038: Moving from Sexual Shame toward Sacred Play with Sam Jolman

In this episode, we dig into how most men never got a proper "sex talk"— just rules about staying pure and anatomical basics, without any guidance on how to handle feelings, desires, and attraction in a healthy way. Jolman shares how men can learn to appreciate beauty (whether it's a sunset or steak) without spiraling into shame or lust, and explains the important difference between arousal and desire.

Jolman pushes back against the fear-based messages many people got from purity culture. Instead of seeing all sexual feelings as dangerous, he suggests we can be "lovers" in a broader sense—people who know how to enjoy life's pleasures, from good food to meaningful relationships. We talk about what this means for single folks, people healing from sexual trauma, and anyone trying to move past shame toward a healthier view of sexuality. It's a refreshingly honest conversation that acknowledges both the physical side of sex (the "mechanics") and the deeper emotional and spiritual aspects (the "poetics").

Get the full show notes and links here. 📄

Episode Resources and Links

• Episode 18 with Dr. Camden Morgante
• Get a 2025 All Access Pass
• The Sex Talk You Never Got by Sam Jolman   Amazon | Bookshop

Bio

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.

Website | Instagram | Substack

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Transcript

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She says, "there's the mechanics of sex, and then there's the poetics of sex." The mechanics being, how does it all fit together? How does the plumbing work? The birds and the bees, which is primarily where the conversation stops. But the poetics is the realm of desire. What's the story around your sexuality? It is not just a body function like sneezzing. It follows a story arc. And so what's the story that's animating your sexuality? What I mean is that sex was made to live in a story romance. It was meant to be an act of love. And so many times, evil, I would even say, desires that your sexuality is joined, your arousal cycle is joined to harm or shame or exposure so that you are left feeling dirty, broken or impure. Welcome back to the Broken to Beloved Podcast. I hope to provide practical resources through compassionate conversations to move toward healing and wholeness. Today, we're talking with Sam Jolman about his book, The<i> Sex Talk You Never Got:</i><i>Reclaiming the Heart</i><i>of Masculine Sexuality.</i> We will obviously be talking about sex, so listener discretion is advised. And while it's easy to write this episode off as something that may not be interesting, we certainly address both men and women, and what does it mean to have a sexual ethic around being single. Sam was one of our guests at the 2025 Summit, and join me for a live bonus session with Dr. Camden Morgante. You can hear more about Camden in her book, in my conversation with her on episode 18, and you can also watch their bonus session with a 2025 Summit All Access Pass. I'll have a link for both of those in the show notes. Sam is a trauma therapist with over 20 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, and together they enjoy exploring the best camping spots in Colorado in a pop-up camper. He goes to therapy, loves fly fishing, and can often be found trying to catch his breath on the floor of his local CrossFit gym. And now, here's my conversation with our friend Sam. Sam, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Good to see you again. You, too. You open the book and say,"As men, our sexuality is one of the most neglected and abandoned parts of us. I'm not implying that we just need more sex or titulation. We need the cultivation and recovery of something deep within. Being sexual is not the same as being sexually mature. Then you share stories of botched sex talks with parents or missed opportunities, parents who provide permission but no blessing." Tell us about what you mean by all of that. We have a category for spiritual formation. Good. That's really good that we have that. We don't seem to have a category, or at least not much of one, for sexual formation as a process that we go through, not just sexual maturity of our bodies through puberty, but actually the development development of an ethic or a heart, as I say in my book, around our sexuality, so that it's integrated into who we are and connected to our heart. It's not this separate thing that exists over here. I think we tend to see, at least in terms of how most of our sexual formation goes, we tend to see it as this thing that runs itself, I guess, right? That the plumbing will work and you'll figure it out. That is such a setup for all of us at some level to feel the shame of, what about all the other things connected to my sexuality that don't seem to work? Or when they go wrong, we tend to then feel like we have to hold it with shame or silence. I can't disclose this. As I say in the book, it's probably the place most men have had the least meaningful conversations in their lives. We have the proverbial locker room talk or sex jokes, and maybe that's about as verbal we get about it, or if you got anything, maybe it was a quick and probably shoddy anatomy lesson and then a purity lecture. It just leaves so much undeveloped in us that we end up bumbling around with in life, especially as men. Yeah. Which is what I appreciate about your book and what drew me to it. I've seen lots of other people talking about it. Obviously, we've been trying to connect for a long time, so I'm glad we finally made it happen. I love that you say right in the introduction, The absence of care in this area is worse than your neglect. Something like a curse lands on our hearts. When we don't talk about or acknowledge something, we make a statement about its value or lack thereof. Then you say, What is left unformed will only become malformed. I think we've seen the fruit of that over all of these many decades of the church not knowing how to handle the sex talk. Yeah, it ends up, I think in the church, there's such this fear of sexual desire or passionate desire or pleasure or the body in general. We tend to talk about it primarily as, as purity culture did, primarily something you need to contain or keep sinless. That your whole goal here is to not sin. If you've achieved that, you're good. We don't know how to engage, integration of it. Then we end up in so many ways leaving people to push this part of them into the shadows of their being, not necessarily that they're acting out sinfully even, but just that we don't talk about this part of us. Again, as we all know, if you're in a family and there's certain things you just don't talk about. We're not going to go to that subject. You know that that thing has inherent shame. I think that's where so many of us, especially as men, are left with is not even because of our sin, but the guilt of sin, but just the inherent shame of this must be a bad part of me or a broken part of me or a perverted part of me. Then on top of that, for it to be the script of the only way you need to think about your sexuality is just that you're not sinning. If you've achieved that, then you're fine. No one, even if you are engaging your lusts, no one is without struggle in this area of their lives. I think that's it. You obviously talk a lot about shame, what it feels like, how it comes from. I was really fascinated by the idea that shame can have the same effects on us as trauma, that shame is a trauma of its own kind, of dealing with it and healing from it. We'll talk about all that later. But it's just so true, and I hope, validating for people who are listening. While this is a book primarily written for men, I recognize that a lot of these truths, hopefully, will land for anyone who's listening, that we've been given this unfortunate message that it is. It's just this thing that we don't talk about. Therefore, it is something I should feel shame about anytime I experience it or feel it or have an inkling and don't know how to repress it or dismiss it or do all these damaging things to ourselves. I appreciate the approach that you take to get to the heart of sex, to get to the position or identity of men, not just as conquest or player or all these other words, but as lover. What is that look like to do that for self first before for others? You open with this idea of beauty, which I love. It can be such a subjective word. People always say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all these other things. People have different standards of beauty or whatever it is. Tell us about the power of beauty. I believe at the heart of our sexuality, our deepest sexual identity is lover. That's every man. That's every human, by the way, but I'm obviously writing to men. That's every man that at your core, your sexual identity as lover. You are wired to be moved by the beauty of God's world. Ultimately, the beauty of another person, the glory might be the biblical word that I would use, and I do use, but that you're moved by God's creation, which is infused with his glory. We don't hold that as a cultural category for men, lover. We tend to think of warriors or workers or grit, those sorts of words we associate as like, that's what it means to be masculine. But I'm saying, every man I've sat with talks about the lover part of his heart, which is anything from your love of a well-prepared steak. That is a sensual pleasure. There is a aesthetic or sensual beauty, you could say, to, Oh, that's a good steak, or just a love of sunsets or good music, good jazz. This is how men talk about their lives, I just don't know that they've accepted, You realize that's just your love or heart we're talking from. I've been blown away. I was nervous about using that word lover. Are men going to resonate with that? I've been blown away by how many men are like, Oh, yes, thank you. That's what it's called, that they finally have something, a word to hang so much of their felt experience on. Because we diminish men with this idea of, Well, men just want sex. Romance and the other finer things are for women, but men just want sex. I literally have never met a man who just wants sex. Now, Ken, I've met men who are desperate or even heavily sexually addicted and that is a struggle in itself. But even they would say, This is miserable in their most sober moments. This is miserable. This is not fun to just be this cravenly addicted to sexual release. In other words, even they want more. I'm trying to invite men to see you were made to be moved. That is not just sin, the beginning of lust, which I think is what purity culture set men up to accept is, you need to shut that down. Anything that moves in you is suspect. Again, we need to be very self-aware of what moves in us and what we're being moved to do. But being moved by beauty is how you are wired by God to fall in love, yes, in romance with a partner, but also to fall in love with God's world. He gave give you 4,000 taste buds on your tongue for a reason, not just to make sure something isn't hot or cold or too hot or too cold, but that you would savor the good things of life. You have 8,000 to 10,000 nerve endings in your genitalia. Again, not saying that everyone will become sexually active in life, but it needs to stand as witness that you were wired for pleasure. You were wired for beauty and sensuality That is God's design of you. Well, I appreciate that you differentiate, and I want to ask this question after this one, but you differentiate between sensuality and sexuality. Yes. Just talking about that embodied practice of sensing the world around us. Like you're saying, with your taste, with all these different nerve endings that we have, taking it all in. I appreciate that you make that difference. Yes, sensuality. We have equated these sensualities Sensuality means sexuality too often in our culture. But sensuality just means of the senses. You have five senses, taste, touch, sight, smell, seeing, hearing. I said sight. Anyway. Those were designed I think, gifts, obviously for survival in a world. But you were made for Eden. I think primarily those were given for you to experience the pleasure of God's good world. Sexuality It is built on sensuality. Sexuality is a very embodied and sensual experience of relationship and connection with another person. But it is based in the body. It is a body-based behavior. Learning to engage the sensuality of your body and know how to bless it is a basic building block of healthy sexuality. Is that I know how to receive pleasure and I know how to welcome it as a gift from God and know when I want to overindulge, which actually becomes a form of numbing. It's actually not an association to the body anymore. But now I am actually checking out from my own embodiment. But that tension of I'm going to let something overwhelm me. I'm going to let something move me. Again, good music, a sunset, good smoked ribs was an experience I had recently of being moved. There is a humility inherent to letting yourself be overpowered. It's the arrogant who cannot be moved. That's from Cole Arthur Riley. She talks so well about how the arrogant can't really be moved beauty because it's a form of being overpowered. Well, and you write so much about awe, and you mentioned it a little bit, but I love that idea of sensuality is necessary. It's part of our embodied experience, and yet so many of us have been taught to shut that down or to experience sensuality as shame, or the idea that purity culture teaches us to just avoid all of these things at all costs, and then somehow, magically, on your wedding night, you'll just be able to turn it all on, and something you've experienced as shame for 10, 20, 30, 40 years will suddenly become magical and wonderful and allowed. It's just not the way it works. I love how much you write about awe and beauty. You say the sense of humility and being part of something larger, up and out of ourselves, not lost or small, but belonging to something beautiful and good. It doesn't highlight our smallness, but being part of something bigger. I'm struck by your use of the word reverence, and that it draws us in and moves us from fear to pleasure to longing. I love that sense of awe. It's like what Deb Dana talks about when we're looking for glimmers, to overcome the triggers that we have in our lives. That sense of awe are those glimmers that we have to remind us that I'm okay. I'm part of something. I'm connected. It's not just me. I would love for you to help us different differentiate between, and maybe this is too many words, so you decide, between awe and desire and arousal and lust. Because I think those are really important distinctions where so often in the church, they just conflate everything into lust, right? Yes. Arousal and desire are separate things, and we so equate them and even get body confused confusion within ourselves about them. But arousal is a body statement. The arousal cycle that was codified or researched by Masters and Johnson in the 1960s is a body process. It is a statement about what your physical body goes through in the presence of sexual stimuli. It makes no statement about desire. Tragically, in other words, your body can be walked through an arousal cycle without desire. I mean, this is the horror of sexual abuse. And why oftentimes a sexual abuse victim will say, It feels like my body betrayed me. Why did my body feel pleasure when I was in terror, emotionally or relationally, in the violation? It is because your body, even if you do this to your hand, your body gets a little hit of oxytocin. It starts to end dopamine. You feel a little bit of pleasure. In other words, your body is so wired for it that you can be walked through it without desire. Similarly, you can be even aroused by another person and not feel desire, meaning it is not a statement, again, of lust. Desire is a heart word. Do I want this or not? Or what am I doing with this? And what do I want to happen from here. I think this is where Jesus made a distinction in the sermon on the Mount, and I'm referencing the Bible project here, where they describe Jesus is talking about lust and adultery. He says, If any Man goes on, If any man lusts after a woman, he's committing adultery, the Bible project says a better translation there would be, goes on looking for the sake of lust. In other words, you can experience arousal and maybe even notice beauty or attraction to another person and move on and say, Wow, my body felt something. I felt moved by that person, and I'm moving on. As I say in the book, that can be a moment actually to thank God for beauty in the world. It can be a moment to say, Wow, God, you make beautiful things. You make beautiful people, and move on. You can turn that into lust, meaning you can move towards a desire lust. You could move towards other desires, though, as I say, a desire to worship God. I was thinking of a moment I was at Costco pumping gas and looking at my fellow Costco Club members around me pumping their gas. I noticed a well-dressed, attractive, beautiful woman, one aisle over, one island over from me pumping her gas. I felt that instant body movement of, whoa, she's a beautiful woman. I let myself sit with, what does she stir in me? Where is my heart? What do I notice happening in my body? What I noticed is my body being moved took me into some of my own core needs, which are I felt tired. This was a well-dressed woman. The sense was she was a woman who cared for herself. I Again, I had this image in my head that she was on her way to a dinner party with friends or maybe a cultural event, like a concert or a play or something. I just found myself saying, Man, I want to care for myself as well as she cares for herself. It took me into my own core needs. I actually have a desire to be a well-cared-for person, that I've cared well for myself, and that I have events that I'm attending, right? That's where that experience took me. And that became prayer with God on my drive home. Of God, I want to care for myself well. And thank you for the witness of this woman who has done that with her life. Again, what I would invite is you have choice in the realm of desire. Arousal is largely just sexual radar. It's only telling you there's some sexual stimuli in your vicinity. I'm getting this from Emily Nagosky, who's a sex researcher. She would say that sexual arousal is largely just the radar for sexual stimuli. It's only saying that something sexually relevant is happening around me or maybe in my thoughts or was triggered by something around me. That's the only thing it's telling you. It's not a moral statement. Morality is what happens when you notice that in your body and what you do with it. I think that hopefully will help people to disentangle the shame that they carry. Because even that story of noticing a woman at Costco, I imagine comes with a whole another narrative of I imagine people who are listening going, Oh, I wonder what his wife thought, or I wonder if he told her, or where does it cross the line of cheating mentally with something? We jump to these conclusions because we've perverted or twisted the idea of what does it mean to notice beauty in the world? We have all these weird double and triple standards for the body around nudity, around all these other things. I was going to say this for later, but it fits here. It's just you tell the story at the end of picking up your wife from art class and being able to review her figure drawing sketches. I went to art school. I have a degree I took lots of figure drawing classes. Oh, that's so cool. I had that experience of you're standing in a in a giant room for two, three, four hours just staring at a naked person drawing their body. It's a totally different experience when you're doing it in beauty and awe of appreciating the human figure, contrasted with the dehumanizing act of viewing porn or looking at whatever that is. I think you write the phrase you use as not to stare, but to behold. Yes. And I love that phrase. Yeah. That is still such a meaningful time of ritual for my wife and I. She was taking art classes, these live new drawing classes where she was sketching men, women, old, young. The beauty of these classes is there's not, at least when she was attending, there's not... All bodies are beautiful in their own way and worthy of beholding and sketching. She would come home home from these classes and want to show me her drawings. I was recovering from my own pornography, struggle, compulsion, addiction. It felt very vulnerable to be invited to look at nakedness. But what I noticed, the nakedness of other human bodies, and what I noticed is it was retraining something in me. Wait a second. Bodies can be beheld, treated with awe, as you said so well, and not dehumanized with just craven lust. Yes, you've brought an important tension to the conversation, which is, if my heart is being taken with a woman at Costco, what will that do in my marriage? And I would say, I don't think my heart was taken with this woman. I was moved by her. But if I am not also and primarily being moved by my wife and speaking to and beholding my wife and her beauty, and by that, I don't mind just her body, but the depth of her, the infinite mystery of her, to borrow a line from Emily Nagosky, then something's out of place, something's out of balance. If I'm only letting myself be moved by others and not my wife, well, that's a... Something's wrong, something's out of place. My sense of awe is has so much more room to play and enjoy in a marriage, in a committed marriage and story. That's why I think it's so important when we are moved. I think the gospel gives us the space to be curious, even if you find yourself having been moved lustfully. Let's say you're actually in the wake of having just looked at pornography. You're Probably in some body numbness or shame and confession and temptation towards self-hatred. My invitation in that moment is, I think Jesus bid you be curious about what you were being moved with or what was going on in your body or what's the story, particularly, around your your lusts, because those are such big clues to your own trauma stories, your own sexual formation stories. That moment in Costco, let me really connect with, I'm not caring for myself well. If I'm being pulled, and I didn't go to lust, but I could feel, what would be the pull? It would be, I haven't taken care of myself well, and I need to do that. It brought me back to my core needs. I would say asking those questions of, what's the symbolism of my lusts, if it's gone, even there can help you connect with even your story. Well, and again, I think we push things to such extremes that I would imagine for people, if you had been admiring the awe or beauty of another man at Costco, people just immediately jump to conclusions. Oh, does this mean I'm gay? Or whatever it is. It's like, There are such unnecessary conclusions that people draw or jump to, or immediately move to shame or condemnation or judgment rather than just the curiosity of the moment to say, what is it that I'm appreciating or noticing or what's going on in me. I love that you write that awe becomes more expansive in our bodies and hearts, and lust narrows obsessing on specific body parts or fantasies, and the distinction that sexual arousal is not the same as lust. I love that idea that you share from Emily Nagoski, you said, right? That arousal is just a sexual radar. It's like, I notice something sexual is happening around me, and that it's not necessarily linked to desire, which I think is so important, especially for people who have suffered sexual abuse. Yes. That arousal is a body response to the stimuli or the mechanics, and lust happens in the realm of desire in the heart or the poetics, and that desire and arousal are separate and distinct. Talk about the poetics. Talk about the heart. Because this is the heart of the book, right? The heart. Yes. That's a line from author, sex researcher, sex educator Esther Pirel. Who is a sage in her own right. But she says, there's the mechanics of sex, and then there's the poetics of sex. The mechanics being, how does it all fit together? How does the plumbing work? The birds and the bees, which is primarily the conversation stops. Even that ends up being broken in itself. I've talked with couples who... One couple said, For 10 years, we did not know that a woman could also orgasm. What a tragedy. Again, that dissociation from the body and its pleasure and capacity for pleasure. Again, even the mechanics can go wrong in a conversation. But the poetics is the realm of desire. What's the story around your sexuality? Interestingly, arousal cycles, body arousal cycles, mirror story arcs. If you look at an arousal cycle and you overlay that with a story arc. They both build to a climax. There's an inciting incident, something that triggers the movement towards sexual connection. There's moments of building tension to the climax to resolution. Just for you to know, your sexuality is storied. It is not just a body function like sneezing. It follows a story arc. What's the story that's animating your sexuality? I believe God made it to be romance. I say romance, even I mean committed covenantal marriage. I do believe that. But we all know that some marriages end up being devoid of awe and romance, and maybe even be places of disconnection and harm. What I mean is that sex was made to live in a story of romance. It was meant to be an act of love. So many times, evil, I would even say, desires that your sexuality is joined, your arousal cycle is joined to harm or shame or exposure so that you are left feeling dirty or broken or impure or twisted, that you begin to feel all kinds of terrible things about yourself and even join self-hatred or self-harm to your body. I've known men to where their own struggles with their sexuality have led them, even things like punching their own face or working out so hard that they injure their body. I think we need to be aware of what story is animating our sexuality. I think it was meant to be lovemaking. I think that's the picture given to us in Song of Songs. But like you said, if you notice arousal outside of what seems to be romance, it's easy to feel condemnation. I work out in CrossFit. I call it dad bod maintenance, I guess you could say, as a dad of three sons. I don't even know if it's preventing now, but it is entirely for me to keep up with my boys and stay healthy for them. I work out with a lot of 20-year-old young men, and they have staggeringly beautiful bodies. I am in awe of them on a daily basis with their speed, agility. It is so freeing to be able to say, Yeah, that's the glory of God. God in them. They have beautiful bodies, and they move them well. Being able to have a category for that and a way to sit with your arousal in a more curious way feels essential to not condemning your sexuality. I appreciate that. I forget how you said it, but something about the culmination is lovemaking. What's the story arc that's meant, that's best and healthiest for your sexual arousal cycle? It is lovemaking. So for people who are not in a relationship, for people who are single, for people who have suffered some sexual abuse, and they've just written off relationships or are just too afraid to get into one at all, what does sexuality mean for our single friends? I think I would say at the most basic level, your body bears witness to the fact you were made for pleasure. You were made for arousal. You were made for goodness. You were meant to be moved by God's good world and all of the glory in the world. You may not be sexually active, but the fact that you have 8,000 to 10,000 nerve endings, announced this, you were made for pleasure. Just to acknowledge, there's a whole world of beauty and awe to be in awe of. Certainly, relationships relationship with a partner, a beloved, and being sexually active is a place to play that out, but it's not the only place. I would want to start by acknowledging that you have a good body and it was made for pleasure. Where are you living out sensuality? It may not be in sex, but it can be in so many other places. The other thing I would say is, as I say in the book, sex is actually a form of play. There are so many places God wants to invite you into play. Even as a married couple, sex cannot be the only place you play together. It can't be the only place you are making love, meaning literally cultivating love. To honor, there's a world of places to play and be in awe. I would invite you to those things, to live out that destiny, even if it's not in being sexually active. But then I would also want to invite a curiosity, again, around your story of sexual formation. What has shaped you? If there is an aversion to sexuality or to sex, to begin to ask the questions of what is the body resistance saying? What is it telling you? What is the story around it? If you find yourself avoiding relationship or romance or sexual experience, to not force your body or condemn it for not working, but to let your body talk to you. Your body has wisdom. To start with, your body is not broken. It may need help. It may need an advocate. That's what I would invite you to do, is to try to be your body's advocate, to ask questions about that resistance or avoidance, and what's the story around it? On a very basic level, a simple thing anybody could do, married, single, is to just take a piece of paper and write, What are the top 10 things that shaped your sexuality? The 10 things from 0 to 18 or 0 to 25, what are the 10 things, 10 stories? You don't even have to write them all out yet. Just bullet point them. Oh, Oh, there was this. Oh, yeah, there was that. You don't even have to rank them. Just get a piece of paper. Just a brain dump of the things that shaped my idea of sex. Yeah. If I thought about this, my own sexual formation, what would be the things in it? Then to sit back with that piece of paper, which in itself might be a lot. Your body will probably start to talk to you, and you will start to feel things. Then beginning to ask the question of what is the voice of shame shame. Where do I notice evil wanting to assault my sexuality, my nakedness, my embodiment, my sense of pleasure, or sensuality, or attachment? To begin to be curious about what shaped you. Because just like Adam and Eve, evil hates your sexuality. It does not want you living well in your body. Evil wants to make sure that you're buried in shame. So Just beginning to discern that and listen for what is the theme? Is there a theme I can yet? Then maybe pick one or two stories and write them out. Long form, right? Oh, wow. I think I'll pick that story. Write it out to try to, again, listen for when did shame enter in? When did shame enter into my innocence? I think that will start to get you down the road. And then certainly, find a safe person that you could talk to about that. That could be a therapist, that could be a friend, a mentor, but find somewhere to begin to open up. That could be a men's group, a community group. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you also, and I remember having this conversation with Camden as well, that sex is not a need, right? Yes. Emily Nagosky, again, no one has ever died from a lack of sex, even though it might surely feel like we might. That it's a desire, not a drive, a want, not I think, again, with the church, it's like we've done such a poor job of equipping men and women to understand the desires around sex, the mechanics around sex, and this idea with a especially within patriarchal or complementarian cultures, that marriage is the ultimate call of a woman. Then even if you're married, it's not enough because when are you going to start having kids? We have this twist twisted version of what does it mean to be a sensual being? What does it mean to be a sexual being? Then, purity culture intended to instill a sexual ethic and standard of Holiness, gone completely awry and having damaged or destroyed the sense of sensuality and sexuality, I think you're right. It treated all sexual arousal experiences or awakened with immense fear and never emancipation, that purity as a goal or a sum total kills something in us and dissociates us from our bodies, that it's never an end in itself. Then especially for people who have grown up in purity culture and then have had some sexual experience to feel like now I am forever contaminated and damaged goods. What do we do with those kinds of devastating messages? You write about moving away from shame this idea that we can treat it with contempt or kindness. What do we do with all of that shame? First of all, I'd want to say, if you aren't feeling some level of anger in response to everything you've just rattled off, that affects us in the cultural story, the church culture story of sexuality, the masculine entitlement to sex. I mean, think of that as a story and just how much that's a failure of inviting men to be lovers. That you are more of a child that needs coddling. That's degrading to us as men to see sex as a need that we have to, that our wives are obligated to take care of for us or we're going to fall into lust. Again, as I invite, what's the story there? There's a clear story, which is there's no place for love. There's no place for permission or invitation or desire. It's It's all very fear-based demand. Again, I hope something inside of both men and women rises up and gets angry at that very story to say that is not the way it was meant to be. This was meant to be a free place of play. As you've said so well, yes, sex is not a need. We call it a drive. It's not a drive. A drive in the body is for oxygen, for food, even for love or security and safety. But not ultimately for sex. Sex can be a place you might experience some of those things of love and safety and connection, but it in itself is not a need. It's a desire. A core tenet of being a lover is, I want this, but I don't need it. Can you be well in your body? Can you learn how to regulate even strong desire, even hormonal urge in your body, and find a way to live well in that? But yes, deconstructing the fear of sexuality and the fear of being moved is so important to welcoming your sexuality back home. To be curious about your fear, it doesn't just magically go away. You have to unwind, was C. S. Lewis's word, and I would deconstruct. How did I get here? What in my body am I afraid But yes, that would be an essential part as well of anybody's healing journey is, I hope, experiencing some anger. How did my body get turned to me as an enemy? Yeah. Thank you. There's so much more, too, that I want to get into and we won't have time for. But the whole invitation to play, there's so much good information about sex as play and invitation. I think even again, for our single friends or for our non-sexually active friends, It's just like with sex not being a need, I think so often, and you write about this a lot with the people you find who come into your office who are confessing these things around sex or porn or desire or lust or whatever it is, that it's a bid for something else, that it's the missing connection, that it's a relationship with a parent that went wrong or an abuse that happened in childhood that is now playing out in adulthood. I think that invitation into curiosity. Our friend Chuck DeGroot talks all about connection, and that invitation into connection. What does it mean that I'm having this moment of connection with this person? That it may not be about the mechanics or the release that's happening within sex, but this intimate moment of connection that I'm having with this person as we play, as we invite curiosity, as we invite all of these things. I love the idea. Even at the end of the book, you write about the idea that Jesus is resurrected to play, that he that he plays with Mary, that he plays with the disciples. What does that look like for us as we can look towards a resurrection of a healthy sexual ethic or identity, and what does it look like to play in that playground? All the definition that you provide around play that are just so wonderful about being reverent and freely chosen, having a playground, and rules, and objectives, and lasting bonds are so wonderful. What is your hope for people, and especially because it is written, I think, specifically for men, if a woman were to pick it up, because I recognize that most of our community is women, it's not that they shouldn't read it. What are you hoping for someone who reads this book? That was a really wonderful surprise to me is that I had some early readers that were women, and they brought back gratitude to me. Of course, I wanted this vision of a healthy man and healthy sexuality to resonate with women. That was just such a, yay, I'm so glad that this vision is validating to their experience of men, but also welcoming to their connection to men. I've had women say, Yeah, just the understanding of sexuality that you present, the play and awe and not a need and arousal and desire and the difference between those was really, really helpful in itself. I hope that there's a vision for sexuality that you can take with you because in many ways, the way to healthy masculinity is to just humanize who we are. So much of who we are as men and women is just shared humanity. I hope you find a humanizing vision of sexuality. I also hope you find validation for maybe what you've suffered with men, the stories you have. The whole reason I wrote this book was out of the #MeToo movement in church to movement. When I felt like there's got to be a better vision here because this is men as animals and what that then plays out in the culture, the staggering amount of harm done in the name of male sexual desire is beyond tragic. I hope there's a vision that invites you to be able to honor your own harm, but also to begin to welcome curious curiosity about men and what might be true of them as lovers in a different way. Yeah. Thank you. If people want more, where can they find or connect with you? Yeah, that's great. Well, I'm writing on Substack, so samjolman. Substack. Com, about these things, about healthy sexuality and living in the Christian story in that. You can go to my website, samjolman. Com. My publisher is actually still offering a buy one, get one free offer for the book, which is really cool. If you buy a paperback or audio or Kindle copy, you can get a free paperback for yourself or somebody else. Then I also wrote a little e-book, How to give a sex talk to your children just to give some hand holds. That's also a free download there. I would love to connect you there on any social media. I'm on most of them. Awesome. Everyone, go get a copy of The<i> Sex Talk</i><i>You Never Got: Reclaiming the</i><i>Heart of Masculine Sexuality.</i> We'll have links for everyone and everything in the show notes. Sam, thank you so much again for taking time with us today. Brian, it's so good to be with you. What a fascinating conversation. I know I didn't get to ask half the questions I had, so we may have Sam back on another episode or just host a workshop with you. I'd love to hear from you if you have questions for him, and we'll put something together. If you enjoyed the episode as much as I did, be sure to follow Sam and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links in all the things in the show notes at brokentobeloved. org. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, our work is made possible by our generous donors. If this has been helpful to you, would you consider joining us today at brokentobeloved. org/support? Coming up on the show, we have Beth Allison Barr, Adam Young, Diane Langberg, and lots more. Be sure to subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically. If you would leave us a rating and review or share with your friends much. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. Here's to moving toward healing and wholeness together. I'll see you next time.