Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep937: The Great Sex Rescue: Sheila Wray Gregiore and Rebecca Lindenbach

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Sheila has written seven books including award-winning book The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex and the forthcoming The Great Sex Rescue, which she coauthored with her daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach. Both Sheila and Rebecca speak and write about a Christian view of sex, often correcting problems created by a purity culture approach to sex.  The Great Sex Rescue https://amzn.to/3zvrYda Sheila’s blog: https://tolovehonorandvacuum.com Bare Marriage podcast (wherever you listen to podcasts) https://twitter.com/sheilagregoire https://instagram.com/sheilagregoire https://instagram.com/rebeccalindenbach Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. The Theology in the Raw Exiles in Babylon conference is right around the corner, March 31st through April 2nd. We're talking about race. We're talking about politics. We're talking about sexuality. We're talking about gender, hell, and many other hot topics with an amazing lineup of incredible speakers. You can get all the info on my website, PrestonSprinkle.com. Sign up sooner than later, attend in person or virtually. Prestonspringle.com for all the info. My guests, plural, today are Sheila Rae Gregoire and her daughter, Rebecca Lindbach. Both of them are authors. Sheila has written several books and Rebecca has written a couple books.

The most recent is the forthcoming book that they wrote together with Joanna Sawatsky. Sorry, I didn't practice that pronunciation before recording this. The book is called The Great Sex Rescue, which is based on a groundbreaking in-depth survey of 22,000 Christian women talking about sex, stereotypes about female sexuality, male sexuality, and the damage that the purity culture has done on future sex lives and marriages with conservative or evangelical Christian women. This podcast is pretty provocative. So this is, let me just say extra raw. We talk about all kinds of things in a way that we are not, we didn't edit it. We just talked freely. We talked about sex. We talked about sexual anatomy. We get pretty graphic in what I think is a very honest and tasteful way. So just to be aware, if you're playing this podcast out loud with children

present, you might want to turn it down a little bit or put in your iPods. So I am so excited for you to engage this super, super important and provocative conversation. So please welcome back, not back to another episode of Theology to Raw. Happy New Year again to you. I'm here with Sheila Rae Gregoire. I hope I got that right. Very good. And Rebecca Lindenbach. I didn't double check this. Okay, cool.

I'm terrible at pronunciations, so I'm really excited right now. We're off to a good start. I have had a lot of people tell me, you need to have Sheila in particular on the show. So we share a lot of followers, apparently. Yes, I'm not surprised yeah so i think people are gonna be really excited about i i had already booked this podcast when i fished on twitter for like who do you want me to have on and um i had already booked it but then a lot of people were like oh you gotta have sheila and you'd love

talking to her so um why don't you begin both of you just give a quick snapshot of what is the kind of work you guys do and then I want to talk about this study you've done with 20,000 women because I think that'll be super eye-opening well I've been I've been I started mommy blogging in 2008 when Rebecca was my daughter yeah what were you you were young Um, so I was like all marriage and parenting and homemaking and organizing and all that, all that stuff. Okay. I was in that space and I found that the more I talked about sex, the more my traffic grew because people like talking about sex. And so I started talking about that more and more researched it 2012. Um, the good girl's guide to great sex came out, which was a pretty big book at the time and I just kept

writing about sex and when Rebecca graduated from university started working for me on the blog we created a libido course 31 days to great sex all this stuff we were pumping out great info on how to have great sex and everyone still had the same problems and it was it was really frustrating it was like we were hitting a wall. And then January 2019, I had a migraine and I didn't want to work. And I was procrastinating and I was on Twitter. And people were fighting over whether women needed respect or love. And they were referring to the book Love and Respect with Emma Snegrich.

And I thought to myself, I have that book upstairs and I've never read it because I didn't read marriage books in case I plagiarized anything. So I had all these books, but I'd never read them. So I went and got it and I turned to the sex chapter and it was like a nuclear bomb went off in my living room. And I started FaceTiming Rebecca and Joanna, another young woman who worked for me. And I'm like, he is said, he said, if your husband is typical, he has a need you don't have. Wow. So sex is all about the guy. He said, a husband needs physical release. That's what sex is about is a husband's physical release. Well, women need emotional release. I don't even know what that is. Like I think about, I think about Sandra Bullock and the

late Betty White, the late Betty White, you know, in, in, in the proposal when they're, when they're doing that scene in the woods, like that's what I think. But, you know, and, and he said all this awful stuff. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is like the best selling Christian marriage book. Maybe this is why people are still having trouble with sex, no matter how much good stuff we put out. And so, um, we wrote a whole series on love and respect. We had hundreds upon hundreds of people commenting on how that book enabled abuse in their marriage. Um, we, we created a report, sent it into focus on the family cause they publish it. They ignored us. And so we decided, well, they can ignore almost a thousand women, but can they ignore 20,000? And we just decided

to do the largest study that's ever been done to academic standards and figure out if evangelical teachings are wrecking sex and marriage for women. Yeah. So tell, I want to know all about that study. So when did that, when did you do that study? Can you maybe describe the nature of it? And then I really want to get to the results of it. Yeah, of course. So we did the study in like the fall of 2019. We just, and we ended it winter of 2020, like right before COVID. So this is where, this is where me and our co-author Joanna Sawatsky did a lot of the work. I have education in psychometrics and survey creation through my undergraduate university degree. I really focused on that.

And our co-author Joanna is an epidemiology statistician. She knows numbers really, really well. And so she and I really developed this survey and we, um, measured three main things. First of all, we measured marital satisfaction and we used just looking for how happy are you in your marriage. Then we did sexual satisfaction. We asked questions about, you know, do you, or so we're going to, we're going to use a lot of words here. This is Theology in a Raw. You probably cannot.

If someone has an eight-year-old in the next room, okay? So we ask questions like, do you orgasm? Are you able to get reliably aroused during sex? Like these kinds of questions. And then finally what we asked were, we asked questions about whether or not they believed common evangelical teachings about sexuality and marriage that are found in these bestselling books. So we didn't ask them things like, have you read Love and Respect? But rather what we asked was, a wife is obligated to give her husband sex and he wants it, you know, do you

agree? And those kinds of questions. So then what we could do was we could cross-reference and we could say, okay, of the people who believed X, did they have better or worse sex lives than people who don't believe X? But on top of that, we actually measured it in two points of time. We measured it either in high school and today or during premarital counseling and today based on the message. Because we're assuming that high school girls are not being told a wife is obligated to give her husband sex. We're assuming she's going to be told the modesty messages or the boys will push your sexual boundaries messages. So what that means is we could actually see if there was a causal relationship to a certain extent, if there was more likely to have a causal relationship.

So if you believed something before you got married and that made it more likely that your marriage is worse, it could be that hearing this belief even in high school primes you to have a worse marriage and worse sex life. Wow. Golly. So yeah, what is the message that women are – sorry, I have several different questions coming together. Welcome to my brain. These are best-selling books.

So people are buying these books or reading these books, and you're saying they are really not accurate. Or how would you describe the books? Is it just playing into stereotypes? Are they capturing a glimpse of truth? How would you describe it? I would say that all of them say things that sound just right enough that you miss the poison in them. So for instance, we know, multiple studies have shown, that the majority of marriages between a man and a woman, the man will have the higher sex drive, the majority. Okay. We know that from a lot of different studies. So what these books will do is they'll then talk about how sex is for men and men need sex in a way that women can never understand. You know, they talk

about how, you know, this is something where women, it's your duty to provide this because you are the only way that he can. And so if you don't, then you are leaving him out. Like he's starving in a desert with no water and no food. And this is the most cruel thing you could do to someone. And you can never understand it because you don't want sex as much as he does. And so what they do is they take that little bit where it's like men tend to have a higher libido than women. And they forget all the nuance, which is a lot of women have higher libidos than men. And also simply having a felt need for sex does not mean that you don't understand each other's experience. There's all the nuance that they completely miss. And what

that means is over time, again and again and again, these bestselling books have completely erased women's experience at the expense of, in essence, men's desire for ejaculation. Yeah. So what we did essentially was we did this huge survey. Our research project was really, there were four elements to it. So we did the huge survey and it was like a minimum 130 questions. Like it took about half an hour of a woman's life and we had 20,000 people answer it. So if you were one of those 20,000, thank you very much. Thank you. Then we did a huge literature review. So we looked at all the peer-reviewed literature in academia. We actually did the literature review.

I do stickler. We did the literature review first. So we knew what to ask. But to find out what does help women's sexual and marital satisfaction. And then from that, we created a rubric of 12 markers of healthy sexuality. So these 12 things are what are important. And then we read the 10 bestselling marriage books and six iconic sex books to see what they said. And what we found is that over and over again, they had very harmful messages. Yeah, they failed. There are some that passed so it was possible to pass.

Yeah, Gift of Sex by Cliff and Joyce Penner scored 47 out of 48 on our rubric. So amazing book. Boundaries in Marriage scored 42 out of 48. Really good book, highly recommend. Love and Respect literally scored zero. So when you say scored you're measuring that against

what 20,000 women have said? Against both the results from our own survey but also um the results of other peer-reviewed research okay what was the first one you mentioned they got a 47 out of 48 the gift of sex by cliff and joyce penner i've heard i've heard of it but i've not yeah i'm not i don't contrary to what people may i don't sit around reading sex books. Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with Love and Reset. I think I've read parts of it way long, when it first came out. What are some dangerous messages? What are some of the main threads you see that through the ones that are scoring low? What are some of the things, the main themes that

you see come up again and again? Well, we identified four really harmful teachings. And in Lord of the Rings terminology, I like to say like there's one ring that rules them all, like one teaching that's over everything. And it would be that idea that if your husband is typical, he has a need you don't have, that Emerson Egrich said, that sex is primarily for men. So all of the teachings really flow from that, that sex is a man's need, not a woman's need. And then we had four specific things that we found were particularly harmful. There were other ones, but these are the four main ones we talk about in our book. And things like all men struggle with lust. It's every man's battle. Even if you don't believe it, even if

a girl is merely taught that in youth group, okay, so she's a teenager and she is taught that all men struggle with lust, it's going to lower her libido when she gets married. It's going to cause her to trust her husband less, even if he doesn't watch porn, even if he doesn't show any signs of lusting, she's going to trust him less. It's going to make her marital satisfaction go down. It's a toxic message, even if she never believes it. If she grows up in a community that is always teaching this, that is making sex sound degrading, it's going to really affect her. Wow. So how would you communicate that? What's the better message with regard to lust? Because a lot of men do struggle, right? Or a lot of just people struggle with lust, I would say. Men

probably on average more. Exactly. And this whole idea of reframing is actually one of the big things that we do in our book, is this idea that it's not just about calling out what's bad, it's also about how do we then move forward? How do we find the healthy other way? And yeah, exactly. So for this whole idea of all men struggle with lust, really what we just have to start telling people is lust is a sin that a lot of people struggle with. You know, sure. Statistically speaking, men might struggle with it more than women, but that doesn't

mean that women don't. And this is not a battle that is going to be completely unwinnable because we know that Christ and the Holy Spirit can work through us to help us overcome all sin. And so this is... Yeah, but also the way that you defeat lust is by... Oh, you're going to go there? Okay, I just totally preempted you. That's fine. The way you defeat lust is by treating other people as whole people made

the image of God. It's not by bouncing your eyes the way that Steve Arterburn talks about in Every Man's Battle. It's by seeing people as whole people made the image of God. Yeah, it's not by seeing women as threats, but rather as learning to see women as sisters, as like bearers of God's image. That mentality is different. So how does this show up later in life then? You said, I mean, when they start hearing these messages as a teenager, early 20-something, then they get married, then 15 years into marriage, got a couple of kids. How have you seen this message rear its head up later on in marriage?

Well, for this particular one, I think that this really, what it does is it poisons the water for the woman, I think, against her husband, right? So think about it. If you're a 15-year-old in youth group and you're hearing every single boy that you know is constantly going to be struggling if you wear spaghetti strap tank tops, and not only the boys, but the elders and the pastors and your friends' dads, because that is what girls are told, specifically in a lot of Shanti Felden's work. She writes to girls and says that, you know, it's not just the boys your age, but it's also your friends' dads who are going to be looking at you and have this automatic response that, you know, is incredibly creepy. is incredibly creepy. And I think that what happens is if you're growing up in this culture, and then you meet a man who you think seems really great, you're still going to believe

in the back of your mind, but he's still just like all the others, because all men are like this. So no matter what he does, you can never fully trust him. Because even if he's never given you a chance to, sorry, even if he's never given you a reason to not trust him, you've been told from the moment that you hit puberty, when 11-year-olds are told they have to start covering up or else they're going to start inciting lust in the men in the pews. You're told this from such a young age that you almost kind of believe, well, maybe he's just never given me a reason to not trust him because I've still had sex, because I've still made sure that his cup is full, as they often say. And so it becomes this almost self-fulfilling prophecy because you keep having sex to make sure that he doesn't watch porn or lust or struggle. And so he doesn't watch porn or lust or struggle. So you keep having sex. And then down the line, you realize that your entire marriage has been, you know, maybe it's only a small seed, but it's a small seed of fear and distrust.

That's always been there that didn't need to be. But I think it even goes further than that. Like, okay, what is sex? Yeah. Because that's, that's part of the problem. Like if I were to, if I were to ask you, Preston, like, did you have sex last night? Which I'm not going to do. If I were to ask you, Preston, like, did you have sex last night, which I'm not going to do.

But if I were to, what everyone thinks I'm asking is, like, did you put your penis into her vagina, move around until you climaxed? Like, that's how we're defining it. But if that's our definition, she could be lying there making a grocery list in her head, right? She could be lying there in emotional turmoil, or she could even be in physical pain, and it would still count as having sex. And that is part of the problem, because the Bible does not define sex as merely intercourse, but our church culture does. And when we tell women, you need to have sex, or when we tell couples, sex is an important part of marriage, and what we mean is intercourse, then her experience is secondary. It doesn't really matter. Like the main thing is that he gets to ejaculate. How would you define sex? And yeah, what's a healthier?

I think there's three big things. In our book, in The Great Sex Rescue, we break it down into, I think, seven. But I'm not going to do seven because it's too hard to remember. There's three that you can remember that kind of encapsulate everything. But Genesis 4, verse 1, there's this weird verse. Adam knew his wife Eve and they conceived a son. And it's easy to read that and laugh and think God's embarrassed of using the real word. But the root word there for to know is the same root in the Psalms when David says, search me and know me, oh God. And God is telling us that sex is a deeply

intimate experience. It's a longing to be connected. And we see that in the way that God uses sexual imagery to talk about his relationship with us. Like it isn't merely a physical act. It's a deeply intimate knowing of two people. In Song of Solomon, we know it's awfully pleasurable for both. The woman in Song of Solomon gets to talk more than the guy. She's having a really good time. So, you know, it's intimate. It's pleasurable for both. And in 1 Corinthians 7, we know it's completely mutual. Everything that she gets, he gets, and vice versa. So it's this intimate, pleasurable, mutual experience. That's what God intended, and we have reduced it to his ejaculation. And it's created, here's just one stat that a lot of people don't know.

Evangelical women have more than twice the rate of sexual pain disorders as the general population. Why is that? That's one of our big research questions, and we figured it out. And so we're actually presenting at the American Physical Therapy Conference next month with some of our findings. But it flows down from what we call the obligation sex message. That's the message that we found was most correlated with vaginismus. And everyone needs to know the word vaginismus, okay? Everyone say it. Vaginismus. We all know erectile dysfunction, right? Like you watch, everyone knows what that is. Vaginismus is way more common in couples under the age of 40.

We found an incidence rate of about 22.6% and 7% to the point where penetration is impossible. And it's where the muscles in the vaginal wall contract or get really tight. And so sex either hurts or is impossible. And the obligation sex message is highly correlated with this. And the obligation sex message says you are obligated to give your husband sex when he wants it. And if a woman believes that, her chance of experiencing pain increases to almost the same statistical effect as if she had been abused. Because both abuse and the obligation sex message tell a woman, you don't matter. He has the right to use you. And our bodies interpret that as trauma.

Well, if, I mean, and I didn't, it's almost eight o'clock in the morning here where I'm at. I didn't wake up thinking I'd talk about the muscles of vaginal walls, but this is actually important. Because that sounds to me like that's like a lot like that's that's in the brain that's the brain sending the message to your vagina and close like the muscles are related to some sort of psychological response right is that is that what you're getting at or it's both and okay yeah there's there's a site like obviously you know believing something is a psychological experience. But then as you have the physical response, then the physical response can start happening just because – Automatically.

Because your body learns this is not a safe thing. My body must close up. So it's both a psychological and a physical thing, which is which is why frankly a lot of times just counseling doesn't work you need to also get like physiotherapy from a pelvic floor physiotherapist to help you retrain how your muscles themselves work how to you know learn how to use those muscles again in a way that doesn't cause pain in a way that you can help relax them and and relearn how to even if it's sort of subconscious it still seems like the roots of it are in some sort of message they've heard like if somebody if it's sort of subconscious it still seems like the roots of it are in some sort of message they've heard like if somebody never heard some sort of kind of

message like that it sounds like a large number of women well that's what your study showed right that's what our study showed is that it was because they were exposed to these teachings and believed them yeah the women who who reported, I only have sex because I have to like their, their pain rates were just ridiculously high. And can you imagine as well, taking that into consideration, these are women who are experiencing pain to such an extent that sex is, is it's not even just like, ah, it hurt for a little bit and then we were okay. No, this is pain to the extent that sex is not pleasurable. Sex is actively a bad experience and they're still having sex because they feel they have to. Because they've been told their whole life that you're not allowed to deprive him. And anything that he feels like you just

would never be able to understand the extent of it. And so that means that no matter what you're going through, what he's going through by not having sex is worse. Yeah, exactly. Wow. And you will, he will, he will not feel loved. It will be impossible. Like Emerson Egbert says, it will be impossible for him to feel respected or loved if you don't have sex with him. And so you're not allowed to deprive him unless you're taking time away for prayer. Yeah. And I guess, and the question that we're really trying to ask is at what point do we get to say that women matter too? We're not saying that women should matter more than men. What we're just saying is that

if you are a good Christian man, why isn't it expected that your wife being uncomfortable or in pain or psychologically troubled or anything like that, why wouldn't that be expected to make you not want to have sex right now? Do you think that the couples are even aware of – I don't know if you found in your research, but do they talk about it? Is she like, this hurts, I don't want to do this? And he's like, oh, let's – why is that? Or is it just kind of just hush-hush? Like she just kind of doesn't want to talk about it or both yeah i think there's both we talked to a lot of i talked to a lot of women in focus groups that i ran uh to try to tease out

some more of these more complicated nuanced relationships and i talked to a lot of women whose husbands knew that they they kind of didn't really have a high libido and didn't really like sex, but they hadn't ever actually really talked about, like, the fact that it hurt, or they felt dirty or gross about sex, or they felt like they were being used, or they felt emotionally distant after sex. They never talked about it. And then when they did talk about it, their husbands were like, well, gosh, I don't believe any of that stuff. I don't believe you have to have sex with me.

I want you to want to have sex with me. And if you don't, then I'm happy not having sex for a while while we sort this out. You know, these are husbands who are like, I'm not just four minutes away from like ruining our entire marriage with an affair. If you don't give me sex right now, like there's all these husbands who are thinking, I had no idea what my wife was being taught. So there's that half of it. And we actually found in our focus groups that a lot of times those husbands are actually the best healing forces in their wives' lives because they then proved to their wife, what you've been taught is not true. What you have been taught that I need and I think is not true, and I'm going to prove it to you. So those guys, we were like, good job.

We love you. And then there's the other side where the men have also heard this, and they've also internalized it. And then there's the other side where the men have also heard this and they've also internalized it. And they have created an expectation on their wives because of what the church has told them that has led to incredible sexual entitlement. So that their wife literally is there in pain. And he says, it's okay, I'll make it fast. Wow. Yeah. What are some, I'm curious, what are some general differences between men and women's

sexuality, libido, drive? Like, have you, because I mean, just to acknowledge up front that some of these general differences have been made absolute, maybe blown out of proportion, and yet there are general differences, right? Between female sexuality. Can you, in your work and research and discussions, like how would you, how would you describe in a more healthy way, different male, female sexualities per se? The first thing that I would say is the first thing we have to look at is the orgasm gap. Okay. Yeah. So the biggest difference in men and women's sexuality in general is that men orgasm really easily and women do not. Um, our research of E of primarily

evangelical women found that 47% of women reliably orgasm, whereas, um, other studies have found, um, that over 95% of men. Well, our study, our, our, our followup survey of men, it's not in the great sex rescue, but it's, it's in our new book coming out in March, the good guy's guide to great sex found the 95% of evangelical men orgasm almost always are always. Yep. And, and other studies of non religious women have found around 63% of women orgasm reliably. So, um, and we do know that religion tends to actually reduce orgasm rate for women because of these toxic messages. So that makes sense that our numbers were slightly, slightly lower. So we need to, first of all, understand that there's something about how our bodies and our minds work. That means that in

essence, sex is going to be easier for men than it is for women. That's just a reality that I think that, you know, couples should go into their relationship knowing that she's not broken if what works for him doesn't work for her. Now, the other difference as well is that for women, a lot of the things that can quote unquote go wrong with sex are incredibly big deals. Like I will be honest here. Okay. Like sexual pain is a really, really difficult thing to experience. Um, it's really bad. And we, I talked about this in the book. I experienced incredibly bad sexual pain postpartum as a result of an incredibly bad third degree, almost fourth degree tear. Yeah. And I had primary vaginismus when we first got married.

Like we all – We're all preaching from experience. But it's one of those things where, you know, also if a woman is feeling like she's not safe having sex or anything like that. She also is the one who could get pregnant if something happens. And that alone is a really big vulnerability that men simply do not have. And I think that that's also a really important thing to recognize. And I think that that comes back to this whole call to love as Christ loved the church and love as you love your own body is take those experiences and, and, and really understand them and don't make her act like your body. You need to consider hers. Um, so that's, that's one thing. The other thing is that we do tend to see that men have a

higher libido than women, but it's not, it's not that different. No. Really? There's a lot of – yeah. So in – oh, gosh. Now I can't remember our exact numbers. I know. Okay. So 58% of men have the higher libido than their wives. In our study. In our study.

19% of women have the higher libido. And then in the other 23%, it's roughly equal. Yeah. So it's not like it's always the guy who wants it more. Interesting. And other studies have found that it's even more swayed towards women having the higher libido, especially in secular groups as well. So, yeah. So it really does seem like a lot of our evangelical teachings are artificially lowering women's libidos.

Yeah. And so we do see this difference. But again, our question is, is this a difference of gender or is this a difference of culture? Because there are other cultures that kind of saw women as the sexual ones and men were the holy ones who were trying to keep back from these over-sexualized women who were trying to get at them. Right. back from these over-sexualized women who are trying to get at them. And so like, I do think there's, there's a level where we have to question, is this something that we, that we're seeing because it's a God designed aspect of sexuality or our experience? Or is it because we happen to live in a culture that frankly tells women that sex is kind

of painful and bad and threatening. And it's something you just kind of have to do to make sure your man doesn't leave. Like maybe, maybe that might be part of it. Or like you said, 20 to 30% stat where it's like, how, yeah, how surprising is it if we have such a high rate of sexual abuse or, or like sexual assault that women are experiencing and then we're all of a sudden surprised they don't like sex as much as their husbands the nature nurture things really hard to unravel you know are we are we nurtured into believing these things and therefore we start embodying messages from a very early age or is it strictly just biological and i you know i i

try to read stuff on both sides there's some extreme views on this where it's like men and women are biologically basically exactly the same you know everything's culture nurturing us and other others like a steven pinker others was like no like we kind of pre-programmed in our biology to have a certain personality and that will never change you know i i do i've read several books on like just the role of testosterone in particular. It does seem that high levels of testosterone aren't neutral. Like that does do something. And there's two cases where this is especially interesting. One, when you have – I'm not going to open up this door.

But when you have trans men, so biological females transitioning to male and they take high levels of testosterone. And just, it's more, it's a little anecdotal. I don't know if there's data on this, but a lot of them experience just like skyrocketing, you know, sex drive where it's like, oh my gosh, I just want to have sex like all the time. You know, it's like, well, welcome to high tea, You know, it's like, well, welcome to high tea, you know. And other, Andrew Sullivan, he's a journalist, gay journalist, and he's had, he has HIV. And he, I remember listening to a podcast and he talked about as some, I don't even know the science behind this, but like he had to take testosterone as some sort of like therapeutic whatever to whatever. And he said, you know, his words, not mine.

It was hilarious. He's like, so I started taking testosterone and like he says, you know, small animals were running away from me. Like I was just, I was so off the chart horny, you know? So I do think, so here's where I think when we talk about libido and here's where I'm going to wander into an ignorant area. This is more me asking questions. Like when we talk about libido or sex drive, are we thinking too limited?

Because just because somebody with high levels of testosterone just wants to have like intercourse, you know, that's not – somebody else could have – not have that but still have a high libido. Maybe they have a more holistic view of sex where sex is the Genesis 2 for one thing. Like I have a strong desire to know and be known where intercourse may be part of that but it can't be reduced to just, I just want to have intercourse. Yeah. If I play into some of these old school stereotypes, just slap me on the head or something. But is there something just different about female sexuality in general that is more holistic, complex, one might even say beautiful and more humane or?

Well, I think that it comes back to, first of all, we do know that women's sexuality and women's sex drive is more easily affected by psychological state, by relational closeness, those kinds of things, which makes total sense. Again, like I said, women are the ones who get pregnant. If you are having sex with a man as a woman, you could become pregnant. That is a lot of resources that your body will need. That is incredibly stressful. You will have a baby to take care of. And so it makes sense that our sex drives are much more, in essence, trigger happy to turn off. Right?

Because it's like anything goes bad and it's like, oh, don't have sex with that person. They could get you pregnant. Yeah. And they're not safe. They're not safe. Whereas for men, again, it's like if you have sex and you get someone pregnant, I mean, this is going to sound bad, but you can just dip, right? Like you don't have the physical vulnerability in the same way. And so there is a level there, but that does not mean that women's sexuality,

I think this is where we get into a problem with how we talk about sex, where the idea that women's sexuality can turn off very quickly. Therefore, we assume that it also can't turn on very intensely. So the question is not whether or not, you know, men want sex more than women or any of these kinds of questions. It's about how do we find a situation where women's sexuality is allowed to flourish so that she feels safe, so she knows it's going to be pleasurable, so her body, you know, can just enjoy it without having to worry. Because frankly, I mean, if we're looking at how women and men are different, one of the big things that I find very ironic that we never talk about in all these gender discussions in the church is that women can have multiple orgasms and men can't. Yeah.

So who is, when you look at how our bodies are made. Yeah. Who is the more sexual? And when you look at how our bodies are made, yeah, women are the ones, women are the ones with the body part that is literally only for sexual pleasure. Um,

which is the clitoris for anyone who doesn't know that, um, you know, women are the ones who can have multiple orgasms that can last upwards of an hour. Um, women are, yes.

And the women, they haven't found an end point. No, they just stopped. They just stopped timing an hour. Yeah. Wow. No, they just stopped timing an hour. Yeah. Wow. So there is no scientific reason why a woman couldn't just have a continuous orgasm for hours at a time.

Yeah. Like over and over and over again. And so this is what I mean. Like there is a biological precedent to actually believe that women have a higher capacity for sexual experience than men do. We don't have a refractory period. We don't have a refractory period. Like all that sort of thing. And so this is the kind of thing where it's like,

is it that men just are hornier than women? Or is it that women have been put in a situation where they're not safe and so they're not able to experience the fullness of the sexuality that God designed for them. Yeah. And that's really what we're saying is that a lot of the reason that women feel unsafe isn't necessarily because of their husbands. It's because of these toxic messages that they've been filled with their whole lives in church, which makes sex sound really ugly. Like every man's battle literally said,

when your husband quits porn cold turkey, be like a merciful vial of methadone for him. Oh my gosh. Like, you know, he really wants the good stuff, but he'll put up with you. And then like sheet music, lehman said that your period is a difficult time for your husband and so your husband yes yes and so during poor man we have it so hard i'm telling you all those periods yes you need to you should give him oral sex or a hand job to get him through that difficult time and then later later on, he says, if you're not feeling your best, or if you're postpartum, you can give him a hand job or if you have a heavy period.

So and then Gary Thomas in his recent book, Married Sex, told women that husbands really like it when you give hand jobs postpartum because of how aroused you get. Like there's no, women do not get aroused giving hand jobs when they're postpartum because of how aroused you get. Like there's no, women do not get aroused giving hand jobs when they're postpartum. I don't like, I, it sounds like some fantasy. Again, some women, some women do. We know that some women have hormones. They're like, I want to get freaky and they go and they have fun. Good for you. Good for you. Yes. But the majority of women when they're postpartum do not want to be told this is a difficult time for your husband so make sure that you're also panting and moaning and making it really hot for him because you just

pushed a baby out two weeks ago yeah and can't have sex yet medically are there any books christian books that talk about how like men can serve women so that she like where hey okay you may not want to have sex but she's super horny here's what you can do to like basically flip the script is there anybody that also sex they do mention like of course a husband should also you know like help his wife out when he's not particularly feeling it but the difference is this is a false equivalency saying i'm just not really feeling into it. It's not the same thing as I literally had a C-section eight days ago. Like feeling I'm not into it. It's not the same thing as I am currently experiencing cramps so bad that like

I have to curl my toes to get through them because of my period. Like I'm not feeling like I want to have sex, but sure. I'll, I'll, you know, make you feel good. It's not the same thing as saying, you know, I've been up with the baby every single night breastfeeding, I have bleeding nipples, and I have hormones postpartum that are raging. And by the way, I just spent nine months, like depleting all of my body stores to grow a human being. And I just went through the most traumatic thing that my body's going to do in its entire life. But yeah, it's been six days. So I guess you need a handy. Can you tell that her baby is two months old right now? to do in its entire life. But yeah, it's been six days. So I guess you need a handy.

Can you tell that her baby is two months old right now? The difference is the difference is what the advice that's given to men can also be given to women. You know, sometimes you'd rather just watch Netflix or call a friend and chat or play video games. But you know what? Prioritize your relationship and say, this is going to be great for both of us and go have some sex. That can be said to both men and women. The problem is that the advice that's given to women can never be said to men because they, like, it simply is not a part of the life cycle for men to experience physical recovery the way that it is for women. Because there are women who every single month are going through horrific experiences on their periods.

There are women who are having a child every 18 months for like seven years of their life. And that means that that is approximately 10 months. Or Preston, have you ever heard of the 72-hour rule? No. Every woman has. Okay, pretty much. It's in every man's battle. Have you ever heard of the 72-hour rule? No. Every woman has. Every woman. Pretty much.

Evangelical. Yeah, it's in Every Man's Battle. It's in Power of a Praying Wife. It's in sheet music. I've heard it at women's conferences that men need sex every 72 hours. And we tried to figure out where this rule came from because all of these books had it. And they were all footnoting each other and i finally found it we looked in the medical literature like is there something

magical about hour 73 where men suddenly like just explode or something if they don't get sex because that is what we're in essence told us until they'll have extreme physical discomfort they won't be able they'll have really big issues with mood. And with lust. And with lust. Lust will pop up after 72 hours because men get so uncomfortable. Nothing in the medical literature about this. We finally traced it back to a book that James Dobson wrote in 1977. Really? Yes. He just says it. That men need sex at 72. But this has become gospel and it is told women, like Kevin Lehman in Sheet Music says, don't get married unless you're willing to have sex every 48 to 72 hours for the rest of your life. And he includes periods and the postpartum period in that. That's the issue.

It's like, you know, so- Well, the issue is Kevin Lehman in that section says that there are times you might want to abstain such as the postpartum, but then in the same book, he gives advice for women postpartum to give hand jobs. So which is it? Is she allowed to take any time off or is it that if you're not as good of a wife, you can take time off. But if you're really wanting to serve God and be a good Christian woman, you'll make sure that you get, you give him a handy when. And it's specifically because he can't last your whole period without watching porn yeah unless you're topping him up so i so a lot of this sounds like just hardcore late 80s early 90s purity culture stuff that's been so i i don't know i live in a different brand of evangelicalism so part of me is like oh yeah like 20 years ago we used to do all this purity stuff is this still very alive and well like married sex was written october 2021 then that's that's like gary thomas

okay oh wow okay and that and and i will say married sex um you know i think i think they tried to make it a lot more balanced yeah um but it's one of those things where the core messages are all still there you know they praise women for sending nude photos to their husbands, saying that it neurologically rewires his brain to get used to looking at his wife instead of pornographic images, which is just complete bunk. It tells women you should see giving sex to your husband in a similar way to how a parent sees feeding their newborn child in the middle of the night. Yeah. How a mom breastfeeds the newborn because they need it. And so, you know, yeah, it's going to feel like a sacrifice and obligation, but you love your baby. So why can't you service your husband? They have that kind of logic all through it. And it's, it's these kinds of things where, again, you know, women are told, give him hand jobs when

you're postpartum or on your period. Here's why he likes it so much. And then men are told, and maybe if you're not in the mood sometimes when she is, throw her one. It's not the same thing. Sheet music is an older book. I think it's 2008. Yeah, it's not that old. When you consider the fact that this is affecting people who have been married for maybe 15 years. They were married back in, you know, 2006 or so. And so

these kinds of books, they're still being touted today as the experts. I mean, Love and Respect is still one of the best selling marriage books out there. And it's still the most used marriage study in North American churches. Yeah. And it's, and I mean, the book literally has an example of a woman talking to her daughter who doesn't enjoy sex, their husband, and who's really struggling. And the mom says to her daughter, why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short amount of time and makes him so happy? And Egrich includes multiple O's. Like so happy. And I will say that this is the entire problem because if sex is taking such a short amount of time, that also might point to why she doesn't like it. I think we said in the book that we really can't understand why anyone expecting sex to feel good

for a woman would emphasize his brevity above all else. And this is the mentality where it's like, why would you deprive him of something that makes him so happy? And the question isn't, hey, why hasn't he made this good for you? The question isn't, how can we make this so that both of you can really enjoy the gifts that God has given you? Instead, it's, oh, this selfish woman, this selfish woman who is once again making this poor man not get the sex that he so deserves. And it's this whole mentality that, you know, women really can't enjoy sex. Women just aren't really sexual.

Some women will tell you that they like sex and that's fine. But we all know that women don't really like sex as much as men. And so we just have to put up with it and make sure that he gets enough so he doesn't look at porn or look at other women. And it's just, it's such a, it's such a distressingly depressing view of men. It's a distressingly depressing view of sex, of marriage. And no wonder we're seeing so many people, you know, wake up 15, 20 years into marriage and realize what the heck have I done with my life? Because we're giving them a terrible, terrible playbook. And it's not just happening in the 1990s and 2000s. Again, like this same thing, these same messages, they might be given with

a lot more kind of PC language now, but they're still being given today. Yeah. And it's still the main issue in that we, that we read about over and over again and evangelicalism, or even when you listen to sermons about sex, it's, you need to make this priority. You need to have more sex as if the main problem is frequency. Yeah. So frequency is the problem we need to solve. What we found is that in marriages where she orgasms frequently, she feels emotionally close to him during sex, they have high marital satisfaction, there's no sexual dysfunction, and there's no porn use, frequency takes care of itself. Like if sex is good for her and she feels connected, frequency is not an issue. So if frequency is an issue, there's something else going on. And it's probably the orgasm cap or any number of things.

And yet instead of talking about those number of things, we're simply telling women you need to have more sex. What I've said is what I would love to see as a big change is that frequency is, is less the measure of a good sex life. Because by the way, I do want to say this other studies and secular studies as well have found that frequency is actually not a predictor of marital or sexual satisfaction. It's not a good predictor. Um, there's other predictors that actually show whether or not the marriage is, is good that are much more reliable than sexual frequency. Um, but rather sexual frequency is more like the canary in the coal frequency. Um, but rather sexual frequency is more like the canary in the coal mine. You know, so if we're, if, if, if she's only wanting to

have sex once every three months, if that, let's have a conversation about what went wrong. You know, maybe life is untenable. Maybe she's overstressed because he's just totally disconnected. Um, you know, maybe she's never had an orgasm because sex has never taken more than 45 seconds. You know, like there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things we have to ask about first. And, um, I think that if we started seeing frequency and even, even incredibly low libidos as a canary in the coal mine versus the problem or the goal, we'd actually get back to that kind of three-factored approach to sexuality where we focus on the mutual intimate and pleasurable experiences that god has designed into sex

and when something goes off we can go back to those three things say okay which of these have we are missing which these are missing in terms of libido like is it and again i'm i'm drawing on i don't know if this is a stereotype or whatever but like that – yeah, how does male and female libido change over time? Like I've heard like men's libido drops off earlier than women and women, does it actually kind of go up or is that – There's a lot of questions about that and there's a lot of questions about why. go up? There's a lot of questions about that. And there's a lot of questions about why the one thing that I've seen, um, proposed in the literature recently is that because women tend to be the default parent and the default homemaker, it makes sense that women's libidos would skyrocket in their late forties to early fifties, because what happens, the kids leave the home. And so he

hasn't necessarily had as much on his plate their entire marriage. And so in your 30s, when you have a four-year-old and a two-year-old who only want mommy in the middle of the night, it makes sense if he's the one getting sleep and he's the one who isn't having to think about, oh, Johnny's homework is due. And by the way, the piano recital is at Thursday at four. And it makes sense that he just had more kind of mental, um, uh, freedom for all those years. There's that question. There's also the question of, you know, all these studies, uh, often forget to include that women are pregnant and postpartum and breastfeeding in their twenties and thirties, a lot of the time in these kinds of marriages. And so if you have that kind of hormonal swing, your whole twenties and thirties up and down and

up and down and up and down, it also makes sense if for one of you it's kind of steady that, you know, libido just seems to always be higher. I think if we started looking at libido more as we looked at it less in male in male view, because it is a male view to assume that your libido should be the same all the time. Um, because women are such cyclical beings, um, you know, even within month to month, you know, you have experiences where your libido is incredibly high. Ovulation is really high. And then the next week it plummets. And the week after that, you want sex more, but you're really annoyed at him. So it's like, it's just, I just think that if we were able to, to stop judging women based on how we measure up to men's experience and rather look at us as, as, as, you know, we're, we are, we have different experiences because of our hormonal makeups, because of how our bodies

work because of our experiences. And if we started looking at that, I think that a lot of women will be able to feel a lot less broken about their sexuality where it's like, oh, like, I haven't wanted sex in three months. It's like, yeah, you had a baby two months ago. Like, I don't know, maybe we give you a little bit of a break and we recognize what sexuality can look like and how maybe this is a point of time where sexuality is more about him helping you relax so that then you can enjoy sex together instead of how it was before when you could be ready in three minutes yeah yeah right like we need to talk about this more as a cyclical experience because there are differences we're not gonna say there's not

differences lots of studies have found that but i i do think that we also need to look at why are the differences there and not just assume it's like oh women just don't really hit peak sexuality until their 40s or 50s it's like well maybe maybe it was too much on their plate for 20 years right is there something like like low libido linked to like stress in life and if you're raising three four or five kids and just yes like i would have i mean just anecdotally i know that's true yes and mental load mental load is huge women bear the women bear the majority of the mental load like just having to make having to remember when the dentist appointment is that mom's anniversary is next month and i have to send a card um that little

johnny has to go to a birthday party on saturday and we need to buy a present and karate the the karate uniform's not washed and we borrowed ben's cleats last week and we have to return them like like having to keep track of all of that stuff um it just really wears on a woman and she bears the the majority of it in most marriages and you know you split up the mental load and suddenly her libido flourishes and is the female sexuality and whenever i say anything like that just on general not not absolute but like is is libido wrapped it well i've heard and maybe this comes from every man's battle i don't know but like men can compartmentalize a little bit so if they have like several things going on they still have this compartment of like this libido compartment that's

less intertwined with everything else where women it does tend to be more intertwined or is that again no no no that's fine that people have said that for a long time a lot of research is actually coming out that is a question of whether or not it's compartmentalized versus whether or not men have been told to shuttle all of their emotions into just one aspect of their being which is so a man has a really stressful job at work but he can still have sex whereas a woman has a really stressful day at work and she feels like, and she might feel like, I just can't even think about that right now. But what is it in our culture? Our culture has told men the only appropriate emotion that you're allowed to have is horniness, right? Horniness and anger. That's what men experience. And so if you have all these things that are going

on, it's actually often a lot easier for men to then turn to sex in one way. The other way, of course, is that a lot of research has found that for a lot of men, they actually also find that stress and busyness and all these things really does lower the libido. So there's kind of two sides of it. compartmentalize a little bit more is first of all, a privilege, because the reason men are able to compartmentalize is because frankly, if they forget something, there's someone else there to figure it out. A lot of time it's their wife. Um, so you can be like, okay, like we can think about the kids later. And she's like, but then what if we forget it? I'm the last line of defense. What if we forget it? I'm the last line of defense.

And that's really what mental load comes down to is the men kind of get to live a little bit easier knowing I'm not the last line of defense. Everything will still be fine even if I drop the ball because she knows where all the balls are. And then on top of that, you know, there it is a little bit of a of a so that is true for a lot of men. But then for the men who do have a lot of stress, who do take on the mental load, who have a lot of stuff going on as well, it actually, they, their sex drive is quite fluctuate, like does actually fluctuate as well. There's a lot of studies that actually show that the more invested a dad is in the first three months, their child's life, the lower his sex drive is for those first three months. Yeah. is in the first three months of their child's life, the lower his sex drive is for those first three months.

Yeah. So like actual like testosterone levels are lower. Yeah. Oxytocin levels are higher. So in essence, if a dad is really is helping with the middle of the night feedings, is changing all the diapers, is taking care of his wife postpartum, doing all these things, it actually will even be easier for him to go without sex because that's how his brain responds.

Well, that's – I just well that's that's i just read the book um carol hooven from harvard on it's called t uh i forget the subtitle it's on testosterone and um she spent her whole life studying to stop and she said that i remember seeing there's several studies have shown both in animals primates and humans that went like testosterone levels go down when when get married, settle down, and they're more invested in their children, which is really unique among, I think, primates and humans. Yeah, that's what I've seen too.

Yeah, and so that's why so much violent crime and stuff is done by typically younger single men and fighting and stuff. That competition is there, but when men settle down, some of that goes down. I was kind of disappointed. I'm like no you know because every guy wants like no my t levels are off the chart you know and here i am with four kids and you know i'm 46 i'm like yeah i think my butt kicked in a fight right now whereas 20 years ago man i would you know um i thought that was interesting i mean again the nature nurture thing is so, like you said, though, like it's so intertwined, you know, like our biology is not disconnected from our social surroundings and messages we're hearing. Like it's so complex.

What about the theory? I almost call it a myth, but I'll let you call it a myth if it is a myth. The whole like, you know, women, it takes a long time to sex begins in the kitchen. You know, if i really want to have sex in the night i'm going to be doing the dishes in the morning hi honey i just took care of the dishes for you and it's a slow cook oven or whatever the metaphor is and men it's just kind of like bam you know it can they can get aroused super quickly is that is that have you seen that to be is that true or is that more mythical or is it i like this one okay I like this one. Okay, good. Okay. This one, it is a very, it's a myth in the way that people often try to actually apply it.

So what this often leads to is a man says, I want to have sex. So I'm going to clean the house so I can get sex. Right? And what does that lead to? It leads to her being like, you know, maybe she gives him sex. Maybe he learns that when I clean, I get sex. But that doesn't necessarily actually mean that it was good for her. view of a man with a mop is just, Oh yeah, like come take me. Nothing like that. What it is, is that women need to know that they have a partner. They need to know they're not alone. They need to know it's not all on their shoulders. And so it's not about, I'm going to do my chores so that I can get some nookie. It's about a lifestyle where regardless of how much sex

you're having, I will be your partner. I am an adult. You don't have to take care of me. You don't have to be my mom. I'm a fully grown man. And so, yeah, I can clean up my socks and put them in the hamper and I can do dishes and I'm not going to make your life more difficult. And so that is really, I think what often unlocks women's sexuality a little bit more, where it's like, it's not sexy to feel like you have to be a mom to the fully grown man that you married. It's just not sexy. It's really off-putting for a lot of women to walk into a room and see that it is an utter disaster and it doesn't need to be, but this is a 42 year old man who's acting like he's still 14 years old with Mountain Dew cans all over his bedroom.

It's not sexy. So I don't actually know how much it is that it turns on women's sex drive as much as it stops diminishing them. Anecdotally, everything you're saying, that's 100% true. I think what you're really getting at though, Preston, is the difference between what Emily Nagoski called a spontaneous versus responsive libido. Yes. In that, in that some people, and especially men, but women can have it as well, have just more of a felt need for sex. Like I like to explain it, how, um, movies and TV shows all present sex drives and libidos as if everybody is spontaneous.

Right. So you're together and you spontaneous, right? So you're together and you pant, right? You're panting and then you start to kiss and your clothes come off and you end up in bed. And that's how sex is always portrayed. Like that's the order you pant and then you kiss and then the clothes and bed. And so that's how we think of libido, pant, kiss, close bed. But what if you're at home and you're not panting? Like, does that mean that you don't want sex? And for some people, the panting comes first. For other people, the kissing and the touching come first, and then you start to pant. And that's more of a responsive libido. And more women have a responsive libido, and more men have a spontaneous libido,

but there's a lot of overlap. And so to say that men are like this and women are like this isn't entirely true. And both of us can go up and down on this one. But for a lot of women, and we actually measured this, a responsive libido and a spontaneous libido can both get you to the same place. It doesn't mean that one person is more sexual than the other. And that's the problem is that we tend to portray the person with a spontaneous libido who just wants to right away. They're the more sexual one.

But if, if, if two women, and we measured this, if two women start having sex, one is already aroused and the other one isn't aroused but is confident that she's going to get there, they end the sexual encounter with the same positive feelings and experiences. So, you know, they feel close to their husbands. They feel like it was a great time. They enjoyed it, et cetera. So it's not about whether you're panting first. It's about whether you're sureing first, it's about whether you're sure you're going to get there. I mean, honestly, from everything we're talking about here,

it just goes back to the fact that the creator seems like the creator, if there's a creator who designed this sexually, that he designed this sexual experience to be holistic and within some kind of committed relation like everything we're saying is like well there's this factor that's related to this and stress and connection and and holistically knowing and loving the other person and being mutual and humble and serving like there's so many relational things that go into a good sex life that the whole idea of just one-off one-night stands and stuff just doesn't, it seems to go against the way the creator has designed us. Is that, I don't want to make an absolute moral argument, but it seems to play a role.

I wouldn't say therefore, you know, that's why sex outside of marriage isn't moral. Like I think there's more to it than that. But I think that there's a good argument that sex within that committed relationship has the ability to just be all that it's supposed to be. I think a lot of people, especially who grew up in the church, they were told sex is going to be bad unless you're married. And then they have sex and they're not married. They're like, well, that was great. Everyone lied to me. And, and really what I think we're missing, we have such a small and narrow view of what a good sex life is. And it's like, as long as I orgasm, it was good. And I said, that's a really important part of it. But what about the knowing? What about that

intense, the, the idea of this is a person who knows you inside and out, who sees you and says, I want you, who sees you and says, you are good. I love you. Not just I want you now, but I want you forever. One thing that's thrown me for a loop a little bit in the whole, like women don't really need sex, whatever. What about affairs? Like every, I mean, women are having affairs. Well, I mean, every man who has an affair is with, you know, like why, if a woman doesn't really need sex or whatever, why shall having an affair at the same, is it same rate, similar

rate, a rate? I mean, it's happening. sex or whatever um why is she out having an affair at the same is it same rate similar rate a rate i mean it's happening is is that is is even that though more like her she's not emotionally connected her husband some other guy is like holistically winning her over or is it just this like i just want to have sex and i don't want to have with my husband or um i think there's likely a whole slew of it we haven't actually done research on why women have affairs. That wasn't part of our survey. But what I will tell you is, like, the book His Needs, Her Needs, for instance, which scored really badly on our rubric.

But that book, it's been a bestseller for like three decades now. And his whole premise is men have five core needs and women have five core needs and they're very different. And unless you meet those needs, the other person's going to have an affair. Or going to really want to. And this is often how this whole thing is talked about to women is you need to give him sex or he's going to have an affair. And to men, they're kind of told, well, women don't want sex anyway. And so it's all just a big mess. And if we could just get back, you know, to how, how do we see each other, not as categories, like, like, she's a woman, therefore, she's like this, and he's a man, therefore, he's like this. But instead, like, we're together, let's just get to know each other.

Let's figure out what each other's needs are. Let's meet each other's needs. Let's love each other. Let's, let's learn how to truly communicate and have our relationship thrive, as opposed to let's try to put ourselves in boxes, which is what all of these books are trying to do is put everyone in a box. And then that just doesn't work. Well, and I think that the reason we put them in boxes is because, frankly, the goal of these books has been quite clear. The goal is to make sure that men get enough sex because they don't focus that much on making sure it's good for women. And even on the books that do talk a lot about how it can be great for women, women can really enjoy sex,

they still have this weird obligation message to women where you have to have sex, you don't have a choice, and so make sure that even though you don't want sex as much as your husband. Yeah, or when they do talk about women's orgasm, they say it's really important to enjoy sex and that you tell your husband you enjoy sex because he'll only enjoy it if you enjoy it. So then even enjoying it becomes an obligation.

Like it's like even your orgasm is for his experience. Yeah, not for yours. because he'll only enjoy it if you enjoy it. So then even enjoying it becomes an obligation. Like it's like even your orgasm is for his experience. Yeah, not for yours. And I think that that's the problem is we have found, our study showed, our study actually proved that all these books worked. Because when you tell women you have to have sex, if you don't have sex, he'll watch porn. You know, by the way, like men are sexual and you're not. Lust is every man's battle. Guess what? They have a lot more sex. They actually do. Yeah. Women have more sex. Women have more sex. They also have lower orgasm rates, higher rates of pain. So in essence, they have more terrible sex. But for the man who's orgasming the whole time, it's fine sex. It's good sex. And so this is the question that I really had

at the end of our big research endeavor is what is the goal of a Christian marriage? What is the goal of a healthy marriage? What should the goal of these books be? Because so far it's been making sure that he gets enough intercourse. And I would love to see the goal of our books be that both members become more and more emotionally healthy, more emotionally close, and look more and more like Christ. And I think that if they are two people who are honestly working towards those things, the frequency will sort itself out, even if it's slightly less than what it would have been. That doesn't mean it's going to go totally off. Frequency doesn't, I'm just, just by intuition would say that shouldn't be a good measure. I mean, every, every humans are different. We're diverse. We have, you know,

it's, it's almost like if you compare it to like eating, I don't want to make that analogy, but I mean like, you know, eating less food, but more high quality food is typically, you would feel more satisfied than eating, you know, crap every day at McDonald's, whatever. I, I, I'm, We're getting over our time here, but I do want to, I've been wanting to ask this question. The role that sexual abuse plays into this whole conversation. I mean, upwards to one third of all women,

one fifth, one sixth of men have experienced an unwanted sexual encounter. I have two male friends. One, as a teenager was wooed into a sort of like powered consensual sexual relationship he was like 13 his cousin was like 17 and for four years was engaging in not not like i wouldn't consider it rape in the classic sense, but it was like coaxed into an unwanted that turned into a wanted but then wasn't – it's complex. It's sexual assault. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sexual assault. It's sexual assault, yeah. And he's very – you would love – his name is Joel Willits. He's been on the show and he talks. He's a Bible scholar and he's 50 now been married for 30 30 years 25 years or something he talks very openly about how this this just messed him up sexually like his view of sex is is just like because he loves his wife he doesn't want to

have sex with her because sex is just associated with abuse and power and just and another friend of mine was sexually abused as a kid and he has almost no sex drive at all, even though he would consider himself very heterosexual, he just doesn't desire sex. And so when he hears every man's battle, he interprets that as, I must not be a man because I'm not experiencing these things.

It took him years to even think about how these things have been related. I can't imagine. I mean, one third, close to one third of women have been related. I can't imagine. I mean, one third, close to one third of women have experienced some kind of unwanted sexual encounter. What role does abuse play in this whole conversation? I mean, can somebody really have healthy, loving, consensual sex with their spouse if they have undealt with abuse in the past? Oh, they totally can. You can definitely have wonderful great sex if you have

undealt with abuse but a lot of times abuse leads to issues that need to be dealt with right like we all need to go like working through trauma instead of just pushing it all down instead of just denying it or ignoring it um is it's just so important because you're often, often it's bringing up issues that you might not even realize are there. But if sex is really a struggle because of past abuse, the answer is not to push through and have more sex. The answer is to deal with the trauma. The answer is to get your trauma therapy.

And one of the ways that your spouse, whether you're the man or the woman in the relationship that we're talking about here, one of the ways that your spouse can be Christ to you is by helping you with your recovery instead of focusing on making sure that you get to the end goal of having sex again as fast as possible, right? Because, again, the goal is health here. The goal is to love one another as Christ loved the church, and one of the ways of doing that is to help however you need to help. Yeah. And sexual abuse is a huge issue in the church and out of it. We didn't measure that specifically in the Great Sex Rescue that much because that wasn't our main focus. But what we did find, which was really sad, is that a lot of these messages have virtually the same effects as abuse. And so in a way, the church is abusing women.

Yeah, beyond just the actual other ways that the sexual abuse is done. By the messages. By telling women that you are merely methadadone that you are a body to use that he has the right to your body that you have no agency um and the rates of marital rape that we found in a follow-up survey that we'll be talking about in another book are really very sobering what is what are they um our population, I think we found something like seven percent. No, it's higher than that. It's, it's, it's between 10 and 20, but, but you know, that was our press, our, our, yeah, our population. There's a word that's missing

from all of the evangelical books that we looked at. There's a word that I couldn't find in any of them. And that's the word consent. It just isn't talked about in marriage. It's not an issue. And when you combine that with all of these messages about how women, your body is not your own. You're not to deprive him. We're creating such a mentality of entitlement that sexual coercion is a real issue in a lot of marriages. And many women don't even understand that they are victims of sexual assault. Like we talked to so many women who, um, uh, well, we talked to women every day who say things like, yeah,

I just curl up in a ball and I cry until he gets it done. And then I guess like, I just want sex to be better. And I just feel really guilty about the fact that I can't enjoy sex. And I was like, you have a husband who is forcing you to have sex with him while you're in a ball crying. The problem is not your libido. Yep. Or we had a woman who said, I have to have sex with my husband before small group every week, or before we go to the beach, like the night before we take the kids to the beach. Cause otherwise he'll say embarrassing things about me in public or he'll be terrible to the kids. That's a really common one. That's actually very common. That's common. Yeah. Having sex so he doesn't yell or hit the kids the next day. Yeah. Yeah. Because if he doesn't get his sex,

he's just too amped up. Right. Because that's... But again, these books, a lot of these books make that sound normal, because you can't expect a man to treat you well. You can't, because without sex, he just, he can't function. And so you need, you need to do your part and keep his cup full. And that's why I'm saying like, these messages really are abusive. And our prayer in the Great Sex Rescue is that we raise the bar on Christian marriage literature. Like we should no longer be allowed, like a pastor should not be allowed to write a book on sex just because he's a pastor. Like you should need actual peer-review reviewed research, like evidence-based research. Or like, or like have done. And what made me like, if you write a book, it has to be backed up by research. Yeah. Like that kind of thing. It can't just be your own opinion. And, and hopefully, hopefully we'll start saying no to these books that are harmful and we'll put them behind us

so that, yeah, they can be in the dust like I kissed dating goodbye or something. Well, a lot of them are just anecdotal, right? You have maybe some pastor who embodies a lot of the things you're talking about, and he's like, oh, this is how all women are, this is how all men are, whatever, without cross-checking anecdotal experience with actual data. And as you know, once you start peeking behind the curtain of scientific studies, you realize, oh, this is all complex out there. You have to do a lot of research. Look at both sides. Don't just read one study. Read 10. Read the 10 that critique those 10. Because there's a quote, I can't remember it exactly, but some sex researcher said,

the science of sexology is among the most politicized studies that exist, you know, which means you just can't, you can't just look at one study even. You have to do a lot of hardcore research. But I've taken you over the time. I can't think I could keep talking. And this has been fantastic. You've given us a lot to think about. I will put links to your work in the show notes. So if anybody says, oh, I didn't write this down or where can I find more about Rebecca and Sheila, just go to the show notes. There's going to be links in there.

Thank you so much for the work you're doing. I hope that it continues to spread. Please keep writing books. You guys are awesome. Thank you. Take care. Thank you.