What if evangelical marriage advice actually mimics coercive control? A few months ago I was emailed by Bethany Jantzi when I started talking about The Excellent Wife online. She had just done her dissertation on how The Excellent Wife actually has the same advice and...
The Excellent Wife is a horribly depressing book to read. It was profoundly heavy and sad. When I started writing these onesheets, they didn’t really affect me that much. Most of the books I was going to be reading were ones I had read already, or were ones I had read...
There are few books as harmful to women as The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace sells like hotcakes in biblical counseling/ fundamentalist/ homeschooling circles, and even though it seems like a “fringe” book, it’s affecting tens of...
I first heard of Naghmeh Panahi when she was campaigning to get her husband Saeed, a pastor, released from an Iranian prison. I saw her on the news, and heard about the prayer vigils, and even took part. Perhaps you did too. And then I remember vaguely the chaos as he...
Sheila here! October is Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, and last week I saw an amazing post by Emily at Thriving Forward, who was a guest on the Bare Marriage podcast a while ago talking about growing up under Gothard, and being part of the lawsuit against him. One...
Is all obligation sex necessarily rape? As we’ve been talking about obligation sex this month, starting with 10 things you need to know about obligation sex, and how obligation sex affects a woman’s body, there’s a conversation that keeps coming up on social media:...
Sometimes it's women who hold other women in bondage. Last night I shared this Fixed It For You on my social media channels. It's a simple one, and it doesn't really need much explanation. The author of the original quote, Rachel Jankovic, is Doug Wilson's daughter,...
The story behind Shiny, Happy People is the story behind Bare Marriage. Not exactly, of course. But in many ways we started this work because of the same forces that the new documentary Shiny, Happy People, which just landed on Amazon Prime, is revealing. This one is...
Last week, a video of Steven Crowder berating his wife Hilary went viral. Hilary was eight months pregnant with twins at the time, and video showed her trying to de-escalate while Steven Crowder yelled at her, swore at her, threatened her ("Watch it!"), and accused...
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...
Today I want to tell you the story of a woman who was the victim of marital rape--and what her church did to her. She's an amazing woman. She reached out to me after our posts on marital rape back in November, in the middle of our series about getting out of sexual...
John MacArthur has sent abused women back to their husbands. It is horrific. Julie Roys broke a story last year about Eileen Gray. Twenty years ago she came to the church leadership at Grace Community Church for help for her abusive marriage. Her husband was abusing...
If your husband has been coercing you into sex, how do you get him to understand what he's done? That's the million dollar question, isn't it? We're in the middle of a series on what to do if one, or both, of you have dug your sex life into a pit. And fundamental to...
What do you do if your wife tells you that she feels as if she has been raped? Or, if she doesn't use those exact words, if she tells you that she feels as if she's been coerced into sex? We've been talking this month about digging out of the pit that you may have...
What does it mean to be "unwilling" to have sex? We're in the middle of a series on the blog about how to dig out of the pit your sex life is in, when one of you, or both of you, keeps digging that pit deeper. One of the big points I was making is that we cannot...