Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker ignore abuse victims in Every Man’s Battle.
They never talk about the reality of sexual abuse, or acknowledge that a man’s lust and sexual behavior can deeply injure women. Instead, they portray the victim when men lust as the man himself–he feels shame and loses his purity.
I talked about this recently, but I wanted to expand on it today using a few examples from the book Every Man’s Battle. I shared one on Facebook yesterday, and it blew up, so I thought it was worth showing them both to you today. Many people said that they knew Every Man’s Battle was bad, but until they saw the excerpt from their own eyes, they had no idea how horrifying it was.
To set the stage, here are a few Fixed It For Yous I’ve done of one of the authors, Fred Stoeker, ignoring the reality of date rape:
You can see that he phrases sexual assault as “pushing against the boundaries of our girlfriends”, to obscure what he’s really talking about. He paints it as not actually that bad, because he refuses to think about the experience from the point of view of said girlfriend.
But we see this in even more horrifying ways in Every Man’s Battle itself.
Example 1: Every Man’s Battle Ignores the Reality of Statutory Rape
In this passage, we hear a story about a man, presumably in his 30s, married and the father of 3, grooming a 15-year-old girl for rape. Note all the language that he uses to minimize what was done–he talks as if she participated fully, and he was hardly to blame because she was a “knockout” who “looked more like 20.”
What’s striking here is that they only narrate the story from the perpetrator’s point of view.
We never hear how she feels. Usually in books like this all names are changed, so we can’t identify who it is, but they gave him a name and not her. He is the only one who is personalized here, who we are invited to care about. And what happens?
Kevin jokes with her sexually, dares her to do sexual things, that escalate to having intercourse. He describes this as completely consensual.
But the girl immediately told her parents who now want to press charges. This was rape, on so many levels. It was statutory rape because she was 15; it was unwanted because she immediately told her parents; and it was abuse of power because he was an adult leader at her youth group. This was rape-rape-rape. (All rape is horrific, but I just want to show that they had absolutely no excuse in ignoring the reality of what was happening here).
The book, though, never actually calls him a rapist–just announces in panicked tones that the parents are going to have him charged with rape. It never talks about the harm done to the unnamed girl, just the devastating consequences for him because he got “out of control” and “somehow” had sex with her.
And look how Stoeker and Arterburn frame this whole encounter: it’s in a passage about “lurking at your neighbour’s door”, and going somewhere you shouldn’t be. It frames statutory rape of a minor as the same thing as infidelity with a married friend.
This is absolutely horrifying.
Example 2: Exhibitionism and Masturbating to Your Sleeping Sister-in-Law
Then there’s this example of “Alex” masturbating to the sight of his sleeping sister-in-law.
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Exhibitionism is actually a crime.
The authors say that Alex masturbated out in the open to the sight of his sister-in-law. We don’t know the age of this sister-in-law either, but I get the sense she’s likely a teenager (she’s falling asleep on the floor).
I have so many questions about this! How do we know she stayed asleep? I can imagine a girl waking up to hear what he’s doing and pretending to still be asleep!
How do we know this didn’t escalate to anything else? Joseph Duggar was recently charged with sexual abuse of a minor for assault on his 9-year-old sister-in-law, according to news reports. And perhaps I’m just too Canadian for this, but when I hear of a man masturbating to his teen sister-in-law, I just think Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka murdering Karla’s sister Tammy.
But how do they frame this? He participated in “visual gratification” which led to him defiling the marriage bed. So his sin was against his marriage bed, and presumably against his wife. But the sister-in-law? She’s completely absent from the discussion. She was asleep, after all. No need to talk about her! She was just the object.
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Throughout all of their Every Man books, Arterburn and Stoeker ignore crimes and ignore victims.
The word “victim” rarely appears in their books, and when it does, the man is usually described as a victim of a woman wearing tight clothing or seducing him. In their book for teen boys Every Young Man’s Battle (one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read, far worse than the one for adult men), they narrate multiple date rape examples without ever naming them as date rape.
Arterburn and Stoeker simply can’t be this ignorant. This is willful. These are conscious decisions to never, ever think about the effects of men’s acting out sexually and assaulting women and girls from the women’s and girls’ points of view. What women think and experience is irrelevant; only the men’s experiences matter.
As one commenter said, perhaps the reason they can’t acknowledge it is that to do so means acknowledging that they themselves have been rapists. They prefer to think of themselves as promiscuous, but not as rapists. That seems plausible to me.
Every Man’s Battle sexually discipled millions of men.
Millions of men got their idea of sex and what sexual integrity looked like from reading these books. As many men said on my Facebook page yesterday, they’re horrified they never saw these problems when they read the books. But of course they didn’t! They were reading books by “experts” that were published by one of the largest Christian publishers. Editors and publishers had read and okayed these words; Focus on the Family had promoted them. This was the gold standard. Who were they to question it?
And so millions of men were discipled into a sexuality that completely ignored the effects of their behaviour on women.
All that mattered was men staying pure for men’s sake.
I’m absolutely sickened, and quite frankly, I want an apology.
I want an apology from Waterbrook/Multnomah (full disclosure: they published one of my older books). I want an apology from Stoeker and Arterburn who, instead of apologizing, have disparaged us and had us threatened behind the scenes (or at least one has). I want them to publicly apologize to evangelical women.
I’m not holding my breath, of course. But it would be so healing. And until that apology comes, we will just have to keep giving examples of how absolutely horrifying their books were, because when people see pics of the actual pages, somehow it hits harder.
What do you think of these examples? Why do Stoeker and Arterburn refuse to acknowledge abuse and assault? Let’s talk in the comments.
I saw a comment on a recent post by Zawn, either on her Facebook page at zawnv or her Substack at Zawn (major language warning for her own writing and for reader comments), that said something to the effect that since it was women who paid the price, the price was acceptable.
Not acknowledging what will be life-long trauma of women is obviously an acceptable price to pay for men’s victimhood. 🙄
Exactly. So sobering.
They probably never will apologize and retract what they have written. A lot of people, both men and women, don’t want to acknowledge that their actions have harmed others even if they have been confronted with concrete examples. To put it bluntly, it’s pride and arrogance that keeps them from accepting the truth.
Yes, I doubt they will too. I would love to see publishers apologize though.
Another big problem with the first excerpt from Every Man’s Battle is that they seem to suggest the man’s actions were only horrible/shameful at the point of raping a minor. Grooming a minor, all his actions before the rape, were also reprehensible and sinful. Also, the framing of the story seems to say, “You can get tempted from time to time and sexually solicit a minor, even rape her—just don’t get caught.” It makes me sick to my stomach.
Every Man’s Battle appears to be a book supportive of and compassionate to men and their sexual issues. I recall Sheila sharing a response from one of the authors whose tone about her work was dismissive of her findings, as if they did not really exist, or dare I say matter to his “personal experiences” that propped up his book. My point here is the argument that is growing where men have these books and podcasts that speak to their struggles, and they feel heard and supported. When women have books (The Great Sex Rescue, She Deserves Better, For the Love of Women, etc.) and podcasts (Bare Marriage, etc.), women face scorn from men as if their platform is being stolen from them. Apparently, women are not allowed to speak statistical facts about Arterburn’s and Stoeker’s documented experiences that ridiculously created yet another “safe place” for men at the expense of stripping safety away from women. Men do not see their books and podcasts as damaging to anyone, and it would seem that they do see books and podcasts supporting women as damaging to them. We could say that the very fact that these authors do not recognize boundary pushing as sexual assault, and the willful deliberate glossing over of the female victims being groomed and/or raped are very clearly because they choose not to see these things – they choose to NOT SEE women as anything more than the problems, obstacles, and struggles for men. Entitlement, misogyny, patriarchy, and abuse in all its forms are more than fine threads woven into the fabric of evangelical churches; they are, in essence, titanium chains that are being hailed as the true character of men, and instead of training our girls about this, our girls are being trained to accept it and accomodate it. It is sickening. I hope that Rebecca will do a deep dive on Every Man’s Battle and that women continue to stand in the gap for our future daughters in this world. Until the righteous men show themselves in growing numbers, standing against this abuse of women and correcting their brothers, women will need to continue to see this as all men.
Yes, we are planning a deep dive on this at some point! We even have the BEST title (but I can’t reveal it here!)
If I hadn’t already seen previous excerpts from Every Man’s Battle or knew anything about your character, I would have thought that these excerpts were part of a cruel April Fools Day joke
I suspect the reason they can’t acknowledge that the situations described in their books are rape and sexual assault is because that would involve accepting that their friends – and possibly they themselves – are guilty of those things.
Reading the way the authors practically salivate over their descriptions of young girls, revelling in totally unnecessary salacious detail, it seems more like a thinly-veiled pornographic fantasy than anything else. Like they couldn’t actually write the pornographic novel they wanted to, so this was the next best thing.
Reminds me of this video I saw of a Jehovahs Witness elder aimed at young men describing very detailed sexual scenarios and saying whether or not they are sin including a teenage boy’s very detailed sexual dream of a JW girl that caused him to have a wet dream among other things. It was a meme for a while among the ex-Mormon and JW communities which I like lurking in due to relating to so much from them.
This reminds me so much of that video for the same reasons. I think in another life he would be a porn director or a dark romance author if he was a woman had he not been already entrenched in the evangelical world.