EVENT DETAILS
Brain Heart World
3:45 to 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, June 23
The docuseries will be screened starting at 4 p.m., with the 30-minute panel discussion taking place immediately after and then a 15-minute Q&A starting at 6 p.m.
Princess Theatre, 10337 82 Ave., in Edmonton
Admission is $10. Tickets at eventbrite.ca
Special notice: This documentary is intended for anyone aged 10 and up. Anyone under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.
Porn is a problem that is bad for your body, your mind, and the world, said the organizer and contributors to a film screening and panel discussion to be held on Sunday.
“I see the suffering and I see what people are looking for. I also see that there are really limited resources out there,” said Sabrina Souto, holistic health practitioner and the founder of Fertile Way Wellness, an Edmonton-based sexual and reproductive health clinic.
That damage isn’t only direct to the individual; there’s a lot of indirect damage that afflicts society in general. Soutu even sees it affecting her six-year-old son and others in his age group.
“He's just getting into the school system. Even though we monitor a lot of things from him, when I look at his friends, I see that they’re I would say highly sexualized in a way that I can't quite pinpoint.”
The documentary was produced by Fight the New Drug, a U.S.-based non-religious and non-legislative organization that strives to guide people toward making informed decisions about porn. It does so with the help of scientific research, facts and personal accounts, including that of Elizabeth Smart. The American woman was 14 in 2002 when she was kidnapped and repeatedly sexually assaulted over a nine-month period.
The film also includes the account of a 21-year-old man named Ryan, whose porn usage had a devastating impact on his thought patterns and his behaviours.
“(It) changed the way I viewed girls. I started to put them as objects of my use,” he said in discussing how it also led to his incarceration after sexually touching a young girl. He was only 13 at the time. “It changed my mind. It changed the way I viewed people. It changed my expectations. It changed ... everything about me, besides my physical appearance. Mentally, it just ripped me apart.”
The panel hopes to provide a well-rounded and sometimes humorous discussion of porn and its effects. Souto will be joined by people who have been involved in sex work, health professions, and non-profit advocacy organizations, among others. This includes Kate Quinn, the executive director of CeaseNow (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation); Nathalie Jackson, a healer and sexual shadow work retreat facilitator; and Mark Lenyk, the facilitator with the Mankind Project, a global network of free peer-facilitated men’s groups and supports men in leading lives of integrity, authenticity, and service. An unnamed high school student will be there too, speaking about how porn affects her and her peers’ lives.
Souto will also be joined by retired exotic dancer Tacey Deering and St. Albert-raised burlesque dancer who goes by her professional name, Layla Le Lay. They both speak intelligently and ardently about the importance of open discussion about sexual health.
“I can see how porn is changing our perspectives, our brains, our views, our heart, our love. We are learning behaviours that aren't reality. If we're watching this and we bring that to a relationship, it's affecting intimacy,” Deering said, adding she recently left the sex industry, which dramatically skewed her ability to have healthy relationships over 20 years.
“It affected intimacy in a major way. From my perspective, what we see is not reality. What we're looking at, what we're watching, and what we're feeding our brains and our hearts is not reality. We try and take that into a relationship and it does not work. It attracts the wrong types of people. It isn't food for soul, so to speak.”
She is also the mother of three and has a deep concern about how porn is going to affect their lives too. The good news is that the doors of communication are open with her teens.
“We're talking about it. They want to have somebody to go to and get good information and give them different choices. They're actually craving that. They don't want to learn this through technology.”
Le Lay is still active as an entertainer and she’s also a psychology student who hosts sexual empowerment workshops for women. There are two major points that she hopes to contribute to the discussion. The first is what she calls the capitalist approach to pornography and she makes a strong point about it.
“They essentially are trying to develop the perfect consumer. By doing that, it's setting unrealistic expectations on what both the female and male body is supposed to look like and do. A big thing that I bring in is the analogy that porn is fiction and it is designed to be fiction but it is not presented as fiction. It is tailored sex, which is not reality,” she began, adding that it’s very difficult for many to perceive that it’s fake.
She also firmly believes in a proactive approach to the discussion. In general, things are far more reactive and unreasonable toward the topic, especially because of the Internet.
“I don't think we are honest with each other about how young sexuality starts, and how we need to be catching these conversations way earlier than we're comfortable with. With the accessibility of the Internet, it's happening, and it's happening way faster than we want it to. If we're not talking about it and we're not having those healthy conversations, there's so much accessibility that anyone could find out at any point.”
She said parents need to set boundaries with their children. Porn, she said, does not display healthy boundaries. Without them, she continued, the reality is that you’re not going to stop a 14-year-old boy from viewing porn if he wants to.
Those who can’t attend the presentation on Sunday can still view the docu-series by visiting brainheartworld.org.
