Alisa Childers recently critiqued The Great Sex Rescue on her podcast.

Childers calls herself an apologist. She became well-known in Christian spaces as a member of ZoeGirl, and now hosts a podcast where she critiques anyone who doesn’t endorse conservative Christian complementarian beliefs. Recently, for instance, she agreed with Al Mohler that women shouldn’t be on church podcasts because that could be pastoring.

She decided to take on The Great Sex Rescue, and did such a bad job that her followers roundly criticized her. 

I have posted about this on social media, because I believe that she owes evangelical women an apology. I want to post it here, as well, so that it is here for posterity, since social media posts tend to get lost. 

Here is my statement:

And now screenshots, many from her own followers, that were all left on her social media channels. This is just a few of them; there were literally hundreds.

I’m going to put more of my thoughts at the end, so scroll down!

Random thoughts on Alisa Childers’ take

She seems almost panicked by the conversation around women’s orgasm

She says saying these words are explicit, and a lot of her conversation with her guest revolved around whether it was sinful to talk about this stuff.

She also says that The Great Sex Rescue is a how-to manual about how to have an orgasm. 

I mean, I think that may help me sell books, so that’s nice! But The Great Sex Rescue is not a how-to manual. The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex and The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex are, as is our Orgasm course! The Great Sex Rescue merely points out the orgasm gap. That’s it.

Also, we spend one chapter talking about orgasm, and one chapter talking about problems with arousal, but she said that was the whole book. She basically ignored what we said about lust, obligation sex, marital rape, demands about postpartum favours. She acted as if the whole reason we wrote the book–to critique evangelical teaching–didn’t really exist. 

Our research shows the more explicitly you talk about these things to kids, the better they do

One of the things I personally was surprised by in our dataset for She Deserves Better was how stark the outcome differences were for women who received lots of sex ed as teens and for women who didn’t. Women who couldn’t identify words about sex (like ejaculation, clitoris, etc) did far worse long term, and were even more likely to marry abusers. Understanding words about sex enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence.

When she and her guest insinuate that only mothers should talk about sex to daughters, and it shouldn’t be that explicit, they do directly against evidence. The worst outcomes we saw were for homeschooled girls who got the least sex ed. That matters. 

Want to do this well with your kids? Check out our Whole Story puberty course to talk to your kids about sex & puberty! And the curriculum is based on our findings from our surveys about what kids need to know when, as well as other best-practices from peer reviewed studies. 

How do you explain to someone who is so uneducated that they don’t understand research?

I’m truly at a loss on this. Their guest, talking about our article in Sociology of Religion, said  that they’re not even sure it’s peer reviewed. 

Ummm….it’s in a peer reviewed journal! They started saying all kinds of things criticizing our research which are just factually untrue, but more importantly, display an alarming ignorance about research.

I feel like we’ve done high level calculus, and they’ve only done math up to long division. And we’re trying to explain why they’re wrong, but how do you even explain that when they don’t actually understand that calculus exists? 

This is the problem we face in evangelical circles. They are so anti-intellectual, while painting themselves as the only smart ones. And the rest of us are looking at them, trying to figure out how to explain complicated things to a 5-year-old, because that’s what it feels like when they make some of the same critiques (they don’t understand that the word “bias” in research is a mathematical term, not an implication of mindset, and that there are mathematical tests you can run to eliminate bias, for instance). 

I’m so frustrated by this, because we’ve done something no one else in evangelicalism has done. We did an absolutely huge study that has blown academics away, and have been peer reviewed even though we’re citizen scientists and not even affiliated with a university. And they all think they know better than us. 

I just want to say–go ahead and do your own study and get it peer reviewed and then we’ll talk. But they don’t even understand that. 

Sigh.

The bigger problem: They ignore the pain.

They completely ignore the main focus of our book. Her guest even said she didn’t even know what argument we were trying to make in our book, even though anyone who has read it will tell you. 

It’s quite simple.

It’s on the back cover. It’s in the synospis. It’s in the subtitle.

The evangelical church has taught toxic things about sex and marriage that have harmed people, and we need to correct those things so that people can flourish and find real intimacy and satisfying marriages and sex lives. 

They denied the problem existed. They didn’t deal with the fact that evangelical women have twice the rate of sexual pain as the general population. They didn’t acknowledge marital rape. They thought obligation was okay! 

And so they deny and dismiss the very real experiences of millions of evangelical women, because they want to call me unbiblical because I don’t believe like they do that men should be in authority over women.

The crazy thing is we don’t even talk about egalitarianism really in The Great Sex Rescue.

There are maybe three pages where we share Gottman’s findings that when men don’t share power and make the final decisions marriages break up, and we share our findings that say the same thing.

But this is not the majority of the book. They make it sound like it is, because they want people to dismiss us.

But in so doing, they dismiss their own followers. Their own readers. Their own people who have experienced genuine pain.

And honestly, in listening to how hesitant and embarrassed they are to talk about sex, and how dismissive they are of women’s experiences during sex, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve experienced a lot of these bad things too.

That makes me sad for them. It makes me sad for all the women who will feel overlooked, ignored, and their pain invalidated. 

And I hope and pray that maybe, just maybe, she will apologize.

I doubt it, but I will hope, because I want to believe that some of these people who say they believe in Jesus really do. I want to believe that hearts can change. I haven’t seen any evidence of that from evangelical thought leaders or influencers yet, but I’ve seen it from people on the ground. And so that is who I will continue to focus on, while I still hold out hope that some integrity will still be found among those with large platforms. 

What do you think? Will anyone ever apologize? Why are people ramping up critiques of our work? Let’s talk in the comments!