“The Sex Talk You Never Got” with Sam Jolman
Do you remember “the talk?” Maybe you never had one… or wish yours had gone differently.
This week, we’re pleased to talk to friend, therapist, writer, and NFTC alumni Sam Jolman, MA, LPC, about his new book, “The Sex Talk You Never Got,” which was just released this week.
In our sex-saturated world, it might seem surprising that men need more talk about sex. But the reality is that sexuality is one of the most neglected aspects of men’s lives. From the woefully inadequate sex talks many young men receive from parents (little more than an anatomy lesson or a purity lecture, if anything at all) to cultural messages that unhelpfully weave both shame and permissiveness into men’s understanding of their own sexuality and masculinity, too many boys and men experience sexual desire as an area of struggle, confusion, and brokenness.
In this new book, Sam helps men reconnect their God-given sexuality with innocence, awe, and joy, and shows readers how to celebrate–instead of struggle against–the gift of sexual desire.
“The Sex Talk You Never Got” by Sam Jolman was just released on June 11, and is available wherever books are sold.
Please note that this episode contains discussions of sex, and mentions sensitive topics like sexual assault, rape, and misogyny. Listener discretion is advised.
About Our Guest:
Sam Jolman (MA LPC) is a trauma therapist with over twenty years of experience specializing in men’s issues and sexual trauma recovery. Being a therapist has given him a front row seat to hear hundreds of men and women share their stories. His writing flows out of this unique opportunity to help people know and heal their stories, and find greater sexual wholeness and aliveness. He received his master’s in counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and was further trained in Narrative Focused Trauma Care through the Allender Center at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Sam lives in Colorado with his wife and three sons. Together they enjoy exploring the best camping spots in Colorado in a pop-up camper. Sam goes to therapy, loves fly fishing, and can often be found trying to catch his breath on the floor of his local CrossFit gym.
Read more from Sam at his website, on Substack, or your favorite social media.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: Sex. Oh my. Yep. That’s where we’re going.
Rachael: What an entry. What an entry, Dan,
Dan: Should we say trigger warning. Or if you’ve got young children underfoot, send them, I don’t know, to the moon. But wherever you are, know that when we step into directly the category of sexuality, it just brings so much to the surface. And we have the privilege today, Rachael, to be with a dear friend, amazing human being, Sam Jolman. Sam, welcome, welcome, welcome.
Sam: Thank you. Thank you Dan and Rachael. It’s so good to see you again.
Dan: Well, we’ve got the incredible pleasure to be with you and indeed the pleasure of talking about sexuality. But you also have a glorious new book, arriving in the world called “The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality”. Oh, let’s talk about the sex talk we never got. Mine was just beyond horrible. And yet the reality is this is like everything I would have hoped that I would have heard. But I can also say it’s also what I wish I had known to offer my son and my daughters. So this is just, I am so thrilled to have you and so thrilled this book is in the world. Maybe for those of us who received something so inadequate at best said, inadequate, it is an opportunity to, in one sense come back to ourselves even if we are as I am in my early seventies. So just to begin, Sam, you talk about the first encounter with sexuality of a friend who invited you to know about sex. It is both hilarious, horrible, heartbreaking. It’s so normal. So just to begin there,
Sam: Yes.
Dan: What was your first encounters?
Sam: Right, so fourth grade elementary school and somebody leaks to some kid on the playground found out that we were about to have the sex talk or the sexual education videos in our elementary school and in my school, they would split the boys and the girls and you would watch the boy video and then the girls would watch the girl video and then you would switch and you would watch the girl video and the boy video. So somehow, and there was a permission slip that went home. So this intel got leaked to some kid on the playground that we were going to have the sex videos and they had a bit of legend in our school. And so it put a hiatus on any kind of conversation other than hushed tones in the corners while I was by the tire swing. And there was a boy Adam that I would walk home from school with on a regular basis. And Adam said, this is a couple weeks before the talk. Do you want to know what sex is? And I was like, he knows? And I was like, yes. Right. To get the secret knowledge ahead of time, be an insider? And so this is exactly obviously what Adam hoped for, that I would be curious and interested in his answer. And so he says to me, okay, ready? Here’s what sex is. A man and woman get naked and they begin to wrestle. And at some point the woman scares the man and he scares her. She scares him so much that he pees and she catches it in her private parts and that’s sex. And I was horrified.
Dan: Me too!
Sam: and baffled. Yes. What? This is crazy. That sounds gross. Weird gymnastically impossible. How does that happen? Every time that he’s not surprised? I was beside myself. With reflection, later, I can say sadly, it reads like a boy that probably learned about sex from pornography. He’s probably interpreting a video he’s seen. I don’t know that about Adam, but there’s a sense that that’s a boy’s version of a pornography scene of some sort.
Dan: Again, you can see why I’ve said there’s a certain hilarity. And yet it is heartbreaking. And I think for many of us, the initial encounter with a parent or another child or older child informing us about sexuality is one of those points of, again, this interplay of awkward, weird. It’s fundamentally not helpful. Rachael, what broadly was your world?
Rachael: Well, I mean, it’s so interesting because reading your story and even talking with Dan in preparation for this conversation, I didn’t remember until just now that the first time I found out about sex was actually at a very similar situation as you. It was like we were getting ready to have the sex talk and someone had found out, the parents had talked to them about it, they got the permission slip. And I was in fourth grade, very similar way, it’s done. And I remember someone saying to me, do you know how babies are made? And being like, yeah, because my parents had told me babies were made from prayer. And I was a very, very spiritual little person. And so I was like, I said to this person, you pray. And they were like, no, a man and a woman sit across from each other and their private parts touch and that’s how babies are made. And so that was also horrifying to me, just trying to imagine that and also perplexing and felt so scary. But then I was also like, so prayer’s not involved at all? What the hell? It was such a loss of innocence. And of course then getting the classes, I was a learner. So I was just very fascinated by bodies. And that all started to make sense to me. But there was something of such a precious loss of innocence that I genuinely believed, not like a stork, but it was just like you pray and then you have a baby. And it just felt very safe and godly. And now I don’t know what to do with this whole situation.
Dan: So Sam, why is this so screwed up? Not only the initial entry into conversations, but again, the awkwardness, the strangeness, the inability to be able to thoughtfully, prayerfully kindly engage young souls with their body and in the process of truly what love making means?
Sam: Yeah, well, I think it begins with there are certain topics you can talk about in a sort of disconnected way. I don’t know, rock strata of the Rocky mountains or something. It’s largely unemotional, at least for most of us, or migration patterns of geese or something, right? It’s just sort of blah, blah. But sex is not something you can talk about in a disembodied way. I so firmly believe when you talk about sex, you bring your body to the conversation. You can’t help but bring your body to the conversation. So you imagine where the story goes from there, as I write in the book, is I brought that question home to my mom of mom, and I don’t remember the car ride home or that conversation, but I do know that she didn’t answer my question right away. Maybe it was something like wait for the video or something, let’s say. But what happened next was we were at doing a play date at a friend’s house, one of her friend’s houses, and she called me into the kitchen with this other mom that was there and said, tell Joan what you learned on the playground. And I was confused by the question and followed through with answering what she asked. I told the story of what I had learned what sex was, and they both understandably now broke out in laughter. There is a certain hilarity as you name to the story itself, but I didn’t know the punchline. And so I was instantly broke down crying and just a wash in shame for not understanding why this was hilarious. And I can know now, my mother comforted me in the moment and we’ve since talked about that conversation. And she understood more the layers that happened for me. But in that moment, I was plunked into profound shame, which I believe is evil’s hope for all of our stories of sexuality, that they get joined to shame. And so I buried my sexual curiosity deep inside, and I’m not going to talk openly or ask questions openly anymore about it. I’ll figure it out on my own. And I now know that my mother’s story plays so much into that moment, what it probably meant for a boy to begin to come of age and ask questions about sexuality and what it stirred in her own story. In other words, you can’t talk about this from a textbook. You talk about it from the text of your own story. So you just think of the layers, right? Generations of sexual shame and trauma that then make it difficult to want to openly have a conversation that can hold innocence and wonder without it just drenching people in their own shame about it.
Dan: Well said. Again, we think we are passing on information and hopefully something of a heart of what we would wish on behalf of our children. But really at a much harder and darker level, we are inevitably passing on our own shame. And again, not that we would wish to do so, we’re not purposely shaming our children, but we can’t help but be embodied. And if we have not begun that hard labor of disentangling how our sexuality has been bound to shame, it can’t help but be passed on. So that feels like, oh, just a part of me wants to scream in terms of your mom’s failure. And yet when I look at even my son and I have talked about what it was like to engage and you would think I’ve written, I’ve talked about sexuality, it is appropriate laughter of my awkwardness. He was a lot calmer than I was. And I remember even as a 12-year-old boy, he said, you’re really uncomfortable. And I’m like, oh yeah. So when we step into what’s the power of shame, if you will, what’s the guiding principle that you operate with regard to why evil is so committed to making sure our sexuality is suffused in shame?
Sam: From research that I’ve read, shame actually causes within the body a trigger of fight or flight. So this is work from Emily Nagoski who talked about shame, self-evaluation as she calls it. But the category of shame, it triggers fight or flight, but in this case, there’s no bear to run from. You’re the bear. And so good luck trying to run from yourself. And how do we do that? We split, we dissociate, we separate from the parts of us that we feel exposed us as you’ve named so well, Dan, that we run from eyes. We try to shut down the part of us that feels seen, or in this case, not in a good way. It’s exposed. So how do you do that? You have to shut something down inside to get away from it. So evil has figured out a way to trigger that within us so that we separate from the goodness of our own sexuality and we shut down then our sexuality where we at least push it into the shadows, the shadow self, the part of us that we don’t really talk about or bring into the light or bring into the light of conversation or we push it away and let it operate in its own kind of wilderness within. And I think sexuality is such a mirror of our hearts, as I say in the book, as lovers, as worshipers, it so captures our capacity for pleasure as Rachael you’ve named before in past podcasts and our capacity for beauty and all the things that would lead us to God or to lead us to love. It’s not to say that all of that is sexual, no. But all of that has our sexuality has all those underpinnings to it, our capacity for awe. And so if you just think about how efficiently evil can mar that, oh, it just makes me want to weep at how effectively it can get us to disown something good within us.
Dan: Well, at one point as I was reading, I literally shouted and I was in Becky’s office and she was nearby and came running in, what are you okay? And I’m like, yes. Let me read one of those sentences. “Evil does not want you aroused by the world because once you are aroused, you’ll go looking for the one whom you can thank. You will want God.” And that just captured me so much that there couldn’t be anything other than again this shout. And I said to her later, what did you hear in the shout? And she said, both a sense of rage and joy. And I’m like, oh, I think that’s true. So angry at all that evil has wished to dispel from my own body and from others gratitude from the gift of arousal. That is a… I mean, you’re the author, Sam, so I don’t mean to be unkind as I ask this, but are you aware of what a radical, rich, fabulous sentence that is?
Sam: Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Well, I must echo the gratitude to you for I am a certificate program graduate? Is graduate a word you use?
Dan: Yeah! Why not?
Sam: And I still remember 12 years ago, and you sang the sentence, innocence is the ability to be in awe. And when I heard you say that, I went through all kinds of stages of emotion, but the first thing I wanted to do is get up and run around the building. Like what? Somebody knows how to get this back. You can actually restore a sense I thought instantly of my sexuality when you said that sentence and this idea that I could restore a sense of innocence and wonder and awe that I could be restored to my capacity to awe at beauty and find God again in my sexuality, not simply through, I dunno, just self flatulating and pain and this kind of a, I dunno, self really self-hatred, repentance, right? But that I could be restored to a sense of awe and that God would want that. I would really say that became this growing thing in me that led to this book was a sense that that could be restored in a person. And I’m convinced of that now.
Dan: Well, part of the glory of play is I felt that as I read, I was reading something that was so inviting that gave me again hope not just for myself, but for all those who engage this. So thank you. But back to, you’ve invited us back into incredible darkness, but in that such staggering potential beauty, I know you were about to say something, Rachael, and I didn’t want to interrupt it.
Rachael: That’s okay. If you had I go where you are feeling…
Dan: No, I’m done. I’m done. I’m just saying.
Rachael: No, I think something I really appreciate about how you’re writing, and I mean there’s a lot of things you’re holding intention and holding together, but you make this claim and it was good for me to read just thinking about masculine sexuality being a woman in this world and often at the mercy of masculine sexuality as it is the here and now. Just that being sexual is not the same as being sexually mature. You say this in the introduction and we live with the madness of being oversexualized yet sexually under nurtured and just the case you’re making for the desire in the sex talk and that it’s not a one-time thing, that it needs to be an ongoing conversation and language development for blessing. And that there’s such a lack of nurture and blessing of sexuality for men. And that there could either be cursing or a kind of permissiveness that actually is another form of cursing, right? It is another form of cursing. And so I really appreciated that sense of part of the need in the sex talk you never got is a sense of blessing. And that’s what I hear you guys both putting language to. I also love how you parse out the difference between arousal and lust because most people, especially I think men and the way your bodies are shaped and formed the word arousal and immediately go to lust, and what a wicked thing for evil to do, right to co-opt something that we’re made for. And that’s necessary as you put such good words to not only for love and pleasure, but for hope and a capacity to be awakened for something more, for us to automatically assume that experience is so untrustworthy, is so bad or needs to instantly be soothed right now that we live in a technological age. So something I would just want people to hear and know and would love to hear you put a few more words to. What have you learned in the writing of this in your own journey about how to reclaim a sense of innocence, of arousal and to discern the difference between arousal and lust?
Sam: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. For example, I had a friend that was watching the women’s March madness, Caitlyn Clark and play basketball, and he said, I am just drawn to watch her play. And he was afraid, is this lust? It doesn’t feel like that I’m drawn to something about her. And he had enough self-awareness to know, I don’t think it’s lust, but what is it? What’s this thing that moves in me? And I think that’s a common struggle men have is they feel something moving within their body in the presence of beauty. And then I would want to expand even our sense of beauty to the fuller sense of beauty finesse and athlete Caitlyn Clark beauty in the fullest sense of all the ways she embodies that. And I said, I think that’s awe. I think you’re just feeling awe for her. She’s really good and she has a finesse and a beauty to her presence that is powerful. And he said, that’s it. That gives it a name. And I think men get stuck with you’re standing, I don’t know, in the line at Starbucks or you’re in Seattle, you don’t drink Starbucks, you have too many other good options, whatever coffee shop you’re standing in and you see a beautiful woman. Or you watch a movie with a beautiful actress and you could expand this to beautiful people in general. And you begin to question what’s moving in me? And I think most guys are trained to say, well, that’s lust. Shut it down, right? Run, pulling your hair out of the coffee shop, right? Like be Joseph who fled Potiphar, right? Potiphar’s wife, that’s lust. And you know where this is going. It has only one end, which is lust and such a suspicion of I would say their own bodies, even their own hearts. I’m inviting a pause to say arousal is not the same as lust. You can feel arousal and it can actually take you to a different place. And I share a story in the book from a Jim Harrison novella about fly fishing. And he’s describing, he’s in New York walking around, and this is very broken man. If you read the book, you will be, he’s a very broken man, but he has this one moment where he is walking around this guy Nordstrom, he’s walking around New York and he sees a woman and he sees the wind blow her skirt and reveal her thigh. And it says he was aroused more generally than sexually. And it took him to thoughts of other beautiful moments in his life, good wine, good food, or the feeling of letting a trout go in the river after you’ve caught it. In other words, this man’s… what moved in him at seeing a beautiful woman was a connection to all these other sensually beautiful moments of his life. So I’m inviting men to consider you have a choice in that moment and you don’t have to shut down what’s happening there.
Rachael: Well, and I also think you do a really good job because this is the other half of that, right? When we’ve known trauma, when shame is, if shame is traumatizing in of itself, right? The experience shame how you’ve done such beautiful work in talking about attachment our stories and dysregulated nervous systems because to have choice, we can’t be hijacked by nervous systems that are in some ways functioning without choice. And so could you speak more to how do we offer regulation to dysregulated nervous systems when we’re in these minds?
Dan: Before you do that, Sam, it’s such a great question, and as Rachael invites you to that, can I read another section that I just went nuts with,
Sam: Please!
Dan: Is that all right? That’d be great. Okay. You write, “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 stopped 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.” Let me just say that is so true and so generous and so rarely ever pondered. So with that, I go back to Rachael’s question.
Sam: There could be so many roads into that. Let’s just start with, there’s research that would say that boys are held less from birth and that men receive less touch over their lifetime than women and girls. And obviously men know this within the community of other men, there’s less embracing and hugging that exchanges between men. And so I think men aren’t attuned to their own bodies well, to where they know this category of regulation dysregulation, even the need for touch. I just need a hug, would feel sort of awkward in a group of men. If a man just said that, it’d be like, whoa, everybody would back away from a guy like that sadly. But so this struggle to know… it’s Sue Johnson, author Sue Johnson, who does emotion focused work, emotion focused therapy work, said, I tell all my women clients I would be, she says, when my women clients say my husband is obsessed with sex, and she says, I would be too if the only place I could get touch was sex or the football field. And I’m not saying that justifies a man’s movement towards demanding sex or treating it as a need, but it sets up this idea again that a man, men aren’t trained to know their body needs soothing and sex is one place they get touch. And if you think of pornography as access to lots of skin, and again, the terrible part is it’s not skin that you’re actually getting any sort of meaningful touch of course, and it just taunts you in the end, it just mocks you. Nevertheless, you think of just the urge for skin being what might lead a man to pornography. In other words, a man, sex is not a need. It’s not a drive like oxygen and water and food, but what is? Touch, love, comfort? And I think that men then were set up with this body confusion of I feel like I need sex right now when probably what you need is to soothe in some meaningful way that would let you be at ease in your body.
Dan: Again, think about having this as a conversation with a 10, 12, 14-year-old and not a single conversation, but multiple conversations. But ones that, again, so important to hear whatever age you are and frankly, whatever gender, I think this book speaks so powerfully to anyone’s sexuality. Yes, you’ve written it for men, but I think there is a sense in which the realities are different. And yet the similarities are powerful in terms of the power of shame, power of contempt, the power of what you’ve referred to as dissociation and that internal split, but the need for connection, for union, for touch, such a sweet and rich return to the innocence that we have so forgotten. So when you have thought about the process that you’re offering, what you’ve engaged, and at one point you talk about your raging misogyny, it’s a powerful phrase. And knowing you, Sam, you are a kind known you for a long time. You’re very kind and gentleman, and it’s true and good. So when I read that phrase, you’re raging misogyny. I literally chortled. That’s just not true, but it’s true. So I’d love for you to talk about the cost for you of engaging this material.
Sam: Yeah. Well, that was a phrase that was given to be my therapist when I was in graduate school and newly married a couple years married and sort of had this dabbling relationship on and off with pornography use and newly married. And I’d come to him because my wife said to me, you always control in so many words, you always control the touch in our relationship. If I want to hug you bristle or if I roll over in the bed, you stiffen and reject me. And I was caught because she was right. It was like, whoa, she’s nailed me. That’s true. And I tried to in the moment argue with her, but it landed me in a counselor’s office where I was asking the questions, what’s going on in my body? What is that about? And had again come to this therapist with the idea of I’m a man struggling with lust. What’s new? Every man’s battle here I am pornography. What are you going to do? This kind of acceptance of something about myself as a man. Oh, can you hear it right? It just, it’s just is. It is just what we do. And so he was a very kind man, and he had earned my trust and he said, with the kindest eye, Sam, the linchpin here, the hub of all of these things is that you are a raging misogynist. And I couldn’t speak for a while and I wanted to fight him, but I knew he was right. It was like slowly coming to with like, oh my God, he’s right. And there was a pattern of what was my misogyny? Primarily control. That I was control, pornography was control. And obviously a growing objectification in my heart as a man to see women as an object and a source of my pleasure alone, but that I was in control and that I had every right to stay in control, even in my marriage, that I couldn’t soften and let my wife have power over me, that I had to be the one in power and that had a name. And the beautiful thing is he threw that and beginning to accept what had kind of congealed and hardened in my heart, and began to then turn towards my story of what would lead me to want to hold women with control, which began to uncover my own sexual story. And the places where I had resorted to control to cope with my own pain.
Rachael: Yeah, I just want to say the vulnerability with which you write and the honesty with which you write. I am probably speaking this on behalf of some of the women who may be listening and thinking, this is something I want to read or I want my spouse to read, or people in my life and who might feel like, so are they just going to get a pass for the harm? Or is it taken seriously? And I just really appreciate the way in which throughout your book you hold, what is the devastating possible outcomes if some of this work is not done or if there’s not an imagination for a deeper kind of healing. And I think that takes a lot of integrity and a lot of risk. This is risky writing because you are inviting that there could be a different way, even if someone has lived as a raging misogynist in ways that have been maybe even explicitly more harmful out there, that there’s still a different opportunity for restoration and repair. So to give up your own story in that way feels very generous.
Sam: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I am convinced, Dan, again, as you said, that innocence is recoverable for every man, every person. But obviously I’m speaking to every man here and holding. I am sure as therapists, you guys have experienced this as well, a man who’s so surrendered to the fact, this is just my lot. I’m just going to be broken and twisted and perverted, and it’s just who I am. And even use that defensively, right? Well, it’s just who I am. And I’m trying to get to that man who’s given up hope of something greater, a deeper heart within himself, within his sexuality. So I’m hoping, I knew I had to write with the scalpel, and it had to come to me first.
Dan: That’s so clear. And that sense of, look, when we disrupt the power of shame, it is so culturally and individually easy to move to a kind of shamelessness. But the reality is, in disrupting shame, you’re inviting the heart to kindness. But also as that one quote that I read that to a new level of gratitude and awe. And in that sense, if we go back to the category of that first story that you told, there really is a sense in which, at least for me, I think for many men, sex is terrifying. And not just because I have a history of abuse, not just because there has been a lot of brokenness, but because of my wife’s utter glorious beauty. And in that sense, there is a certain ownership that, oh my God, this is, first of all, I think it’s crazy that that’s how God would have written our bodies. But in the midst of its goodness, I am at some level in a kind of awe that goes, I don’t know what to do with this goodness. So when wonder replaces judgment, and when gratitude replaces accusation and shame, there is a beginning of a new way of moving toward and receiving something of what God intended, which ultimately, you booked so brilliantly, the nature of worship. This is really about coming to our creator God and going, wow.
Sam: Yes, that’s right. Yes. Yeah. Beauty has power. And so true sex requires being undone in the presence of the power of beauty. And I don’t mean beauty in a superficial sense. I mean beauty as glory as you say well, right. The fullness of the beauty of people. And if you are not a man who’s capable of being overpowered, meaning you have arrogance, you have control, you won’t be able to access being undone as we were made to be.
Dan: Before we end, I want you to talk about, I’m assuming you didn’t wear this the entire time of writing, but you did have a T-shirt with a bicycle that you wrote at least a portion of your book. I’d love for you to take that image and in one sense, move us toward what you think is possible, not mere pleasure and greater sense of goodness, but there’s more to our sexuality. And that bicycle was a good, good picture.
Sam: So I’ll preface it with this. When you develop a capacity for awe, it’s not just within sex. It’s a capacity to awe at all people and even the awful things of life. And there’s a story of two men who Peter Johnson Johnson, Carl Frederick Arnt, were two graduate students on a campus, Stanford. And they went for a bike ride one night around midnight, and they came upon two people behind a dumpster. And something wasn’t right because one person wasn’t moving. And they came closer and discovered that there was a man assaulting a woman who was unconscious. And I think it was Peter who gave chase to the man. The man fled. They yelled at him, what are you doing? He fled Peter, chased him, tackled him, and he was actually smiling and giggling when they tackled him, the assaultant. And Carl stayed to attend to the woman to make sure she was alive. And these men, when they gave their report to the police, I mean obviously they had just witnessed the horror of masculine sexuality at its worst, rape. And what did it do to these men? Well, when they were reporting to the police, they both broke down crying. They just were overcome with the horror of what they’d witnessed. And this woman is Chanel Miller. She’s now written a book, Know My Name. She went unnamed through her trial, but she’s became kind of famous for her victim statement during trial that she addressed to her rapist. And it’s very powerful how she gives him her face, how she invites him, as I would say, to recover something even within himself. She speaks to him, but she says in that victim statement and in her book, that these two men, Peter Johnson and Carl Frederick Ardnt had become heroes to her. And that she actually, she’s a sketch artist, and she sketched two bicycles and taped them above her bed to remind her that there’s goodness in the world, that there’s good men in the world. And that got her through her trial of the conviction of Brock Turner, her rapist. And that moved me with like, wow, something so, well, I don’t know these men, but I do know that they stayed and endured the trial with her. They stayed close to follow through on that. But that picture of a bicycle moved me with, you could bring your sexuality and your sense of awe to the world like that, even if it means weeping and intervening during assault, that that’s a form of healthy sexuality.
Dan: Well, what you have done, both Rachael and I have felt this invitation to return, not to naivete, but to innocence through gratitude, through awe, through worship, opens the door to what our hearts need. When I read that section, I remember reading her victim statement and weeping, and it was so powerful and so inviting to both the horror of what was done, but also to the invitation that there is a humanity that we are meant to enter. With all that to say that our hearts need goodness with regard to our sexuality, we need more joy, but yes, we need more goodness and indeed, this lovely labor, the sex talk that you never got will be a talk better said, an excellent book that allows you to again, move toward what you are meant for innocence and goodness, a capacity to receive, but also a capacity to give on behalf. And so, Sam, we thank you and glory in this book and your labor end and may it bring many men and many women to even greater innocence and goodness,
Sam: Dan and Rachael, thank you so much. This has been rich.
Rachael: Thank you, Sam.