Posted on 06/30/2023 10:05:39 PM PDT by Morgana
For years, Focus on the Family has promoted the teaching that Christian wives are obligated to give their husbands sex. Now, they seem to be reversing course—while also deleting references to the researcher that first exposed the harm of so-called “obligation sex.”
Author and researcher Sheila Wray Gregoire had previously called out Focus on the Family (FOTF) for promoting obligation sex. Gregoire’s survey of 20,000 evangelical women and 2021 book, “The Great Sex Rescue,” concluded that Christian teachings requiring women to have sex with their husbands, regardless of women’s emotional and physical needs, increase sexual pain and harm marriages.
On Monday, FOTF published an Instagram reel from an excerpt of an April 2022 FOTF interview with psychologist and former FOTF staff, Juli Slattery, that promotes Gregoire’s talking points.
“The teaching traditionally to men has been, ‘once you get married, you should get all your needs met sexually in marriage and now your wife is obligated to do that,'” Slattery said in the reel. “And that has hurt so many marriages, hurt so many women.”
This shows the conversation around evangelical sex is changing, Gregoire said.
“When we wrote ‘The Great Sex Rescue,’ we said we just wanted to change the evangelical conversation around sex,” Gregoire said. “I think it is changing, and I’m glad about that.”
But then FOTF deleted hundreds of comments people made to their Instagram post that referenced Gregoire’s research. Gregoire’s research shows that evangelical marriage books and organizations that promote them carry a big responsibility for spreading those messages. The deletions mean the change hasn’t gone far enough for real accountability for past FOTF teachings, Gregoire said.
“Focus on the Family would rather escape accountability and pretend they did nothing wrong, instead of grappling with the fact that many of the books they have recommended, and even those they have published, have actually caused demonstrable harm,” she told The Roys Report (TRR).
TRR received about 100 now-deleted screenshots of comments on that post referencing Gregoire and her research. TRR also screenshot a couple of recent comments that have since been deleted.
However, after TRR reached out to FOTF for comment, FOTF left up a comment that this TRR journalist made asking, “Are you removing comments that cite @sheilagregoire’s work?”
Meanwhile, FOTF left up this sexually explicit post for 11 hours before taking it down.
In response to TRR’s request for comment, FOTF provided a general statement of why it removes comments.
“We appreciate Dr. Slattery’s biblical approach toward healthy sexuality in marriage,” wrote Gary Schneeberger, FOTF’s assistant to the president of media relations. “With regard to your question about this one particular Instagram post, our Focus staff member may choose to remove a user comment if it’s off-topic, combative, vulgar, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate or unhelpful. We know that our followers look to our posts for encouraging family content, so we’re committed to keeping the atmosphere of our boards safe and supportive.”
Elissa Lombard, one of Gregoire’s readers, said she also called FOTF to question why FOTF would remove certain social media comments. She said she didn’t get a chance to go into the specifics of the Gregoire-related comments. But she got a similarly-worded emailed reply back from FOTF regarding the organization’s policies on comments.
“(O)ur Focus staff may choose to remove a user comment if it’s off-topic, combative, vulgar, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate or unhelpful,” wrote FOTF staffer Jeremy Hill.
She wrote back with an attachment of one of the now-deleted comments that stated, “Great job addressing this. Much of this information comes from the largest research study conducted on this topic, which was was (sic) by the excellent Bare Marriage folks (@sheilagregoire ). They’re an outstanding resource as well! Thank you for addressing this.”
Lombard then asked FOTF how the comment fit into their criteria for removal. At publication, she hadn’t received a response. TRR also sent FOTF a PDF of 22 comments citing Gregoire’s work to inquire if these meet the criteria for comment removal but didn’t receive a response by publication.
“Not only are they silencing people who are bringing up concerns, (but also) people who are crediting (Sheila),” Lombard said. Has the Christian Conversation on Sex Changed?
In 2010, Gregoire started using the term “obligation sex,” a message that comes from I Corinthians 7:2-5, but that she argued could cause harm to women and in marriage when used inappropriately. In 2012, she wrote on the topic again in “The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.” Since then, she said she’s blogged on the concept more than 100 times and spoken on it for 119 podcasts, including a podcast with TRR.
Then in 2021, she and her team published research that provided the evidence for Gregoire’s theories on obligation sex. They discovered that evangelical women suffer from vaginismus, an involuntary tightening of the vagina that often causes pain during sex, at least twice the rate as the general population.
She also found that evangelical women have orgasms at a rate of 48% versus 95% of evangelical men. In both cases, the message “a wife is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it,” contributes to those statistics, as well as decreases satisfaction with marriage, Gregoire found.
A 2009 series Slattery wrote for FOTF Australia emphasizes men’s physical need for sex and advises women to talk about sex, rather than relational problems, with their husbands. “Look at it this way: How is your husband likely to respond to these two statements—‘Honey, I really think we need to talk about our marriage, I feel like we are drifting apart.’ Versus ‘Babe, I want to work on our sexual relationship.’”
By 2020, however, Slattery said she was questioning these teachings.
“I’ve had some ministry interactions I’d say within the last six to 12 months and done some reading on different topics that have made me think some of how are presenting sex and marriage is unbalanced,” she said in a July 2020 podcast titled, “Is Good Sex a Right in Marriage.”
A few months later, Slattery published a post called “Are you Entitled to Good Sex in Marriage?”
The FOTF Instagram reel from this week showed Slattery talking about sexual pain: “If your wife has had pain during sex, if she has trauma in her past, if she’s not enjoying it, the burden in some ways is also on you to say…‘How do I go on the healing journey with her?’ and not just say, ‘No, I get my needs met regardless?’”
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But Slattery hasn’t explicitly mentioned vaginismus prior to Gregoire’s research, Gregoire said.
“I’m glad they’re talking about it,” Gregoire said. “This just hasn’t been dealt with in evangelical circles.”
A representative for Slattery said she is unable to speak to TRR on short notice, but respects Gregoire’s work.
“Juli has been involved in similar work of addressing damaging messages from the church in regards to sexuality over the past 12 years,” wrote the Authentic Intimacy team in an emailed response.
However, FOTF continues to promote books Gregoire considers harmful like Married Sex by Debra Fileta and Gary Thomas. In Gregoire’s book review of “Married Sex,” she raises concerns that it objectifies women and has mixed messages about porn. The book claims to be against porn, but then encourages women to send their husbands naked pictures of themselves to help the men avoid porn, Gregoire says. Though the book objects to obligation sex, it also holds up women who decide to never tell their husbands no to sex as good examples.
FOTF hosted Gregoire in the early 2000s and as recently as 2015 and 2016. But FOTF has removed past interviews and references to Gregoire in their archives, Gregoire said. A search today of FOTF’s website showed no results for Gregoire’s name.
In 2014, Gary Thomas started writing on obligation sex for his book, “A Lifelong Love.” But he’s only intermittently cited Gregoire for the concept, she says. In his “Married Sex,” he didn’t cite her work regarding obligation sex.
Gregoire said she asked Harper Collins and its Zondervan division, Thomas’ and Fileta’s publisher, for a citation. However, the August 2021 publication includes no citations for Gregoire’s works. She said she parted ways with the publisher for her own work over the matter.
Emailed requests for comment to Harper Collins and the Zondervan division were not immediately answered. Thomas and Fileta also did not immediately respond to TRR’s requests for comment.
FOTF’s mixed messages around this issue can be more harmful than helpful to women and marriages, Gregoire said.
“They’re not going to be able to help women get out of this without having a real conversation about how this was largely taught and marketed by them,” she said.
Me neither. They tacitly defer to psychology, which is diametrically opposed to a Christian Biblical world view. And yet, they claim to be a Christian ministry, putting sanitized, Christian dressing on pagan worldly ideas.
That said, founder James Dobson was FAR more conservative then than even the most conservative Christian leaders today. I have one of his books given to me by my parents on growing up. Homosexuality was ALWAYS viewed by the ministry as sinful and something that needed to be counseled out of. The ministry took a noticable left turn when he retired.
They are saying that it’s ok for a married man to have blue balls. Women’s needs are supreme. But don’t you be looking at any porn to get off, you sinner.
It’s bs.
Churches have become feminized because of the propaganda lie that church permit wife-beating. They want to prove how they are really *for* women.
And men are sick of it. Men don’t want to go to church if all they are going to hear is how bad and abusive they are.
Obligation sex, charity sex,...Sex is sex, no such thing as bad sex
Blue balls is a really lame excuse, for anyone.
Husband and wife need to work together.
Paul tells us in Scripture not to defraud each other.
That means that it’s a two way street and men are not to deny their wives either.
But anyone in a marriage who *demands* performance from the other person is NOT acting in love.
Obligation sex is whether the partner feels like it or not.
My position is that both should have sex as often as possible, but they should also be treating each other as best they can outside the bedroom.
You can’t expect the bedroom to be a good place to be when the rest of the marriage is not.
Full disclosure, my wife and I just made it to forty-nine years three days ago.
Full disclosure, my wife and I just made it to forty-nine years three days ago.
women went thru their child bearing years and expected things to slow down a bit in the bedroom but now we've got 75 yr old men taking viagra thinking they're some desirable hunk....it is unatural, just as unnatural as pumping up breasts with silicon.
men and women were better when they knew their roles and accepted their human biology with its limitations.
As a loving wife of 30 years, I can attest that there was a time when I engaged in obligation sex. The kids were young, my husband and I were both working, we were drowning in medical debt, and I was tired and stressed all the time.
As much as I loved my husband, sex was the last thing I wanted. Even the thought of it was exhausting.
Still, I knew it was his love language, so off to the bedroom we went.
I’m glad I did. I was showing him how much I loved him and respected him in my heart, even if the rest of me was inwardly yelling, “Seriously? Can’t I just have a nap?”
Once life got on an even keel again and those frantic times passed, sex stopped being a “wifely duty” and returned to the passionate lovemaking we shared before three little ones took over the house. It certainly helped that my husband was loving, considerate, hardworking, super sexy, and unfalteringly loyal; a true gift from God.
Now, all we have to do catch each other’s gaze or touch each other’s hand and it’s game on.
Other posters write about how things outside the bedroom impact the bedroom. So true! If husbands and wives are not loving, respectful, and fulfilling their roles in the rest of the house, the bed will be a hostile environment.
They are obligated. Not like a sex slave. Its a job requirement for a wife, and the husband, however. Husbands and wives are to be for each other. No man gets married to NOT have sex with his wife. Every woman in the world knows this. Withholding of affection was and should be grounds for divorce. It forces the other person to become unwillingly celibate against their will. IE they didn’t sign up for celibacy when they got married and the other person dam well knew it.
Its like wanting to be a wife without wanting to fulfill the wifely duties. Or being a husband without doing the same.
Dry marriages are a pox. The spouses who do this to the other person they claim to love and cherish are extremely cruel and married under false pretenses.
Indeed.
Congratulations on your anniversary.
You will never understand the sex drive of a man because you don’t have one.
We have 25-50 times at least, more testosterone in us than you do. Throughout our lifespans.
There have been female bodybuilders who, doped and took testosterone. They only take enough to double their normal level. That means, even with the doping, they still had 12-25 times less testosterone than an average man.
These women could not believe what happened to them. Their own words: “i got extremely aggressive, i started picking fights, i couldn’t control my temper and got irritated easily at any little thing, and I was very horny, all the time.” “I honestly don’t know how you (guys) are able to control yourselves.”
And men are sick of it. Men don’t want to go to church if all they are going to hear is how bad and abusive they are.
…….
Best you don’t read the Bible then. It won’t make you feel any better when you read how sinful you are……
Because their mind is on sin, that’s why they fail. Men will be judged by their thoughts.
What’s more tragic and sad, someone who maybe gets a little more sex than they want, or someone who wants more and is repeatedly rejected by their spouse?
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