist.
Curiosity: discovering the lover you were meant to be
“We are made to love.
That is our whole life’s North Star.”
Sex and true love are often divorced from each other, most evident in hook-up culture. Most were never taught that sex is learning how to give to one another – how to be a good lover.
“A single isolated sex talk
isn’t ever enough…
Often such talks amounted to little more than a
shoddy anatomy lesson…
For some men,
it became a moralistic lesson on lust or purity
so quickly that
there was no room
to anticipate
the goodness of sexuality.
There was no blessing.”
Why our view of sex changes everything
“If romance is the adventure of love, then sex is love at play.”
Jolman flips self-gratification, a pornified sexual script, on its head. He describes sex as a reverent act of playful knowing and giving.
“We have a billion bad associations between sex and play, which brings us to everything Hugh Hefner and Playboy got wrong…Hefner’s entire empire focused on male gratification at the expense of women. He inhibited millions of men from developing a true hearted lover who knew well how to play at sex.”
“Sex as play is a reverent act. It cannot be flippant or born of arrogance. It respects and honors and reveres the other person. This is where a deep knowledge of your partner is so essential. You can hear this in the way the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament describe sex as ‘knowing’ each other.”
“Genuine consent asks us to care about
the desires of our partner,
not just find the limits
of what they’re willing to give in to…
…‘What is the most loving way to have sex?’ should be the question we ask ourselves and our partner.”
The million dollar question that begs for an answer
“Evil’s greatest hope, to this day, is for all our stories of sexuality to end in shame… Evil wants to write the scripts of your arousal.”
“When shame and fear attack the lover within each of us, we become numb, unable to love anyone well, blind to the beautiful, the true, and the good. We become disconnected and unwilling to risk for the sake of meaningful relationships.”
“What have you done with the lover within you?
What have you done
with his innocence,
his sensuality,
and his capacity to be awed at beauty?”
Compassion: recognizing our wounded sexuality
Sam Jolman pleads with parents not to allow “communication black holes.”
Parents should be talking early and often to their children about sex. It’s part of healthy formation, as well as a preventative measure for childhood sexual abuse. Jolman hears far too many sexual abuse stories in his professional experience.
A hidden plague – sexual abuse of boys
“Most often men carry stories of sexual harm as ‘the weird thing that happened that one time.’ Weird seems to be the code word…”
An additional tragedy of childhood sexual abuse is that it’s rarely reported, but even more so among men, Jolman notes sadly:
“In one study of adults with documented cases of childhood sexual abuse only 16% of men affirmed that the abuse happened, compared to 64% of women… Something keeps men silent. Many men carry the shrapnel of sexual harm within their bodies and hearts.”
Added to this, by the time boys are 8 or 9, many of them have already been exposed to online porn.
How porn kills love
“Porn is where the lover goes to die.”
“Porn always tells a story. It always has a script…No matter where pornography begins, it almost always ends with violation and degradation. What a man finds when he first searches is never the only thing he gets.”
“A pornified culture enslaves women and leaves men with a very emaciated sense of beauty.”
Why men often turn to porn: self-soothing or power
“We mistakenly think a man turns to lust or porn because he’s overflowing with sexual desire. And then in a moment of weakness or temptation he gives in. We think his so-called sex drive led him to lust.
But we rarely stop to think about what preceded the arousal in his body. I believe nearly every pornography and masturbation ritual is, first and foremost, an attempt at soothing a dysregulated, anxious nervous system.”
Then there’s the power and control aspect of porn use. Jolman recounts how two years into his marriage he was regularly seeing a therapist. One day, with kind eyes, his therapist gently said, “You are a misogynist!”
Shocked, Jolman took a deep inner look at how he was treating his wife, how he only gave affection when he desired it himself.
“The issue is not too much sexuality, but too little heart.
We withdraw the part of us most capable of awe.”
For others, lust takes the driver’s seat.
“…lust is not simply an attempt to slake our sexual thirst. Lust is a form of contempt, driven by anger as much as anything else. It’s a way to get power when we feel powerless.”
Kindness: renewing hope for your relationships
Jolman also describes his searing shame at getting caught using online porn at age 19 by his mom and his sister, “I might as well have just walked naked on stage to a gasping and wide-eyed and packed arena.”
Getting caught “acting out” could be the best thing that ever happened to you.
“Even if you have to catch yourself, getting caught can save your sanity. It can end the double life you’ve been hiding for so long…here’s your chance to no longer be a split personality, two people coexisting inside your skin.
There will finally be the chance of a true return to peace and wholeness and reality, something never even in the realm of possibility until the truth comes out.”
Choosing kindness instead of self-contempt is a red pill or blue pill choice.
“…There are only two ways out of shame. Not much is binary in life, but this one is absolutely blue pill or red pill.”
“If you don’t want to handle your sexual shame with contempt, you must take a risk on love.
Contempt or kindness. That’s it.”
Jolman then goes on to detail rebuilding healthy masculine sexuality in his final chapter, “The Aroused Life”.
Rebuilding healthy sexuality matters to you and those you love.
“At this point in the story of the world, if you live an embodied, reverent, alive sexuality as a man, you will be radical.
You will find a bazillion moments
to change the tide in our world
away from sex as power,
or sex as escape
or sex as irreverent –
and toward sex as love.
We have so few of these stories being told in our culture.”
In a shocking conclusion, Sam Jolman reveals he only recently learned his mother’s story of sexual shame.
As a 15 year old runaway she was sex-trafficked across state lines for several weeks.
She and her friend made a daring escape, aided by a kind trucker, only to bury her sexual shame for most of her life. After her return to her family and community, tragically, no justice was served. There was secrecy and shame for the horrific crime and trauma she experienced.
Jolman says his mom’s sex traffickers versus her rescuer highlight two polar extremes of sexual legacy: evil, twisted sexuality, and a trucker who was “a good man in the right spot.” He shares her story with her permission to help others.
Unknowingly, his mom’s secret story of sexual shame affected both of their stories for years. By sending him to counseling at age 19, after discovering his online porn habit, Jolman’s mom helped him break the cycle of sexual shame. Now Jolman has been helping men start rebuilding healthy sexuality for 20 years.
What kind of sexual legacy will you leave? Will you help change the tide of sexual harm and evil?
Conclusion
Pastors, youth workers, and anyone involved in counseling should consider this a must-read. Compassion fatigue is surely a constant challenge in our pornified culture.
After all, in this hard-nosed, shriveled world, who doesn’t want to be offered a cup of cold water with kind eyes and an understanding, listening ear? Even if you must tell someone they are behaving like a misogynist, you’ll be better equipped to compassionately offer hope for change.
Also, read or gift this book as an act of kindness for yourself or someone you care about – a husband, boyfriend, or even an accountability partner.
The Sex Talk You Never Got will infuse them with new perspectives and bucket loads of hope. You can follow and learn more from Sam Jolman on Instagram.
