"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...
The strangest thing about watching Netflix’s Death of a Pastor’s Wife is how familiar it all feels. Our family has been attending an Anglican Church since COVID ended. We haven’t been in a typical evangelical church for over 7 years. We left because of trauma and...
Evangelicalism has huge double standards of sexual expectations in marriage. One of the things we tried to drive home in The Marriage You Want is that the biggest killer of marriage is entitlement. When you think you're owed something from your spouse without you...
Let's look at how specific discipleship materials actually enable marital rape. But first, a bit of background. Last week on my Substack I re-ran a post I wrote a few years ago on this blog about the two kinds of marital rape (here's the Substack post and the original...
Recovery from obligation sex begins with understanding autonomy and consent. It begins with understanding it was never God's will for one person to use someone else's body for their own pleasure/emotional coping mechanism, without consideration of what this was doing...
This time we're looking at lust & sex in For Men Only! It's Part 2 of our deep dive into the book For Men Only by Jeff and Shaunti Feldhahn, and we saved the sex & lust & libido stuff to this podcast, because Rebecca had a lot to say. If you remember, the...
In Christian marriage advice, sex is supposed to be deeply intimate--until it's not. Here's what happens: Before marriage, Christians are told that sex is deeply intimate. That it bonds you together. That as you get closer and love each other more, you're going to...
It's moving day for me! We're leaving our house of 19 years and heading to our new place! So I wanted to share something different today. So many people send me their stories (and I'm so touched and honoured!), and this woman's really resonated with me because I know...
Are women visually oriented? What we usually hear in the church is that God made men to be visual (the Every Man's Battle authors say that God made men to receive sexual gratification through the eyes). Women, on the other hand, just aren't. We aren't visual at all....
Women have a harder time enjoying sex--so why is the mental load left to her? Today on the podcast we play a bunch of clips of different pastors/speakers that show all the different ways that the mental load & emotional labour for sex are so often placed on...
Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker ignore abuse victims in Every Man's Battle. They never talk about the reality of sexual abuse, or acknowledge that a man's lust and sexual behavior can deeply injure women. Instead, they portray the victim when men lust as the man...
Why is lust a sin? That may seem like a silly question, because it's obvious, right? It's LUST. And lust is bad. But seriously--what, specifically, is bad about it? I think that answer really matters, because part of the reason the "all men struggle with lust; it's...
Why do evangelical women see sex as a chore? We're doing a fun podcast today where I'm combining a whole bunch of different things that I've been wanting to talk about, and putting them together so that they tell a consistent story. At least that's the plan! We're...
What if our desires make us fully human? And what if they're what give us our individuality? Jay Stringer joins us on the podcast today to talk about his new book Desire, an attempt to answer the question about why so much therapy doesn't work by coming up with a...
Does waiting for marriage for sex increase sexual pain disorders? In short, yes. We found this in our survey of 20,000 women for our book The Great Sex Rescue, and we've been trying to raise awareness of this for quite a while. We know that pelvic floor...