Ariana deVries

Welcome to the podcast, everybody. We are your hosts Ariana.

Alicia deVries

And I'm Alicia.

Ariana deVries

And we're sisters by marriage and great friends. So thank you for joining us as we lean in and chat about life, discovering more of what it means to actively listen and just having a great time meeting new people. So today we are thrilled to chat with Sheila Wray Gregoire. She's a wife, mom and grandma living in Belleville, Ontario. She's a prolific author and has written nine books?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I think so. I don't know. I think so.

Ariana deVries

Something like that. She hosts the Bare Marriage podcast and writes for her blog To Love, Honour and Vacuum. Sheila is a kind and funny soul who is actively working to bring healing and understanding to couples on the topic of marriage and sex alongside her husband and daughters, which is so cool. She's been working to clarify this topic for over 16 years. So thank you so much for joining us, Sheila.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

It's great to be here.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, wonderful. So we're gonna jump right in. Can you tell us a little bit about what life was like for you growing up and how that played a part in shaping your view of the world.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I grew up with a single mom. So I always had daddy issues. I always had like, that sense of rejection. And I probably wanted to get married more than I should have, you know, like I needed that.

Ariana deVries

We did that.

Alicia deVries

Yep.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I needed someone to complete me kind of thing. So that was the negative part of it. The positive was I really had very strong women in my family. And I've always been surrounded by strong women. And I've never had the feeling that I'm less than because I'm a woman or that my career plans need to change because I'm a woman, or anything. I mean, I did stay home with my kids. But that was always a choice that I was allowed to make. And so I never felt like God saw me as someone less than my husband.

Ariana deVries

That's good. That's awesome to hear that you have that foundation. So you were able to go into your marriage and your career with that understanding of the world. That's really helpful, and not what a lot of people, especially those in evangelical circles, necessarily start out with. So that's really good to hear.

Alicia deVries

I'm actually just so curious how someone gets into the business of teaching others how to have a healthy sex life. And I would love if you could share what led you to this point of wanting to break down all the stigmas around sexuality and marriage? What in your journey brought you here? And was there a defining moment that helped spark the passion for you?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Well I've been writing about marriage since 2008. So I started out mommy blogging. Well, I actually started writing for magazines before that. And I had a couple of small books out in the early 2000s. So I would write when my kids took naps, when they were very small. We homeschooled and I wrote some books then. So when they were small, I was doing some writing, but not a lot. And then as they got to high school age, I started a blog. And I wrote about mostly marriage, parenting, housework. I was writing a local column in our newspaper, and I did that for 12 years. But it was really focused just on general slice of life stuff.

What I found was that the more I talked about sex, the more my traffic grew on the blog. And at the same time, my husband and I were speaking at marriage conferences, and he's a doctor, so he'll talk about anything. And no one ever wanted to do the sex talk. So we always got slotted into the sex talk. We got quite good at giving the sex talk. And when I was looking at writing a big book in 2012, my agent said, "Well, why don't you do one on sex? Because that's something that we can sell." So I never intended to be the Christian sex lady, because that's a super weird thing to do. It really was more that there was this void. And I found that the more I spoke into it, the more people paid attention. So it wasn't intentional at all.

Alicia deVries

Right. Yep, that makes sense.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And we saw recently, I think Alicia saw it in your most recent book, that you mentioned that you were not planning on getting into the breaking down of stigmas necessarily, that you've found after you had already been a part of this world, this Christian sex education basically. You saw all the negative aspects of what people were writing and all the books that were being sold about this and, let me know if I'm wrong on this or not, but you purposefully didn't read other people's work, to not affect what you were writing and teaching. Is that right?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah. I was always so afraid of plagiarism. Like when I was in university, they were always talking against plagiarism. And so I was always afraid to take someone's ideas. So I didn't read any books. So here I am, I'm blogging. I read a lot of research. Like I read a lot of secular stuff. I read a lot of journal articles, but I didn't read any Christian books. And I'm speaking at marriage conferences. We're surrounded by all these Christian books. I'm recommending Christian books because I'm told hey, they love Jesus. I love Jesus. We're both talking about sex, you must be saying the same thing, and you know.

So I wrote The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex in 2012. I've since revised it. The new version is coming out next month. But I wrote it back in 2012. I wrote 31 Days to Great Sex, created an orgasm course and libido course. I'm present, I'm creating all this positive information, and everyone still has the same issues.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And it's like there was a wall that I couldn't break down. And I kept getting all of these emails. Then one day, it was January 2019. So just about three years ago, I just had a migraine, I was procrastinating. And I was on Twitter, and people were fighting about Love and Respect. There was a bunch of women saying, "I need respect, not just love." And they were referring to the book Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs, where the thesis is that women need love, but men need respect. And I thought, yeah, I need respect too I don't just need love.

Then I realized I did have that book upstairs, but I'd never read it. So I went and got it. And of course, being the sex person, I turned to the sex chapter, which is in the section of the book where it's like what wives do for husbands. So it's already framed as something for husbands. And I opened it up and he says, "if your husband is typical, he has a need you don't have." So men need sex and women don't. That the need is for physical release. So sex is all about his ejaculation. "Why would you deprive him of something which takes so little time and makes him so happy?" And "you're not supposed to say no." And I'm FaceTiming my daughter and another person who works for me on the blog, and I'm just going nuts. Like, I read the paragraph and I'm like, holy cow, what is going on? Like, what is going on? Because this was the best selling marriage book other than the Five Love Languages.

We wrote a series on it the next week on the blog, and we had hundreds of women write in to us and say that that book enabled abuse in their marriage. So we created a report, well Joanna who works for me, who's a statistician, created a report. We sent it to Focus on the Family who publishes it, and they ignored us. And so we thought, okay, you can ignore several 100. But can you ignore 20,000? And so we decided that we would just do the biggest research project that's ever been done, and we would measure 'how do the things that we're teaching in evangelical books affect women's sexual and marital satisfaction?' And how bad is it out there? Really? And that's what became The Great Sex Rescue.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, wow.

Alicia deVries

I'm already getting a little worked up hearing even some of those lines from the book, because it can cause so much harm when people believe that - when they believe that men need sex and women don't, that wives should submit, that wives should give their husband sex whenever he wants it. And even saying, if she doesn't, that he will fulfill his need elsewhere. And if he does cheat on you, well, it's your fault for not giving him what he needed at home. That's written in these books. And it is just so wild to me that people believe this and teach this.

And, the same as in purity culture, the emphasis is mostly put on the woman to be the one to do all the work in this and in your experience, in getting the results back from your survey, what was the outcome of this way of teaching? How did you find that it affected the women you talked to - positively? Negatively? Can you expand on your survey?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah so what we did was we had three big parts of the survey. So we asked, first of all, all kinds of questions about marital satisfaction. Then we got super up close and personal and asked all kinds of questions about sex - it was seriously personal and awkward. Then we presented them with all of these different teachings and we said, did you ever believe these? Or were you ever taught them? We asked them to answer at two different points in time - before you were married, and now.

From that we were able to compare women who did believe something with women who didn't believe it and see if it affected marital or sexual satisfaction. We had a couple of different outcome variables. We were looking at, how does it affect orgasm rates? How does it affect your ability to get aroused? How does it affect sexual pain? How does it affect whether or not you feel emotionally close during sex? How does it affect your marital satisfaction? So we were looking at all of these different things.

And what we found is that a lot of these teachings seriously harmed both our sexual outcome variables and our marital outcome variables - so they're making things worse. Our best sellers, in many cases, are making things worse. And when I say evangelical teachings, I don't mean Biblical teachings. Right, I really want to stress this. And this is one of the big things that that we did in The Great Sex Rescue is we showed them that no, they might be teaching this but it's not from the Bible. It's something that we've put on, and we put Christian language to it, but it's not Biblical. And that's why we're hurting people.

Ariana deVries

Oh, man, the amount of hurt that comes from this is just unbelievable. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that have been a result of this kind of teaching?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, so we found four big ones that we looked in the book. There were others. There were others that harmed sex and marriage. But there were four really big ones that we studied in detail, because they had the most effects.

And I would say that there's a teaching that's kind of over them all, like, kind of like the Lord of the Rings analogy, like one ring to bind them all, you know. But the teaching that is over them all is the idea 'if your husband is typical, he has a need you don't have.' So it's seeing sex through the male lens, sexism, male entitlement. Sex is something that she gives him. So he takes sex and she gives it. It's not something they share together. It's not something that's intimate. It's something that she gives, and he takes because he needs it. And that's kind of the way that it's framed over and over and over again, in our best sellers. Yeah sure, she might enjoy it, she might want it, but not the way he does; not in any way that she will ever be able to understand.

From that, we measured for specific beliefs that had negative repercussions. And one of them, for instance, the idea that all men struggle with lust, it's every man's battle. Right. So it's the equating of the objectification of women with a male sex drive. Right? So God created men to objectify women. That's really the way it's phrased. The book series, Every Man's Battle, which has sold like 4 million copies or something insane like that, said you know, we see your reason for sexual sin. We got there naturally, simply by being male. It's because we're male. And it says that in Every Young Man's Battle, too. So the book that we're teaching young teenage boys, it's like, you're gonna sin because you're a boy. Right?

Ariana deVries

You're destined to fail, right from the get-go.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Even books that have been written since The Great Sex Rescue, like Married Sex by Gary Thomas, he quotes a discredited neuroscientist saying that men have sexual thoughts flickering through their brains at all times. So much so that they're always ready to seize a sexual opportunity. Like this is the way they're describing what men are like. And I just need to point out, we believe that Jesus was fully male. So do they really think that Jesus was always at the ready to seize a sexual opportunity?

Ariana deVries

Yeah, right.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Or do you not think Jesus was fully male? Like, which one is it? You know?

Ariana deVries

And so many times, I think, when I read these things, like you said, these aren't based out of facts half the time, or biblical truth, either. It feels like sometimes these are being talked about from people's personal experience, or what they wish they weren't like, and then making it feel like, oh, this is the way that everybody should be fighting against this. And that's not true or accurate at all, for most people.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah. And, you know, we've just finished a survey of men. And that's coming out in our book, The Good Guys Guide to Great Sex, which releases in March. But, you know, what we found is they say that it's every man's battle, right? And when we asked men, 75% of men agree that they do have a daily struggle with lust, so it's not 100%. So it's already not every man. But when you drill down on those 75%, almost half of them do not watch porn, so they don't have a problem with porn. They don't lust in a variety of situations that we asked them about. They show no signs of lusting. They do not have intrusive thoughts of women or porn past porn use or anything going through their brains at any time. So they show no signs of lusting whatsoever.

And we think what's going on is that we have conflated noticing a woman is beautiful with lusting. We've put so much shame on a lot of guys that they feel trapped. They feel like I am lusting merely by existing when they're not. And we need to have a much better conversation about this, like noticing someone is attractive is not lusting.

Ariana deVries

Right. And now, both of them have negative connotations, because of the way that we've described it to people to think that this is the only way that it can be.

Alicia deVries

Yeah, this way of teaching is not helpful for men or women. Like it's not helpful for anyone.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Exactly.

Ariana deVries

Which is why then I guess you see the hurt that comes in marriages and why couples struggle to communicate effectively about this because you don't know the words to say. You don't know exactly what you're feeling and if it is only a certain word like lust that you think you're using, and that automatically is triggering and makes people think one specific thing. That just sets everything off on a bad route right off the get-go.

So, do you have some tips of how we can communicate well about these things, like as a couple, and using communication and words and terminology that is more helpful and brings more clarity, as a couple talking about sex?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, well, first of all, let's go back to what Jesus said. He said, "whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery." So two things to notice there - looking is a deliberate action. So it's a deliberate action combined with a deliberate mindset with lust. That's what the problem is. So noticing is not a deliberate action, right? It's not a deliberate mindset. Seeing is not a deliberate mindset. The problem is that the way that we've treated lust, or the solution to lust, has actually just been to solidify the problem of lust. Because the essential problem with the lust mindset is that it sees women as objects. So what is the solution that the church has given us? It's women need to cover up. And men need to bounce their eyes so they don't look.

Alicia deVries

So that just devalues women.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

It devalues them. And even if we're covering women up, and I'm not saying women should all go out bearing things. But seriously, if you wear what people normally wear in society, it's not a problem. Like just stop all of this nonsense, okay? So if women need to totally cover up, and if men need to bounce their eyes, then both things see women as threats. We are the threats, which is so interesting, because it's women who are getting sexually assaulted. And yet women are the ones who are seen as the threats to the men.

Alicia deVries

Just by existing.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

The way to get over lust is not to bounce your eyes. It's not for women to cover up. It's to choose to see women as whole people. Jesus did not refuse to look at women. Jesus chose to truly see women. And one of my favorite things that Jesus ever said was, you know, this woman is washing his feet. And he looks at the Pharisees, and he says, "Do you see this woman?" Like, that is such a profound question. You know, do you see this woman?

Ariana deVries

Do you see her for more than just what she looks like?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Exactly. And that's the way to overcome lust is to treat women as whole people made in the image of God, and that empowers both men and women to go forward.

The other issue that we haven't even gotten to is by framing lust as a male issue, we forget that women can have issues with sexual temptation as well. And women can be very visual, too. And so, you know, when we're talking to our teenagers, instead of saying, 'lust is every man's battle,' let's just simply say 'you know what, a lot of people struggle with lust.' You know, often guys, sometimes more than girls, but a lot of girls struggle with it too. You know, but it is not a lifetime battle. It is not something you can't defeat and the way to defeat it is to learn to respect other people as whole people made in the image of God.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Alicia deVries

Yeah that's so good.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Well that's what often is a tripping up point for people and women too in regards to understanding their sexuality and knowing what it is to orgasm or anything like that. Because we aren't really taught that it's okay for us to have that experience, to have those thoughts, to be a sexual being, because we're told that we are a threat, or we are a stumbling block.

Alicia deVries

Or we don't need it, because it's for men.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, its not for us.

Alicia deVries

And if you do have those desires, as a woman, then you feel bad, like something's wrong with you, because you've been taught your whole life that you shouldn't have those desires, because it's only for men. So you feel bad, and then going into marriage, things can just seem wrong or out of whack, because you feel shame for feeling anything.

Ariana deVries

That was definitely something that my husband and I had to work through in the early years of our marriage, because I felt like, I'm not one of the normal ones, because I maybe want this more than other people that I've talked to do. And so I didn't know how to navigate that at first, to be like, oh, normal is a very large spectrum. There is no normal for this. It's, you got to talk about this and communicate as a couple what works between the two of you, not what anybody else is doing or talking.

Alicia deVries

Yeah it is on a spectrum and you and your spouse will be at different points at different times in your life too. And it can ebb and flow and change and communication needs to be a big part of that so you can figure out what works for the two of you together.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, exactly. And we need to not see sex as something which, you know, he's always going to want it more because that isn't true. Like, that's how almost all of our evangelical resources are written - like women, your responsibility is to have sex more, because he wants it so much. We're told the 72 hour rule, right? You got to have sex every 72 hours.

Ariana deVries

We read that in your book, and we were just like oh my goodness.

Alicia deVries

And just hearing about the couple where the wife did that. And 20 years later, they actually had a conversation about it and he was like, I didn't actually need it that often. Just because she had read it somewhere, then she thought that was how it should be. That just influences your whole life for so long when it doesn't actually need to be that way.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Exactly. It's like, what do you actually want? Because we found that, you know, 58% of men, yes, they have the higher sex drive. But 23% is shared. And in 19%, she has the higher sex drive. And I want to point out too, that that's actually lower than the general population, because what we found is that a lot of these evangelical teachings artificially lower women's libidos, and if we hadn't been given these teachings in the first place, you would see more women with higher sex drives, or more sex drives that were shared. So you know, we've artificially lowered women's libidos, but even in that artificially lowering, we still have 19% who want sex more than their husbands.

And that's a terrible place to be; I've had so many letters from women saying, we really struggled for the first few years of our marriage, like we had to seek counseling. My husband felt like he wasn't enough of a man because he only wanted it once a week and I felt so undesirable. And there was nothing wrong! It's just that they had been told their whole life, he is going to be insatiable. And he is going to be after you constantly. And when that didn't happen, they felt like they were both broken.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, right. Exactly. And so then there's just so many broken people walking around. It's so sad.

Alicia deVries

It is so sad. It is heartbreaking, actually. Because it can be an exciting thing for you as a couple to experience together. But when it's not talked about well, in a way that's actually healthy for both parties, then it just again creates so much shame and guilt for many different reasons.

And even you talk about like, part of the orgasm gap is because we don't talk to women about them actually having a sexual drive or like a low libido. We don't give them any help or men any resources for helping women to orgasm. And so we don't actually help them in any way. And so again, if women aren't feeling anything in the bedroom, then why would they want to do it more? You talk about the need to redefine the word sex and how the way we commonly think about sex actually contributes to the orgasm gap.

Ariana deVries

Can you explain to us what exactly the orgasm gap is? And what that means and how that actually affects relationships.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Okay, so what we found is that 95% of men almost always, or always reach orgasm in a sexual encounter. And the equivalent number for women is just over 48%. So we have a 47 point orgasm gap. Okay, that's huge. Like, that's a really big deal. And a lot of that, I think does stem from how we define sex. Because if you ask someone, like if you're super creepy, and you ask someone, did you have sex last night? Which is a terrible thing to ask, but what they think you're asking is something along the lines of like did he put his penis into her vagina and move around. We're defining it as intercourse. We think that's what sex is. But of the women who do reach orgasm, very few reach orgasm through intercourse alone. Like there's other routes that are much more reliable. You know intercourse is not the end all and be all for women.

When we define sex as only intercourse, and that's the big thing that you're supposed to save for marriage, right? This is the big, big thing. And you get to finally have sex, meaning have intercourse. And then you do and intercourse feels a lot better and easier for a guy, in general, than it does for women. I'm not saying you can't orgasm through intercourse. We have an orgasm course that helps you do that, but it's not necessary. If you can orgasm in other ways, that's fine. It doesn't matter. Like, seriously. But when he does, and she doesn't, and remember that most men can orgasm in like two to three minutes. Now, thankfully, most men can also take longer if they try. But if they don't try to last, they can orgasm in two to three minutes, whereas most women take far longer. We're just designed to take longer.

But if we're not training couples that you need to figure out her arousal cycle, you need to figure out her sexual response cycle, then they can get married, they can have intercourse, it feels nothing for her and they just assume she's not sexual. Right? And she thinks I must be broken.

And remember, like in Shaunti Feldhahn's book For Women Only, for instance, she says that what men really need to know is that you're enthusiastic about this and that you want to do this with them. So she says, like, while you're having sex, let your words be heart words, like affirm him and adore him, even if you can't physically respond. And then later she says, if you can't physically respond, see a counselor. So if you're not feeling good, you should see a counselor. But the number one reason that women don't feel good during sex that we found, the number one reason that women don't orgasm is lack of foreplay. That is my biggest reason. But by saying see a counselor, we're still implying there's something wrong with her.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

You know, and I'm not saying that there can't be things, like if you've been a victim of sexual assault, you know, please see a licensed trauma therapist, okay, not just a counselor from your church, but someone who's trained in evidence based trauma therapies. Or if you've got relationship issues. Like there's lots of things that can hold women back from orgasm. And often you do need a counselor. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the first thing we assume.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And with a lot of teachings for young people, they're not taught to go and learn about these things. Like these things are bad, and you will feel shame. And somehow it's sinful to want to know about how the female body works, or how the male body works, or what even parts of the reproductive system are called, and what are the genitalia, like what all the different parts are - we aren't taught that. So then we don't know what to do with it. Like, we don't know how to create arousal and things like that most of the time, because you don't even know what they do. Right?

Like, I know that was part of my experience. That was something that I had to learn alongside my husband - to go and research this stuff. Like find out how your body works, like all of it - the menstrual cycle, and how you respond sexually, and like all of that stuff. Like, there's a lot to it that we're just not taught.

Alicia deVries

Yeah, totally. And I also had to learn a lot later on in life, like when we were engaged, then married, because I didn't learn any of that before. I didn't know any of it. And I felt like I was bad to want to learn about anything before. So I was just like, well, nope, I'm not gonna learn about any of it. We'll figure it out later. And that just is not actually super healthy for people.

Ariana deVries

And I am really curious, though, what your thoughts are on having sex before marriage. And what you think about that idea, because you did mention in your book, too, that a lot of times, it's in the pre marriage, like the engaged stage where a couple does feel strongly attracted to each other, and like, the arousal and everything is there. But then it's like, going from zero to a hundred, all of a sudden on your wedding night, and it just doesn't work because the arousal is not there. I would like to know a little bit more about what your thoughts are on sex before marriage.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, I mean, I do ascribe to biblical sexual ethic. And I think that sex is meant for marriage. There's a bunch of questions there, though, like, what is marriage? I know, that's a funny question, but if you look at New Testament times, Joseph had to divorce Mary, or was thinking about divorcing Mary and they weren't married yet. They were only engaged. Right? So it's like things meant different things back then. So it's not as clear cut as we may think.

And what I'm all about is what does the research say. So, this is a stat that isn't in The Great Sex Rescue, it's in our upcoming books, The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex and The Good Guys Guide to Great Sex. But we looked at couples where they had only ever had sex with each other, so no other sexual partners. And we controlled for abuse, so that wasn't a factor. Okay. And what we found is that if you wait for the wedding, you're 25% more likely to experience vaginal dryness, which is a sexual dysfunction, where she experiences a lot of pain with sex because the muscles in the vaginal wall contract and just can't relax. I am not saying that that means that everybody should have sex before the marriage. But I am saying that we need to totally rethink how we think about the honeymoon.

Because if you think about couples who have sex before the marriage, why do they have sex? They have sex because they've been watching the romantic movie, and then they made out for an hour and they got really steamy and hands began to wander, and then it just kind of happened.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

That's often what goes on. So you've been really affectionate. You've had this nice night together. You're all hot and steamy. She's aroused, and it happens.

But what often happens on the wedding night is, first of all, you're totally exhausted. This has been the biggest day of your life. You probably didn't sleep the night before. It's been the most stressful period of your life or at least one of them. And then you have a huge obligation message put on you. Like, now you need to have sex. So it's not like you're having sex because you're passionate about each other or any of that. It's like, okay, here we are in the hotel room so now we have to have sex. It's not like anything that is, you know, romantic or anything.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And often she's not aroused.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And then sex just doesn't work very well. I think that's one of the big reasons. So what we're trying to argue for is, on the honeymoon, there's a three fold aim. Okay, first of all, just get comfortable.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, that's it.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Just get comfortable being naked, you know?

Ariana deVries

Take a shower.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, have a bath. Get a hotel room with a jacuzzi. If you're gonna spend money on anything get a hotel like that, you know, then aim for her arousal. So figure out how to get her aroused, and then have intercourse. In that order. Some people can do that in one night. And some people, it takes several weeks, you know, it doesn't matter. But do it in that order and you're gonna set yourself up for a lot of decades of great sex. But if you shortchange it, you can have a lot of decades of a lot of awkwardness and not very good sex.

Ariana deVries

Yeah and that just sets the whole thing off on a bad foot, especially if your very first experience or your first ideas of it with this person are painful.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yep.

Ariana deVries

Okay. Now, I really want to know, because you are a part of teaching this with your husband, and with your daughters. They're all a part of this with you. So I am really curious how you communicated this with your daughters as they were growing up in a way that made them feel safe, and not a sense of shame, so that they felt like they could communicate about this alongside you.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Well, it's funny because we laugh at how terrible a job I did telling them about puberty and sex. I really did. I did a very bad job.

Ariana deVries

Sometimes the fields where we are the most skilled in, we are the worst at communicating for ourselves.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, and it's funny, because since then, they created, well all of us did together, but it was mostly them, they created a puberty course for moms to share with their daughters, like talking about sex and puberty and everything. So I can give you the link to that if you want to put it in your show notes. It's really great. We've also since made a male version of it that dads can share with their sons.

The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex, my first sex book, came out when Rebecca was 17, and Katie was 15. And by that time, we were talking about stuff a lot better than when they were 10, and they were much more used to this. And that was a weird thing for them, because all the guys wanted to be their friends now, because of their mom.

Ariana deVries

Oh yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

You know, so that was the weirdest part for them. But what's happened since is all of their friends come to them for advice. Like they just assume you guys must know everything about sex. So it's really funny, like they become the people that everyone goes to.

After Rebecca, my oldest, graduated from university, she ended up coming onto the blog and working for me because she wanted a job she could do from home. She's got two little kids now, which is wonderful. So she's a big help. She ended up co-authoring The Great Sex Rescue with me. She did psychometrics, so survey design. She's really good at that. So it was wonderful.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Alicia deVries

Very helpful.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And she's a co-host on our podcast. My husband, of course, is on the podcast as well. My son-in-law, Rebecca's husband, often is too. Katie isn't. Her face isn't on the the ministry as much. She edits our stuff, but she lives in a different city.

Ariana deVries

She gets to hear it all the time, though.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, what we like to joke is that we talk about the facts. We talk about the data and the research, but we don't ever say anything personal. So I have no idea what she and Connor do in the bedroom, and they have no idea what we do. But we can talk about orgasm rates and all that. We can talk about the research. It's not a problem. We just never get personal.

Ariana deVries

So then I guess, do you regret the way that you taught your daughters when they were little about this? And how would you do it differently now?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Oh, yeah. But the thing is, you don't need to be perfect. This is what parents need to understand is it's okay to totally mess up as long as when you mess up, you admit it, and you just laugh about it.

Ariana deVries

And you're willing to talk about it later.

Alicia deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, like for Rebecca, we did the Passport to Purity that Family Life puts out, when she was 10. I took her away on a weekend and it was just so bad. And I only ended up doing like four out of the seven CDs because I'm like, I am not going to make a 10 year old pledge to stay pure until she's married because at this point I could get her to pledge to never kiss a boy because she was so grossed out. I just felt like it was emotional manipulation.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And all they really needed was the facts. She just needed to understand what a period was, why she was getting breasts, how our body worked. And all that other stuff needed to wait until she actually was interested, you know, so more like 12, not 10.

Ariana deVries

If you're talking about it, like it's really normal and just part of regular life, I feel like that's a little bit of an easier segue into all the different phases of puberty and learning about sexuality. Instead of getting it all dumped on you at one time.

Alicia deVries

Yeah. And even seeing it as an ongoing process, an ongoing chat with your kids. As opposed to just a one time okay, here's your sex talk, and then never bringing it up again. And just hope for the best.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, but you can totally do it badly, and then it's fine. Like I think parents need to know that kids don't mind if things are awkward. They really don't. They just want to talk to you. So you can even say, okay, this is totally awkward. I know you don't want to talk about this. I don't either, but you need to know this. And so here, just listen to me for a minute. Like, that's fine. Kids are fine with that.

Ariana deVries

Then it's like, okay, and now when you're older, and you want to get married, maybe we can talk about it again, but only if you want to.

Yes, this is so great so far. Thank you. This is wonderful. Okay, now I would really love to know about your journey with this in regards to a lot of the vitriol and negative messaging that you have received personally in regards to the things that you're sharing and the stigmas that you were working to break down, especially when you do your corrections of writings that have been published and you change it to be more positive and more effective. Have you lost connections and friendships because of the things that you are now teaching? And how has it affected you?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, I've lost huge ones. So before I started doing this, I was actually getting quite well known in the evangelical community. The Good Girls Guide to Great Sex was selling quite well. I had been on Focus on the Family, their radio show three times. I was really good friends with Gary Thomas. I actually thought Gary was going to write the foreword to The Great Sex Rescue. So I did send the book to him, and he read it, but he didn't like it. He didn't agree with what I said about lust, and he didn't agree with calling out other authors. So he distanced himself from me after that.

I was good friends with Shaunti Feldhahn. It was one of those things - I had never really read her books. I assumed what she said was good. I came across her at a bunch of conferences we were at, we were talking the same sphere. So you know, we used to guest post for each other. But her books met our inclusion criteria for a study. We had very strict inclusion criteria. So we were going to do this like an academic study, and so we were looking at the ten best selling marriage books for women. When we went on Amazon, and we looked at the ten best selling marriage books for women, For Women Only was like number six or something. So we had to include it. I couldn't not include it because I knew her, you know?

Alicia deVries

Hmm right.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And when we read it, it was one of the worst.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

And so I had to say that and we reached out to her before the book was published. We said, look, you know, we found harmful messages in a number of your books, and here's the data. When people believe that all men struggle with lust, that it's every man's battle, here's the terrible effects it has, you know. We gave her all of the data and, and she just said she didn't believe she taught that.

Then after the book came out, she put out quite a scathing statement where she said that I wasn't following the kingdom way, by going public, that I wasn't being kingdom, along with some other things. After I've been on certain podcasts, she's contacted those podcasts to lambast them. She's talked behind the scenes with a number of other authors trying to figure out what to do about me. We've had lawsuit threats from a number of the people that we've critiqued. Which is laughable, what are they going to sue us for? You're allowed to critique people.

Alicia deVries

It's in their books, so.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, like they wrote it.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Focus on the Family wrote a statement where they actually lied about me. So that was interesting.

Ariana deVries

Oh dear.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Yeah, I think what's been the hardest is Christianity Today really hasn't done a book review or talked about the book. The big organizations, the big media outlets haven't really covered it. No author that we critique has grappled with anything, has said publicly, yeah, you know, maybe we said something wrong. In fact, Gary Thomas, who did read The Great Sex Rescue, wrote a book since then, which perpetuates a lot of the things that we found were harmful, and that was really hard.

Alicia deVries

Yeah, that would be.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

But all that being said, the book is selling really well. Every day I get notes from women for whom it's set people free. Like seriously, if you're listening to this, please, if you don't believe me, I want you to do one thing. Go to Amazon, click on The Great Sex Rescue and just read the reviews, like, just read the reviews.

Ariana deVries

We have a copy, if anyone would also like to borrow it, because we love it too. And we love what you have said. We definitely want people to buy it and to support you, but if someone is feeling like I can't do that this time, we can definitely share it with you.

Alicia deVries

Reach out to us, because we very strongly believe in this message of setting people free from all the toxic beliefs that are out there, that people have been believing for so long. We thank you so much for the work that you are doing in this and in setting people free.

I know in a lot of these books, a lot of the advice about sex has focused mostly on frequency too, and the importance of prioritizing sex. And I know this can be the wrong approach, especially for women who've experienced pain or don't experience anything or thinks something is wrong with them. How do you think this teaching has contributed to problems for women specifically?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

No matter what you read, that's the big problem everyone's trying to solve is how do we get women to have more sex because the big problem is you have libido differences. We've got to bridge the libido differences. That's how we often see sexual problems as somebody wants it more than someone else. But we found that if a woman has high marital satisfaction, if she feels emotionally close during sex, if she frequently reaches orgasm, if there's no porn use in the marriage, and if there's no sexual dysfunction, frequency almost always takes care of itself. So frequency is not the problem. Frequency is a symptom of something else.

When we treat frequency like it's the problem, what we're essentially doing is erasing her needs and erasing her experience. If frequency is an issue, we need to start asking why? What's really going on? It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with him necessarily. It could be her that's experiencing sexual dysfunction. She needs room to get that treated. It could be that the reason she doesn't feel emotionally close during sex is not because of her husband, but because of all this crap she's internalized her whole life. She just needs to work on that.

So I'm not saying it's his fault. I'm just saying it's not about frequency. And so if we want sex to be this holistic thing, where it's intimate and it's mutual, and it's pleasurable for both, we need to look at the underlying stuff that's going on, and not treat the symptom. And that's where we've really gone wrong.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Well, we're gonna bring this to a close really soon. But I just have a couple more questions for you. What is one final piece of advice that you would give to someone starting out on the road to dismantling some of these past beliefs or just learning healthy sexuality? What would you say to them?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I think the biggest thing is we need to stop seeing sex like an entitlement for men. That was the most harmful teaching that we found. It's really the root of a lot of harm - this idea that a woman is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it. When we see sex as an entitlement, it changes the very nature of sex for her and for him. Because if sex is supposed to be this intimate knowing, then you have to have two people who are sharing each other, and sharing themselves and how can you share yourself if what you want doesn't matter? Because if you have to give him sex, no matter what's going on with you, then you don't matter.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

So sex is no longer a knowing it's actually an owing. It's an erasing of who you are as a person.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

So we need to get rid of that entitlement obligation mindset first, and just see sex as this journey of really knowing each other and experiencing each other at a different level. I think that's the first big mindset shift that makes the biggest difference.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, totally. And being able to talk about it, to talk about all the aspects of it, and what phase of life you're in and how you are feeling. Like there's so much that goes along with it, not just the act of it.

Alicia deVries

Yep.

Ariana deVries

My final question for you is what brings you joy? What do you love? And what gives you hope for the future to keep you grounded?

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Okay, well, what brings me joy - I knit all the time.

Ariana deVries

I've seen that. They are pretty epic pieces.

Alicia deVries

Yeah, it's amazing.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I have on knit socks right now, but I don't know if I can show the camera. I love knitting and that gives me a lot of joy.

I think what gives me hope, honestly, is just the next generation. Everyone talks about millennials and Gen Z kids like they're snowflakes and awful and don't try and all that. But I think that the younger generation is going to be the change maker. Because the younger generation is not going to put up with this crap. They can see this is insane, how did we ever let these books get to be bestsellers? I think that's what's giving me hope.

I really feel like something happened and I don't know if it was like COVID and the shutdowns and people not be able to go to church and so paying more attention online or what happened but it seems like the tide has turned. More and more people are talking about this in a healthy way and they're just saying, no, we're gonna do this better from now on. I haven't seen the conversation change this quickly, ever. But it does look like something's happening, so that gets me excited.

Ariana deVries

That's great. Thank you so much, Sheila, for joining us today. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Thank you.