Is it necessary to critique complementarianism to help people have a better sex life?

One of the critiques I get at Bare Marriage is that I’d be more impactful if we stopped critiquing complementarianism so much.

I was talking last week about a big podcast that did an episode critiquing The Great Sex Rescue (and critiqued it badly; the guest was very uncomfortable talking about sex, and insisted that we should be talking about procreation instead of orgasm).

Most comments were supportive of me (which was surprising to me, actually, but rather heartening), but over and over many of them were something like:

This is actually a debate that we’ve had internally as a team, and I want to address it today. Can we critique the evangelical take on sex without critiquing complementarianism? Can we just leave it alone? Wouldn’t that be better strategically, because then churches wouldn’t be warning people off of my books?

Here’s the analogy I’d use in response to that:

Let’s say instead my goal was to help people get healthy. My goal was to help people live longer and higher quality lives.

Now imagine I was told: “You can do that, but you must never, ever mention what people eat. You can talk about everything else, but you can’t talk about that.”

Okay, there’s still lots to talk about–exercise, good relationships, sleep habits. But what if a HUGE part of health is what you eat? What if it matters whether you eat Cheezits or veggies? What if sugar consumption actually does matter? Should we not talk about it at all because it makes people uncomfortable?

And that’s the problem we face:

Our research shows that the BIGGEST driver of marital and sexual problems is complementarianism.

It just is. And it’s not just our research that shows this either. John Gottman found that one of the biggest signs that a marriage was in trouble was when husbands made the final decision and refused to share power with their wives. A husband being in power over a wife leads to bad outcomes.

So if our goal is to help people get good marriages and sex lives, how can we ignore the biggest problem?

A few years ago Keith and I were talking with a couple that organized marriage conferences.

They were personally egalitarian, but didn’t teach specifically on that. Why? Because they didn’t want to take a stand, since they needed churches of all stripes to send people to their marriage conferences.

Keith and I challenged them on that: “But what if, among Christian couples, complementarianism is the biggest problem? How can you improve marriages if you leave out the biggest problem affecting Christian couples?” They didn’t have an answer for that, but they left the conversation still determined to not bring it up.

Our studies have consistently found that the biggest driver of problems is men being prioritized over women.

Think about it–we have a 47 point orgasm gap in the evangelical church between men and women. When we ask husbands whose wives don’t orgasm if they do enough foreplay, 71% say yes. Over 70% say they prioritize their wife’s pleasure–even if she doesn’t orgasm.

How is this possible? It only makes sense when you realize that men and women are being taught that men’s sexual needs come first, and that a woman exists primarily to meet his needs. Women don’t have needs in and of themselves. And if sex isn’t good for her, it’s a her problem, not a him problem.

When it comes to marriage this is even more stark. Among Christian couples, things tend to go really well UNTIL they believe that the husband should make the final decision. Then everything starts going badly. People who don’t believe that are more likely to divide up mental load. They’re more likely to communicate well. They’re more likely to be emotionally mature. They’re less likely to have fits of anger.

But when you believe that the husband is in authority over the wife, things start to go haywire.

This doesn’t mean that all egalitarian marriages are good, and all complementarian ones bad.

Obviously you can have overlap! And some complementarian ones can be really good.

But we also found evidence for the rose coloured glasses phenomenon, where women who believed in complementarianism were more likely to rate their marriages and sex lives well even though the objective measures were bad. So, for instance, a complementarian woman who never orgasms is 25% more likely to say she’s satisfied with how often she orgasms than a woman who doesn’t believe in complementarianism. Belief in complementarianism means that  you don’t prioritize your own pleasure or happiness. And that may mean that more women are satisfied with bad marriages, but it doesn’t mean those marriages are objectively good.

Intimacy in marriage requires equality.

What is intimacy? It’s the ability to show up in marriage fully, with everything you are, and be accepted and loved. But you can’t show up fully if someone else’s opinions automatically matter more than yours do. And definitionally, that’s what complementarianism is. It’s the belief and practice that the husband’s opinions take precedence over the wife’s, because he gets to make the decisions.

That’s why you’ll see in books like Love & Respect, for instance, that one of the big ways marital conflict is avoided is husbands just declare certain things off limits. So when Emerson Eggerichs’ wife Sarah is sad (not angry, just sad) that he forgot her birthday, the response is that she’s being disrespectful for not voicing loudly that she firmly believed he’d never deliberately do that, so she can never bring it up again. When she’s upset that he leaves wet towels on the bed, he labels this disrespectful, so she doesn’t mention it again.

In complementarianism, the husband has the ability to label her issues as finished, solved, off the table. And that means that intimacy is short-circuited, because her issues don’t get solved or addressed.

You can’t have real intimacy unless both of you matter. And complementarianism declares that some animals are more equal than others.

That’s why:

Complementarianism feeds entitlement.

When men are taught that their opinions matter more, and that their needs are centered, this will automatically breed entitlement, even if that’s not intended or even if they give lip service against entitlement. One of the findings about people in power is that they’re less likely to notice the needs of those under them, and they’re less likely to be emotionally attuned to them, because they don’t need to be. And that’s how entitlement starts.

If entitlement kills marriages, and complementarianism breeds entitlement, then to not talk about complementarianism means that we will never really solve marriage problems. And we showed this in spades in our data in The Marriage You Want!

Would we have a larger platform if I stopped talking about complementarianism?

Yes, we likely would. But we also wouldn’t be as effective. We wouldn’t be true to the data. And we wouldn’t be intellectually honest.

And so I have to keep going back to what Jesus said: “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Some will have ears to hear, and some won’t. It isn’t up to me to make the message more palatable to those who don’t want to hear the truth. It is up to me to tell the truth, in the best way I know how. But I can’t fudge it. I can’t water it down. And I think I’m being pretty faithful to Scripture as I take this stance.

Keith and I talked about this on our Friday round up last week.

So here’s this discussion in video form (with Keith’s input too!)

Remember to subscribe to us on YouTube, because I’ll be taking a summer break from the blog starting next week for about six weeks! I’ll still be posting on Substack and social media and having some quick videos on YouTube, so catch up with me there! 

What do you think? Can we fix the problem without addressing complementarianism? Let’s talk in the comments!