31 Days to Great Sex is almost gone.
Well, it will resurrect in the summer. But it’s gone until then.
Let me explain.
I’ve been selling 31 Days to Great Sex on my own since 2012. I created it originally in ebook form, and then I paid for it to be published in paperback as well. I’ve sold a ton of them when I speak, and a ton online, and I’ve always kept the cost really, really low–it’s only $4.99 in ebook form–so that lots of couples can get it. I know that people don’t think much about spending $5, and they’ll take a chance on it, and I wanted it to help as many people as possible. So I didn’t charge much.
But lately I’ve wanted to start focusing on other things, including creating more courses and writing different books, and so I can’t keep promoting 31 Days to Great Sex anymore in the same way. So Zondervan (a Christian publisher) made me an offer, and I accepted. I sold them the book, and the new version will be coming out in August. I beefed up the book quite a bit, creating more of a “magazine” feel, so you’ll get the 31 Day challenge, but also a ton of extra information and dares and quick lists to help boost your sex life.
But because that will be coming out in August, I need to stop selling it on my site.
So tomorrow we’ll be removing it from the store and from Amazon. (I meant to do this on December 31, but I forgot that all of my staff would be on holiday, so I didn’t have a chance. So that means that everybody got an extra week to buy it!).
If you’ve been thinking about getting 31 Days to Great Sex, and you never have, today is the day if you want to get it for $4.99! The August edition is honestly a better book (because I did add great stuff to it), but I wanted to give everybody one last chance to get this edition, with the full 31 day challenge, before it’s gone!
So what is 31 Days to Great Sex?
It’s 31 Days TO great sex, not OF great sex. I’m not saying that you have to have sex for 31 days straight! You can take as long as you need to do the challenges (though doing it quickly will keep the momentum going). But also, not every challenge is about intercourse. Some are about dealing with baggage and the lies you’ve believed about sex; some are about learning to flirt or being more affectionate; some are just about learning what feels good.
Here’s what one reader wrote to me about the book:
“I’ll be honest, I was very skeptical. I was not looking forward to another self help book that would tell me how bad my sex life is. I know it is.
My husband and I have been married a year. We didn’t take the time to figure out sex before marriage, but we had it! I used it to impress and please him. And once we tied the knot, I pretended to enjoy it on our wedding night, and then we stopped having sex. I relented a few times when his libido demanded it, but I never had any kind of bond with my husband in that way.
Day 15 changed that. We re-did Day 5, after discussing my immediate issues at hand that were stressing me during dinner. I went and found my husband after we’d parted for “me time” and asked him if he wanted to try it (I hadn’t done the reading though!).
I had an orgasm with my husband for the first time without feeling like I had to, or to put on a show. And it was easy. For the first time it was easy!
This is a whole new world to me. I’ve only ever had sex when I’ve had to, or I was expected to. To be honest, the whole thing has kind of freaked me out in the past. But now I think I can start to actually enjoy it. And my husband and I can learn to enjoy it together. Thank you.”
That’s so awesome, and that’s what I want for you, too. So take a look–before it’s gone!
Speaking of being gone, our Bare Marriage Survey is now closed–and we have a few things we can finally share.
First, we can tell you what we were specifically looking for. We wanted to know how various teachings and beliefs in the church, about sex, marriage, gender roles, and more, impacted women’s ability to orgasm, women’s rates of sexual pain, and women’s marital satisfaction. Because of that, we had to ask a LOT of questions, so that we could be sure we were teasing out the right stuff. So it was a really loooooooong survey (thank you so much to everyone who filled it out!). We had over 22,000 women take it, which is just incredible. It’s given us so much data.
But in the meantime, we did get a lot of questions from people concerned about some aspects of it. We couldn’t answer all of those questions while it was live, because we couldn’t “prime” our survey takers. But we can answer them now! So I’m going to let Joanna, the data expert for our survey, answer those.
Hi folks!
We’ve had a blast running the survey and it was a really humbling experience, seeing so many, many women take the time to answer some really hard questions so thoughtfully. I really feel like a custodian of all the data we have and I’m doing my level best to tell the stories included in the responses well. The draft of the first book is due in a few months and until then I’ll be most likely found playing with my toddler or at my laptop, running more statistics.
1. Why weren’t there more open ended questions?
First of all, we love the heart behind this question! Lots of folks wanted to add nuance to answers or explain things more fully.
What we decided to do was a two-part study: first, the survey, and second, the focus groups (which are still coming) to add our nuance. With the survey, we have to be able to “code” it (assign numerical values to things) in order to find trends. Given that we were hoping for a huge number of respondents (which we got), we just couldn’t do all the questions as open-ended ones. But don’t worry–if you filled out the survey and you also left your email to be contacted about a focus group, you’ll likely get your chance (provided you match the criteria for a bunch of different things that we’ll be studying). We are really glad we’ll have the opportunity to ask more detailed questions in focus groups and interviews coming up soon. Thanks SO much to everyone who volunteered to be a part of our future research.
2. Why weren’t men included in the survey?
For every study, you have to have a research question and be guided by it. For this study, we were really interested in the effects of the church’s teachings about sex and marriage on women’s sexual and marital satisfaction. We hope to do studies including men someday, but that just wasn’t the focus of this research.
3. Why weren’t single people who have not been married included in the survey?
Our questions were really focused on issues pertaining to marriage and not on the specific issues that are faced in extended singleness. We’d LOVE to do another study someday about singleness and how single folks are treated in the church, but that just isn’t the focus of the current research project.
4. Why are you doing this survey?
This is the one we had to steer clear of announcing beforehand because we didn’t want people to know specifically what we wanted to hear from them. But as Sheila said, what we were really looking at is how the purity culture type of teachings and teachings prevalent about men always battling with lust, sex being primarily about men’s physical release, and women being obligated to have sex with their husbands affect marriages. We were especially interested in whether teachings that contribute to shame in women are associated with higher rates of vaginismus. (We’ll have more on that at a later date!)
5. Why was the survey so LONG?
It really was, wasn’t it? Most people spent about 22 minutes taking the survey, and most answered at least 140 questions (some answered more, depending on their answers. If you answered certain ways, you opened up extra questions). We had to make it long so that we would be able to figure out how the teachings we were asking about affected women’s sexuality, but also how other things may have played a part, so that we could control afterwards for specific things
Thanks, Joanna!
By the way, speaking of priming the audience, I’m thrilled to tell you that the majority of our survey takers didn’t come from the blog!
I was worried that most of the women who answered our survey would be from the blog and my email list. Because you all have heard how upset I’ve been about Love & Respect and different teachings in the church, you’re kind of “primed” already, and that could have distorted the results. That’s why we went out of our way to get other speakers/influencers sending the link to their people, and to encourage you readers yourselves to share the link (we even had a contest going, and Catie from Guelph, Ontario, sent over 350 referrals to our survey! She won Keith and me coming to her church to do a marriage event for free!). It ended up that people that I knew were actually the minority, and that’s awesome.
When can you hear our survey results?
Well, the majority of them will be published in some upcoming books, including The Great Sex Rescue with Baker, coming out spring 2021. But we will be sharing some stats before that, especially on our email list. So if you’re not part of that yet, please sign up!
So that’s our news for now! Thanks again to everyone who filled out our survey, and especially to our amazing recruiters who sent us thousands of women we could never have reached on our own.
Coming up this year, I’m going to move the series posts to Mondays instead of Wednesdays, but we’ll be starting this month’s this Wednesday, because I had to give you this heads up today. But podcasts will still be on Thursdays as usual.
Looking forward to 2020! I have a lot of books to write….
What about you? What stat are you most interested in seeing from our survey? Let me know in the comments!
Congratulations on the survey! Looking forward to the books.
Me, too! 🙂
Sheila, I’m so thankful for the ways you have stood up for women and against toxic teaching in the church. I’m looking forward to reading the new books you are writing and your blog has been an enormous blessing in my life!
I want to make one comment about the survey from a scientific perspective (I have a PhD in Epidemiology). I’m glad you were able to get many people to participate and there are definitely advantages to having a large sample size, like being able to do subgroup analyses. However, you often talk about how having large numbers is going to make your data convincing, but having large numbers doesn’t ensure that your data is representative of your target population (which I’m assuming is North American Christian married women). Since your survey is a convenience sample, it is possible that the people who took your survey are not representative of your target population as a whole (they could be but they might not be). They could have some differences, which may affect how much your data applies to the entire population.
I don’t mean to discourage you or to be too critical – convenience samples are often the only way that we can study issues and we can learn a lot from them. I would just caution you to keep your study’s limitations (and strengths) in mind as you are writing your book and interpreting the data.
I’m very interested to see your survey and focus group results and read the book! Best wishes as you continue the analysis and writing!
Hi there Elsie,
I actually have an MPH and did a masters thesis as part of my program very much focused on epidemiology as it relates to the First Nations water crisis in Canada, so I’m also an epi nerd (it’s a great club). Sheila has two masters degrees in the social sciences and Rebecca has an honors degree in Psychology. We are doing our best to use our research skills to the best of our abilities throughout this project. As the one tasked with analyzing all of this data, I’m feeling the weight of the task ahead of me – it’s a rather large responsibility!
We are very cognizant of the limitations of the sampling method and will, of course, be VERY upfront with any and all limitations that we are able to identify in any upcoming publications. As you noted, there simply wasn’t another way to identify people to do the survey that wasn’t cost prohibitive in this case so I’m living my life in the wonderful land of nonparametric statistics. 😉
One thing we’re very proud of is that we have a wide spectrum of denominations and we were sure to collect demographic data so that we can, to the best of our ability and given the limitations of the sampling method, evaluate how representative our sample is.
All the best!
Joanna
Glad to hear it, Joanna, thanks for your reply! Wishing the best to you all as you write the book.
I just want to thank you for how you handled questions for divorced and remarried women. There is still a lot of judgement in some churches for those of us that have been divorced… as if the pain of what we went through wasn’t enough. I felt no judgement and was relieved that you recognized that sex/baggage/expectations etc are different for those of us married for the second time. I would love to hear more from the survey and your blog on this subject.
We really wanted to have at least 20% of our survey respondents be divorced. If 28% of Christians are divorced, then we really need to listen to them! I don’t think we quite hit that number (I believe that divorced people naturally distrust “Christian” surveys, so I understand, and they’re also harder for me to locate), but we really did try. And we certainly have a strong enough sample that we can make some really interesting comparisons!
I’m really looking forward to the survey results!
Vaginismus is linked to sexual assault as well as certain religious upbringings (which your survey looks at). Not a psychologist, but I think the factor tying those together is not feeling like your body is *yours*. When you are used to your body being used for someone else’s gratification, or are frequently told that God Himself made your body for someone else to use, it’s not exactly easy to handle intercourse. Sex – especially at the onset of marriage, when it’s really painful for women and (usually) still amazing for men – becomes a reaffirmation of that dynamic.
Now, maybe someone will explain to me the long-term plan in telling women they “owe” sex to their husbands, because it seems like there will inevitably come a time when she’ll just get tired of the whole deal and stop. “Suck it up, buttercup” is not a long-term strategy.
Yes, Jane, it does look like vaginismus increase is linked to believing that you owe your husband sex (that’s not the only cause; it’s very multifaceted. But it does look like it’s a contributing cause).
I purchased “Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex” several years ago when I was still somewhat of a newlywed and was pleased with the view of sex in a different way than what the world typically sees, and with a godly biblical view. Fast forward several years; I’ve found myself and husband needing to work through a porn situation, and the first thing that came up in my search for help was TLHV. The articles have me support and understanding of the issue that I needed as well as my spouse. I purchased 31 days to try down the road to try and rewrite both of us. I have enjoyed so much the ability to talk openly and honestly, I feel like we are truly getting to know each other for the first time. As a woman this really helps me desire sex more, but overall our marriage is becoming something we’ve never had in the 8 years we’ve been together. Thank you for the wonderful godly resource! The new version coming out in August sounds awesome!