“Sure it was harmful–but it was still an improvement!”
Or was it?
That’s the pushback that I often get when I critique evangelical sex and marriage books. I’ll show that the book contains harmful teaching, and people will say, “well, yeah, but it’s still better than what came before!”
This week, as I’ve been talking about the intersection between the cultural phenomenon of Every Man’s Battle and normalizing pastors addressing lust from the pulpit, as the documentary Death of The Pastor’s Wife shows, many in the comments section have been saying that–yes, Every Man’s Battle was bad, but for its time, it was better.
I don’t think so at all.
So let’s start with some definitions:
What counts as an improvement in sex and marriage teaching?
I see teaching as existing on a continuum. At one end is true flourishing, true justice and mutuality, and Jesus-like love. At the other end is the cultural condition we’re in now, which is preventing in some way mutual flourishing, and which is promiting things that don’t look like love.
If a book takes us further along that continuum, towards more justice and righteousness (in Hebrew they’re the same word), more flourishing, and more love, then the book is an improvement.
How does Every Man’s Battle do according to this test?
Does Every Man’s Battle pass the test?
More Justice?
Every Man’s Battle made women the sin management tools for men. Men were told that the way they were to defeat lust was to either “bounce their eyes” from women, which effectively dehumanized all women, while transferring their sexual urges onto their wives, treating their wives as “methadone”, and going to them for “10 bowls of sexual gratification a week” (I’m scared to know what that means). Fail.
More Flourishing?
Every Man’s Battle made intimacy virtually impossible. You cannot be intimate with someone who dehumanizes you. Our study found that believing things like “all men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle” artificially lowered women’s libidos, making their sex lives WORSE than they would otherwise have been. The belief also made husbands into worse lovers, since when men believed it, they did less foreplay and were less satisfied with their wives in bed. Fail.
More Jesus-like love?
It is not loving to treat your wife like an object to be used to slake your lusts. Fail.
Now, you could argue that it still could have moved us along the continuum if what was already in the culture was also doing these things, but to a lesser degree, but that simply isn’t the case, and the arguments that people were making in favour of Every Man’s Battle prove this.
People say Every Man’s Battle was an improvement because it let men talk about their lust and not feel so ashamed.
People are admitting that before Every Man’s Battle was written, this was largely not a conversation the church was having. So Every Man’s Battle allowed men to feel like they weren’t alone, they weren’t perverts, this is something others also feel. But is that true? As we showed about Every Young Man’s Battle, a big problem with the book is that it makes young men feel that they are indeed perverts, when prior to reading the book they were nothing of the sort.
Every Young Man’s Battle, directed at teen boys, is one of the most heart-breaking books I have ever read, and the harm it did to a generation of young men cannot be overstated.
You can download our summary of problems with Every Man’s Battle here!
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Those making the argument that this book was an improvement are essentially saying, “sure, it dehumanized women, but now men didn’t feel so ashamed!” Is that a valid argument?
As I was discussing this on Facebook yesterday, many people left wonderful comments addressing this.
In the guise of removing shame, it also removed guilt. And guilt, when you’re doing something wrong, is the correct feeling to have. It replaced the shame of “I am the way I am and I am bad” with “I am the way I am and it’s not going to change.” That’s not an upgrade.
Kind of like women performing obligation sex makes marriage better-when you define “better” as the man is more regulated and his childishness and selfishness have an outlet so he treats people better. Just not better for his wife-who is the other half of the whole marriage!
The philosophy behind Every Man’s Struggle is to accept that men must be kept in perpetual adolescence on a Gerbil Wheel of arousal and obligatory ejaculation either by masturbation assisted by Porn or by using an available female as a masturbatory tool. Instead of teaching men to grow and mature and seek intimacy with the women in their lives using non sexual modalities they encourage remaining in this immature state using sexual release to moderate any difficult emotion or challenge. By excusing the use of P*rnography they are actually changing the chemistry of the brain and making it impossible for men to find satisfaction in the women they have vowed to love, honor and cherish. Scripture tells men to honor the wife of their youth but modern evangelical patriarchy excuses perpetual pursuit of youthful partners. Is it any wonder that we are confronted weekly with the arrest of Pastors and Youth Leaders using their positions of trust to abuse their flock? The day of reckoning is coming. Gray divorce is epidemic as women who have been fed a steady diet of submission realize that the obligatory sex they have been subjected to has left them financially and emotionally destitute. I see the rise of Matriarchy where women expose the lies they have lived by and demand justice within the church and without. Men like Joel Webbon will be the first to fall.
One often seen approach to solving the problem of sin is via asceticism. Basically you take something like gluttony, and then try to avoid the sin of gluttony by suppressing the desire to eat at all. This approach inevitably creates a sense of shame around food – even things which are purely natural and innocent. Eventually thing like merely finding the smell of food enjoyable becomes sin adjacent. This leads to all sorts of screwed up views and attitudes about food.
This is the sort of thing that evangelicals very commonly did with sex before EMB. It lead to all sorts of screwed up ideas about sex and sexual desire. For instance, purely natural biological attraction to women became indistinguishable from the sin of objectifying women. So men constantly felt equal shame for both innocent and evil thoughts. This definitely needed to be corrected.
But EMB did *not* correct this. They instead fully accepted this screwed up view of sex and merely *normalized* it. This helped to reduce the sense of shame, but didn’t do a thing to address the very screwed up ideas around sex. Which means that it normalized the evil along with the innocent. Worse, the author of EMB in fact leaned into explicitly normalizing the evil
So no, EMB didn’t improve a darn thing. It merely justified men’s sense of entitlement around sex that had already been festering in evangelicalism.
“Better” that men felt their shame and guilt alleviated… and then instantly were told that their shame and guilt was the fault of their wives, and their wives owed them anything and everything that could alleviate that shame and guilt.
“He doesn’t feel like such a monster, now that he has been given tacit permission to turn his wife into a sex slave instead of learning to deal with his indoctrinated guilt around normal human sexuality and his natural shame at his lack of self-control and hurting his loved ones!”
That actually sounds worse than him feeling shame and guilt. Before, he had very little reason to actually feel guilty or ashamed, and now, he has sexually abused his own wife without guilt OR shame. Healing from thought crimes to commit actual sex crimes is worse on every conceivable level.
So let’s put Every Man’s Battle in its proper context
It was published in 2000, when porn was very much in the public conversation. There had been a Presidential Task Force on porn in the 1980s. Everyone was concerned about porn DVDs being everywhere, and now the internet was ushering in a whole new age (though high speed internet was still a few years off for most people).
It was the first book that went big in evangelicalism that addressed lust and porn.
But just because it was the first does not mean that it advanced the cause. On the contrary, because it was the first, it largely set the stage for how the evangelical church would talk about lust for the next few decades. And it was completely and utterly wrong.
Again, this isn’t surprising, since the two men who wrote it (Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker) were completely unqualified. They have no relevant education or experience or qualifications. They used no peer reviewed research (there’s not a single citation in the book). They were simply self-proclaimed former sex addicts (and given the creepy descriptions of women’s bodies they have throughout the book, which are utterly gratuitous, the “former” part has to be suspect).
In the year 2000, the evangelical world was at a crossroads
In the 1970s and 1980s, many marriage and relationship books were becoming much more egalitarian. In the 1980s, the church was much more egalitarian. The church could have gone towards greater love and mutuality at that point, but instead, by the late 1990s, it was largely doubling down on marriage being about power dynamics with the husband in authority over the wife, and teaching about male entitlement.
None of this was automatic. We could have gone a different way. But the church largely chose power.
In 2001, for instance, Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti was published. It completely drilled down on gender roles and ignored mental load, but it did not have authority or power dynamics as part of its teaching. Yet by 2004, we saw Love & Respect and For Women Only being published, which made male entitlement the central focus of the teaching.
His Needs Her Needs was still a best-seller. Power of a Praying Wife was selling like hotcakes. And the evangelical church chose its side–male entitlement and boosting men at the expense of women.
So I am a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin‘s writing – – especially the movie The American President which came out in 1995
In the movie, there’s a quote about leadership that has stayed with me for 30 years, voiced by Lewis Rothschild, who was the character played by Michael J. Fox
“People want leadership. And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.”
I think that very succinctly sums up what happened in the late 80s in early 90s and in Christian publishing, at large. Every time an author “discovers” a message that no one else is specifically talking about and they write a book about it – – everyone assumes that they must be right…. Because they are the only one speaking.
Put a little bit of a reputation and a few letters behind their name, call them pastor or counselor and suddenly they are an expert.
As we have noticed 100 times over, this was a very dangerous thing to do, and people are still paying for it with their heart and their relationships.
I read “Every Man’s Battle” and told my wife it was SO MUCH WORSE than the teaching I had growing up, from Dobson and others. In my view, it cleared the way for more bad teaching and either echoed or helped bring in some of the more extreme views, like saying women will give account to God for the sin that men committed in their minds that they don’t even know about, due to their “immodesty”. It’s insane what’s out there these days, and it was less common teaching in the 70s and 80s.
No, Every Man’s Battle was not an improvement. It was part of the movement in publishing to usher in the conservative resurgence from the SBC in the 1990s, and ensure that women stayed in their place.
And Every Man’s Battle did that by objectifying and dehumanizing women, and teaching men that their battles with lust were something “every man” faced their whole life, so women expecting faithfulness was women expecting too much.
The church chose this.
The church saw a book that was saying something totally new but also totally harmful, and said, “that sounds about right, because that makes us more comfortable in our views of sex and women, while not challenging us to confront our entitlement.”
By choosing it, they set the stage for churches excusing youth pastors who abuse their students; for pastors like JP Miller preaching about sex as he did and treating his wife as he did; for countless men telling their wives that if they don’t give them oral sex postpartum they’ll cheat on them.
It’s time for the evangelical church to choose something different.
If you haven’t already, please read The Great Sex Rescue where we outline this in detail. And stay tuned for my new book Fawn, where we talk about how this dehumanizing and objectifying view of women as sin management tools created a trauma loop for so many evangelical women!
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What do you think? Did Every Man’s Battle make things worse? Let’s talk in the comments!
Every Man’s Battle was also harmful in a way I haven’t heard many talking about. It created “what’s wrong with me” in boys and men who didn’t lust after girls and women. My husband had to deal with wondering if he was ok. He had friends that were girls, he found girls attractive and dated, but he never lusted after them. How horrifying that this teaching made him think that something was wrong with him or he should be doing it (lusting) to be “normal”! After all, it is “EVERY man’s battle”.
Yes! We’ve talked about this before too–we talked to a bunch of guys who say they STARTED porn because they started to worry that they weren’t real men after hearing in youth group how much all guys struggle with porn!
Ya know Sheila – Feeling shame is not necessarily a bad thing. Shame can produce Fruit. We are taught that shaming someone is bad. That fact may be true, although I believe there are circumstances where we should absolutely shame people when they just don’t get it and they are harming people. The deal is this: Sometimes the truth is shaming. It’s the truth and with the truth someone can feel shame. Thats where we are struggling as a society right now. We use this “we shouldn’t shame people “mentality” by saying, “Let’s erase the truth so no one feels shame.” NOPE! Let’s tell the truth and if that person feels shame then they need to figure out why! They need to make the changes. I truly believe that while God never shames us, he uses our shame to change us – if we allow it. FRUIT. The problem is, these authors, these pastors have taken on compromising positions. And now their ego is too big to allow shame in. They think it’s Jesus because they have no shame. They are CLUELESS Captain-No Faults. And so they double down. Should we shame men more for looking at porn? Well, again, I say circumstances warrant that answer. Maybe we say generally no. Because anyone who has looked at porn knows the shame they have after doing so. They shame themselves, they don’t need others to do it for them. I raise my own hand on that one. However I am a 100% YES in as doing this: DO NOT TAKE the shame away. I am even against taking action to reduce the shame. Sure love them if your heart is in it. But doing things to take away the shame of the truth is not helpful. We hope the shame sticks to their eyes and causes action. We hope the shame makes that person choose the truth. We hope the shame redirects someones heart. I am glad I never read this book. My wife gave it to me and it was just further confirmation that I had a problem. I am so grateful I did not read it. Gosh I know I would have taken that advice. I was already sort of doing it anyway. If I had it writing to show my wife – my gosh yuk. Thank You Jesus!
Yes, I agree, Phil. I think we need to bring back guilt and even some shame. I know shame can be so dangerous to get over, but guilt is important!
I appreciate your distinction between shame and guilt. Shame is over who you are, and often over things you have little-to-no control over. Guilt is over what you do, and can prompt us to do differently and better in the future.
Guilt is Internal, Shame is External and subjective as well as viral over social media.
The difference is in a Shame culture “If Nobody Knows of my sin, I Am Not Shamed”.
“You need only one for suicide, two for murder, but at least three for blackmail. One who did the horrible act, one who would be horrified by learning about it, and one who knows about it.”
— G.K.Chesterton, one of the Father Brown Mysteries (from memory)
And it’s not much of a stretch from “If Nobody Knows of by sin, I Am Not Shamed” to “And Dead Men Tell No Tales.”
“With sword I wash my shame away;
Fate, bring on me what you may!”
— Arab poem or folk proverb (from memory)
By Arterburn and Stoeker? More like by like Gaston and Frollo!
I really hate how men think that women cannot understand lust the way men experience it when I have experienced first hand on my Otome game chatrooms I often lurk in women and stories of women thirsting and doing things that would rival some of the most shameless male porn addicts like harassing a Chinese company both online and IRL for making a character a vocal minority didn’t like (he was basically Jacob from Twilight) in their mobile game because they were afraid he would steal the attention from the current guys available among other things to the point the Chinese government had to get involved to stop it and they say women don’t struggle with lust? A lot of those women were ones that spent thousands of dollars on this game and their digital boyfriends, they were addicts.
Women aren’t as often as visually sexual as men, or as category specific. Studies have shown women feel arousal from anything sexual, regardless if the focus is on the gender they’re attracted to, or even humans. I’m not saying they’re sexually attracted to all that, just that sexual desire and visual stimulation aren’t interlinked as much with women. Women don’t seek porn of men or any male body exposure imagery nearly as often as men do of women, and of the few who do look at porn, most of them, even though they’re heterosexual, watch gay women because just the thought of being pleasured and desired arouses women more often than the male body! Women more often read books about romance and sex, and find unconventionally attractive looking male characters and non human ones sexually attractive! Women say constantly that seeing the same male body areas as what has most often sexually aroused men on female bodies doesn’t arouse them as much or at all. Women have more varied sexual triggers than men, so males have less broad sex appeal to the opposite sex!
This is why any media made for women featuring attractive men rarely ever shows off the male body as often the same way women are sexualized, why many more women than men demanded the right to not be shamed for dressing revealing with blame of influencing male lust, while there was never as much demand from women to see men as revealing so that we’d also be encouraged to feel good dressed those ways and demand no shaming for enjoying revealing clothes for the same reasons women have worn them, and why women more often prefer to get affirmation of their own genders visual desirability by looking at revealing and decadent displays of women showing off their bodies and beauty in clothes and other styling and sexualizing themselves in media, rather than encouraging males being shown off the same ways as strongly!
I hate how much more often women have been so visually desired by the opposite sex and how little encouragement there’s been from either gender of men being seen as as visually desirable. I don’t think I’d be happy married because the type of women who feel the way I do about this are rare, and I just hate the disparity with the genders in general. Even that type of woman being attracted to me wouldn’t make me feel much better. There are other reasons I prefer staying single, and the sexual frustration has for most of my life been a major influence on my sexual lust and the desire disparity and hypocrisy with what’s accepted as normal and morally fine for women to show of their bodies in the same settings as men had given me depression. I hate going near beaches, pools, church and much of anywhere because how much more revealing women have been and the reasons for that upset me so much and I often feel a burning sensation from that.
I feel guilt for feeling these ways about all this, and fear God’s judgement for wanting to dress more revealing for the reasons I do and hating parts of how he made us and how that influenced hypocrisy in body acceptance more for women than men. That’s arrogance for considering what God has done as not good enough isn’t it, and I also wish women had lusted the same ways as often as men. I don’t know what feeling o can just choose to not have and what of my feelings of all this are of God and what’s sin, besides the lusting and wishing for more female lust.
You obviously haven’t played otome games… they show off a LOT of the men’s body. They are called VISUAL novels for a reason and a lot of women love them
Also yeah I am a woman who gets visually aroused by men so yes I know. Most of the Otome game fans I talk to love a good pic of a shirtless dude. You are definitely mansplaining
Also don’t get me started on the whole fujoshi/yaoi community who love watching, playing, and looking at gay porn of men those. I read the post again and It sounds like you haven’t been in female dominant fandoms on the internet enough my friend
I’m basing this on what I’ve seen women say numerous times, what many studies keep showing, and the difference in how often different areas of the body are shown off as much on either gender in media and clothes. The disparity is evidence of innate sexual differences. I know many women like shirtless men, but it isn’t as often the butt for example that women like as much as men do, so there isn’t much overlap with male and female sex appeal on the same scale. Look how much more revealing more womens swimwear is than mens for the lower body. I’ve seen lots of otome game male designs and they aren’t nearly as often showing the same areas of the body as revealing and prominently as female bodies have been depicted for as long.
“Also don’t get me started on the whole fujoshi/yaoi community…”
Fujoshi/yaoi is just the Rule 63 genderflip of Hawt Lezbo Action being a very popular turn-on among straight men.
An older term for yaoi otaku was “Fag Hags”, i.e. women who were only turned on by Hawt Guy-on-Guy action. Women who are attracted to Men who are only attracted to other Men. Sounds kind of self-defeating.
Do the “female dominant fandoms” include that estrogen-saturated corner of TikTok called “BookTok”?
Which is almost entirely “Spicy(TM)” Romances and Romantasies? A lot of them probably AI Slop-generated, judging from the frequency a lot of said authors upload to Amazon.
The most infamous of this Romantasy genre is “Morning Glory Milking Farm” about a peasant girl who works at a minotaur stud farm and “milks” the stud minotaurs. (Fifty years of D&D parody jokes and I’d never heard of that one before!)
I have also heard about Cryptid Porn, AKA “I Got Banged by Bigfoot!” from the most common cryptid in said sub-genre.
To which I have been asking for a long time:
“DID I GO BATSH*T CRAZY OR DID EVERYBODY ELSE?”
Dude, this is quite a mix of tropes here. I think you’re giving mass industries like media and clothing a lot more credit than they deserve for how well they represent female needs and experiences in general and sexuality specifically. And what’s the study that says women prefer lesbian erotica regardless of their sexual orientation? You seem really convinced there’s *something* inherently unfair to men in how women’s sexuality works. Why? If it’s true that women are innately attracted to a wider range of things than men are, doesn’t that mean there are more opportunities for men who are interested in women to make themselves attractive, even if they aren’t conventionally hot?
Also another thing is that the reason why women don’t like porn typically is because a lot of it is androcentric and made by men for men and often degrading to women almost by design. Lesbian porn is often made by women for women which is why a lot of women are drawn to it.
Also women don’t like men’s butts? I beg to differ those fujoshis/yaoi fangirls I was talking about love that stuff. That mobile game I was talking about Love and Deepspace? Had a lot of spicy 3D animated softcore porn in it. Women liked it because it was made by women for women and not so focused on men.
Another thing is otome games are a spectrum as far as how graphic they are. A lot of them released on consoles are going to be more censored than the 18+ PC ones which are a lot more revealing.
I am sorry if I am accusatory, but I hate as a women telling men this is what women actually think/believe only to be dismissed and act like I don’t know what I am talking about.
I believe you and many other women are as visually sexual and as attracted to as much reveal of the same body areas as men like on women, but it is obvious from women’s own commentary and the reasons for the clothing and media disparity in revealing the genders bodies, that less visual women are much more common. Take your complaints with what I think up with them. The lack of preference for seeing the male body instead, and wanting to see the gender they aren’t even attracted to, just to think of being pleasured is part of my point about males not being as much part of what makes as many women feel sexual as females are part of what makes males feel as sexual. Why would women want to see their genders bodies for self insert fantasies instead of preferring to see the male body, and demanding and making stuff showing that if they’re as often as visually attracted to us!? They are contributing to the gender disparity in that media.
I didn’t say women don’t like butts, just not as many and to the same extent as men. Various women say what they think most attractive about the male body are hands, arms and necks, instead of the more gender dimorphic areas men most often think most attractive on women. Many women also don’t think swim briefs or thongs or the same styles of underwear are sexy on men, and most are fine with just men being shirtless, but more covered lower body than how women as often have been in the same settings for as long!
I didn’t say men never are revealing in otome games. I said otome games still don’t show men as revealing as often as when the female body is sexualized, especially regarding the butt. In Love and Deep Space there are more clothes options that are more revealing for the female character than the males.
I’m retyping this because it seems to have been deleted. I don’t know how this is violating a policy when the same subjects in this other comment thread are the same.
I believe you and many other women are as visually sexual and as attracted to as much reveal of the same body areas as men like on women, but it is obvious from women’s own commentary and the reasons for the clothing and media disparity in revealing the genders bodies, that less visual women are much more common. Take your complaints with what I think up with them. The lack of preference for seeing the male body instead, and wanting to see the gender they aren’t even attracted to, just to think of being pleasured is part of my point about males not being as much part of what makes as many women feel sexual as females are part of what makes males feel as sexual. Why would women want to see their genders bodies for self insert fantasies instead of preferring to see the male body, and demanding and making stuff showing that if they’re as often as visually attracted to us!? They are contributing to the gender disparity in that media.
I didn’t say women don’t like butts, just not as many and to the same extent as men. Various women say what they think most attractive about the male body are hands, arms and necks, instead of the more gender dimorphic areas men most often think most attractive on women. Many women also don’t think swim briefs or thongs or the same styles of underwear are sexy on men, and most are fine with just men being shirtless, but more covered lower body than how women as often have been in the same settings for as long!
I didn’t say men never are revealing in otome games. I said otome games still don’t show men as revealing as often as when the female body is sexualized, especially regarding the butt. In Love and Deep Space there are more clothes options that are more revealing for the female character than the males.
It’s not a study what what numerous women have said. It’s the same thing I’m basing the visual desire disparity and how that influenced vastly different amounts of reveal in male and female clothes. I’ve done lots of fact checking and reading what women say about this stuff, as well as what people say are common reactions either by body language or commentary on men wearing more revealing stuff. I’ve read the history of how clothes standards changed for the genders. If women are more often attracted to stuff non visually and not even male specific, that less opportunity for our gender to be as visually desired. And regardless, the male body hasn’t been presented as revealing as often to get an arousal response from women as anyway, even if men were as visually desired by the opposite sex as often as women.
The first what in my response to CMT was supposed to say but. It should have been “It’s not a study but what numerous women have said.”
I posted a comment to you, CMT, then it got deleted. I don’t know how that could have violated a policy when the comments before of the same subject were fine.
I’m basing this on what I’ve read numerous women say and the history of how clothes standards for genders changed. Why would there be this much disparity in how much more often the female body has been shown in clothes and media if males were as visually desired by the opposite sex? If there are if female sexuality is less often as dependant on visual stimulation from uniquely human make features, and as much from the same body areas as how make sexuality works, that’s less opportunity for makes to as often be as visually sexually desired.
You tend to mention studies this and studies that but I remember in a podcast these studies were debunked and further studies proved the one I know you are thinking of wrong and the person who conducted it got into trouble for academic dishonesty. Women are just as visual it is just due to female socialization they tend to repress that side of them more than men.
Maybe the fact that women get aroused with men with less revealing clothing you can argue means that women are MORE visual than men in that they are able to get visually aroused by men in more modest clothing.
Courtney, I also said I’m basing this stuff on what women have said, some of which you confirmed, like not caring as much to see as much of the male body, and insert fantasies being enough to arouse without any thought or sight of the male body! Men get plenty aroused by more covered women too, but our attraction to them is enough for seeing more of their body to be more arousing, so it makes no sense to suggest that women preferring men more covered is because they are more aroused by us!
When I read bits and pieces of EMB post divorce, it made me dislike the male species even more and wonder if I could ever trust men again. After all, my ex husband was an abusive, sex addict.
It took me years to realize how little evidence based this book was and the men writing it were not professionally qualified to do so. Instead, read a secular book about sexual addiction by a psychologist named Patrick Carnes.
“There had been a Presidential Task Force on porn in the 1980s. ”
The Meese Commission (circa 1984), which included a certain James Dobson.
I might still have a copy of their 300-page report somewhere in my book boxes.
Forty years later, I especially remember two things about it:
1) Their Porn Classification System (Class 4 to Class 1 in order of increasing “hardcode”) which I copped for some fiction I was writing with the addition of a “Class Zero”.
2) Their two-page bibliography of Porn Titles that were awful-but-hilarious parodies of actual book and movie titles. Nowadays reminds me of nothing so much as the Clever Titles (matching fonts and all) you see on Christianese Counterfeit books/movies/T-shirts.
“More Jesus-like love?
It is not loving to treat your wife like an object to be used to slake your lusts. Fail.”
There can be no possible companionship with a pressure-release valve or from a lovely vial of methadone.