Getting married to have sex is a really, really bad idea. Unfortunately, though, there are many hard-line patriarchal teachers, as well as many young people, who are adamantly saying that this is God’s design. When your sexual desires are too strong, you should just...
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Is Purity Culture Trauma?
Welcome to a new season on the Bare Marriage blog! We're about to begin a new series, starting tomorrow, on obligation sex--how to understand it and get over it. But before we do that, I received this great article by Dr. Camden Morgante (known as Dr. Camden around...
PODCAST: Parenting Without Yelling feat. Wendy Snyder
Can discipline and kindness go together? Today on the Bare Marriage podcast we're joined by one of our favourite people, Wendy Snyder, a parenting coach with Fresh Start Family. She helps parents learn how firm kindness works--how we can connect with our kids through...
The Iowa “Monster Study” and Every Man’s Battle
What if our advice actually triggers the behaviour we want to prevent? One of my favourite places on the internet is our private Patreon Facebook group, where the people who support us financially hang out. For just $5 a month people can join our Patreon group, and in...
The Double Standard for Boys and Girls in Brio Magazine
Let's use a real-life example of purity culture double standards: Brio Magazine Yesterday on the podcast Rebecca and I read excerpts from old copies of Focus on the Family's Brio magazine, aimed at teen girls 12-16. We wanted you to hear first hand what purity culture...
PODCAST: The Brio Magazine Pajama Party!
It's our 200th episode! And we wanted to celebrate by doing something that matters to Rebecca--and to so many of you. We wanted to read some back issues of Brio Magazine, the magazine for preteen and teen girls published by Focus on the Family that encapsulated purity...
Amazing She Should Know Merch Is Here!
She should know that Jesus is not a Jealous Boyfriend. In our book She Deserves Better, we have 32 headings that start "She Should Know..." 32 things that girls need to know, in the very fiber of their being, to dispel a lot of the harmful things we too often have...
Is Kissing Before Marriage a Good Litmus Test?
Are we missing something if we save kissing for marriage? One of the tenets of purity culture was that all physical contact--even kissing--should be saved for marriage. It wasn't just that sex is for marriage. It was that kissing was too. Some couples didn't even...
Are We Shaming Teens for Having Sexual Feelings?
When you're a teen, it's normal to have sexual feelings. In fact, sexual feelings are a normal part of life for adults too! We have sex dreams (the content of which can sometimes be quite alarming). We can feel attraction to people. We can feel "horny", for lack of a...
10 Huge Problems with Every Young Man’s Battle: With a One-Sheet Download
Every Young Man’s Battle is the only book I ever reviewed that made me weep. Perhaps it’s because I read it after I had already read a whole bunch of books aimed at teen girls, and it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I think there was a whole other...
What Is Purity Culture? 10 Essential Ingredients
What exactly does "purity culture" refer to? Our recent book She Deserves Better spends about half of its pages addressing many aspects of purity culture, that was so common in youth groups between 1995-2015, and shows how it deviated from the gospel and from what we...
A List of My Podcast Interviews for She Deserves Better
I've been doing so many interviews for our new book She Deserves Better! I wanted a place where I can put the links to those podcasts, because so many of you have been asking for a list. When I do an interview on ANOTHER podcast, I tend to summarize the book quite...
3 Things That Make it More LIkely She Will Marry an Abuser
Not every girl has an equal chance of growing up and marrying an abuser. The family circumstances and social environment she grows up in can greatly impact her chances. And these things are, to a certain extent, out of our control. But there are things that are even...