Hello, I'm Brian Beatty, producer of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. All summer long, we're revisiting conversations that have meant the most to listeners over the years. This next one is from 2021, when Michael sat down with author and researcher Sheila Ray Gragoire to talk about her book, The Great Sex Rescue, containing the messages so many of us absorbed in the church about sex and what it looks like to see women as whole people made in the image of God. We're glad to share it with you again. Here's Sheila.
I have put out so much content on how to make sex great, and what I found was that no matter what I said, everybody still had the same problems. It's like putting out the good content isn't enough. Because there's something rotten underneath. And in talking to people and listening to comments over the last few years, we just realized that many of those things that are rotten underneath come from some of the teachings that we hear in evangelical circles. And so last year, last winter, together with my daughter, who's really good at psychometrics and a statistician that we know very well, we surveyed 20,000 women. It's the largest survey ever been done of Christian women's marital and sexual satisfaction to try to get to the bottom of what is stopping us from experiencing sex the way God intended. And I think we we got some really interesting findings of what really messes stuff up for couples.
Michael John CusickAnd I'm eager to unpack that, but let's back up just one step. Your husband's a pediatrician, and I thought this was a brilliant analogy. You said that he would never dare prescribe certain kind of treatment for asthma unless he knew what the problem was and the effect as to whether that treatment was helping. And you asked the question, what if our evangelical treatments for sex issues were actually making things worse? And that's actually what you discovered, right?
Yeah, like in medicine, they do something called evidence-based therapy. Like you need to have some evidence before you do it. In the evangelical world, we do things a little bit backwards. What we say is, let's figure out what the Bible says about something and then let's do it. And that's not necessarily the way Jesus saw it. Because when I hear Jesus speak, what he says over and over again is that a good tree can't bear bad fruit, and a bad tree can't bear good fruit. And he says that we're supposed to know things by their fruit. And I think what's happened is that we've gotten so focused on figuring out what we believe and that we've forgotten about the fruit. And to me, if something bears really bad fruit, that should be a sign that we're interpreting something wrong. And that's what I hope people will get from this book. You know, if you follow a certain belief and you end up with terrible orgasm rates and terrible marital satisfaction, then maybe there's something wrong with how you're seeing the Bible. Because when we follow Jesus, we don't end up worse off.
Michael John CusickYeah, that idea of asking what does the Bible say and then doing it, there's two problems with that. The first is that many people can't do that. And it's like having the answer to the question, but without asking the question. And what you did in your survey was literally ask 20,000 women these questions. What did the data tell you?
Well, first of all, there's a 47-point orgasm gap. That's the big picture that I want everyone to understand. So around 95% of men reach orgasm almost always or always when they have a sexual encounter. For women, the comparable number is 48. So then, and then there's other women about, I think, I think we're at around just over 60% reach orgasm more than half the time. But then there's a huge chunk that never do, or very rarely do. And so that's a large orgasm gap. So when we're talking about sex, then what's often missing in the evangelical conversation is anything to do with women's experience. You know, for instance, love and respect, which is one of our huge bestsellers, has sex as a man's need and not a woman's need. In fact, he act Emerson Eggridge actually says, if your husband is typical, he has a need you don't have. And that's very typical of our resources, is that they tell women, you don't need sex, you don't like sex, you'll never really want sex the way he does. And you know, I kind of wonder, do these people know anything about self-fulfilling prophecies? Like, like, what happens when you tell women you don't have a libido, you're not visually stimulated, you're not going to like sex, all you really want is conversation. And then you get married and she doesn't want sex, and you're like, well, why?
Well, and and this touches on another whole chapter in your book, the difference between what you describe as intercourse and sex, or the physical act of doing sex and then the more holistic idea of what it is.
Sheila Wray GregoireYeah, well, it's like if I were to say to you, which I won't, but if I were to ask you, did you have sex last night? You know, other than thinking that I'm really intrusive, you're picturing something in your head. And when when people say that, did you have sex? You tend to picture a very specific act, which is, you know, he puts his penis into her vagina, like, you know, part A goes into slot B or whatever, and you move around until he climaxes. And the problem is that that definition of sex, which I think is the most common one and the one that we most commonly think of, completely leaves out her experience. Because the vast majority of women do not reach orgasm through intercourse alone. You know, of the women who do reach orgasm in our survey, only about 30% reach orgasm only through intercourse. Everyone else needs a lot of foreplay, or you know, they reach orgasm much easier through other means. And so when we reduce sex to only intercourse, we're really leaving her out. And what happens is because we think that's what sex is, people get married. And in the Christian sexual ethic, especially if we're waiting for marriage for sex, you have a lot of virgins getting married, and then they immediately go to intercourse. It feels lousy for her. And then she thinks that I must be broken, and he thinks she must be broken because she doesn't like sex. And no one ever thinks, well, maybe God gave her a clitoris for a reason. Like maybe it's more than just intercourse, and how can we figure out how to unlock her sexual pleasure?
Michael John CusickSo not only is there the orgasm gap, but the the way you describe and differentiate intercourse from sex, that intercourse it doesn't even really require the wife or the partner because it's just moving and it's just a release, and there's nothing intimate about
that.
Sheila Wray GregoireYeah, and I think biblically sex is mutual, intimate, and pleasurable. It needs to be all three for both. And so often the way that we talk about it, when we say that she doesn't have a need for sex, um, when we say she'll never understand his need for sex, what we're saying is that sex is really more for him than for her. And we're we're making it like Emerson Eggridge actually actually says, that sex is about a husband's physical release. And it's just such an empty way of seeing it. And I don't think it's biblical. I mean, when you look at Genesis 4, it says, you know, Adam knew his wife Eve, and they conceived a son. And it's easy to laugh and think that that's just a euphemistic word, but I don't think it is. I think that God used that word, which is the same word that's used in the Psalms. You know, when David cries, Search me and know me, O God. I think that God used that word deliberately to tell us that sex is not just physical, it's it's a deep knowing. And it's supposed to be a deep knowing.
Michael John CusickAs a psychotherapist myself, and I've specialized in sexual issues for at least 25 of the last 30 years, and I think many of my colleagues would say this that women have a far greater capacity and ability to experience sex as you're describing it as the holistic relational connected experience. And men, as it's often referred to, that sex, you know, men just want sex, that actually it's the intercourse, that they have this greater capacity to at any time be aroused and to have intercourse and to ejaculate, but a far lesser capacity for the relational, intimate, connected, at least lesser of a capacity in their natural state. Um, and so the irony of all of this is that women have been suppressed and kind of minimized in their sexual selves when there's actually something far more profound there that women have that men don't.
Sheila Wray GregoireYeah, and I and I think that the beauty of sex is that as you get more intimate and more vulnerable with each other, both of you tend to get a lot more sexually responsive. The more vulnerable, the more intimate she feels, the more you're likely to see couples with similar libidos. And that's that's something that we found was really interesting. Like the closer that she feels to him, the more emotionally connected she is with him, the more likely it is that she'll say that they have the same level of libido instead of him having the higher one. And so for women, you know, feeling connected doesn't just make her more sexually responsive. It it makes her more aware of her own sex drive. Um, it really does awaken sex drive in both of them. And so I think treating sex like it's something that women owe men is just it, yeah, just is does a disservice to everybody, and that's putting it politely.
Yeah, so say that again, uh, because I having listened to some podcasts and reading the book as I got an early copy of it, you do say things strongly and you name names, which I appreciate so that people can see what is harmful. Say more about obligation sex, because that in my counseling practice just feels absolutely the norm. Uh, like there's Bible verses that say I have to do this and therefore I have to give it to him.
Sheila Wray GregoireRight. And that's one of the most prevalent findings that we found in all of our evangelical resources, or most of them anyway. And I'm gonna come back to the Bible verses about that because I want to circle back to that later. But let me first tell you some of the effects in our survey. So when women believe I am obligated to give my husband sex whenever he wants it, their chance of having vaginis, which is primary sexual pain, it's a sexual dysfunction, it makes intercourse either difficult, painful, or even impossible, their chance of experiencing that goes up by the same amount as if they had been abused. And I think that's fascinating. So if you think about that, if a woman has abuse in her past, it makes sense that her body would recoil against sex and would have difficulty with sex. Well, the obligation sex message, your body interprets it as the same as abuse. Now, I'm not saying that this is as bad as abuse. We know that abuse has far more repercussions than just that. And obviously, those who have been abused are going through much worse than just simply hearing this message. And so I'm not trying to diminish the effects of being abused. I'm just saying this obligation sex message is almost the same thing because in both cases, what it's saying to the woman is you don't matter. Your needs are inconsequential. I am allowed to use you however I want. And this is what women are told. You know, um uh Emerson Egrid says that you don't, you do not deprive, you're not allowed to say no except for prayer and fasting. Kevin Lehman says sometimes you might have to force yourself to do it, kicking and screaming. In all of our books, we're told this, you're not allowed to say no because of the one Bible passage, 1 Corinthians 7, 3 to 5, which says, do not deprive each other except for a time for prayer and fasting. But what's interesting about that passage, there's several things. Well, first of all, what is it that we're not supposed to deprive each other of? You know, the way that it's being talked about, you're not supposed to deprive each other of one-sided intercourse. How is keeping her from having one-sided intercourse depriving her? Like, why is she being why is she being deprived if they don't have one-sided intercourse? That's like letting her off the hook. That's not what it means. You know, it's not talking about depriving anyone of one-sided intercourse, it's talking about depriving each other of a mutual, pleasurable, intimate sexual experience in your sex life. That's what you're not supposed to deprive each other of. And if we're looking at a 47-point orgasm gap, she's the one who's most likely to be deprived.
Michael John CusickRight.
Sheila Wray GregoireAnd yet we're telling these women you're not allowed to say no to sex, and it's ridiculous. But the other thing is, do not deprive does not mean do not refuse. Like you're not allowed to deprive your kids of food. But if your little boy comes up to you at 11 o'clock in the morning and says, Can I have some Cheetos? And you say no, you're not depriving him. And this idea that sex is like that marriage is just a license to have intercourse anytime you want it and to use her as if you're masturbating is just not true. And it's not biblical. It's it has nothing to do with a biblical sexual ethic.
Michael John CusickI can't tell you, and I'm talking about in the hundreds of times that I've heard a wife say, I feel like a prostitute when we have sex because he doesn't really want me. There's really not any intimacy there. It feels like it's just an act. And when you refer to the experience being like a husband masturbating, it seems to really resonate with that.
Sheila Wray GregoireYeah. And, you know, um, every man's battle actually calls women methadone for their husbands' porn addictions. And I know that's something that you talk about and that is just so harmful for any well, it doesn't lead to sex addiction recovery because it doesn't deal with the underlying issues. But, you know, that's another one of those messages that's really harmful that we uncovered is that if you just have sex, then he won't watch porn or be tempted to lust. That's not the point. But it treats women, again, like they're just simply receptacles, or that there's something that stands in place of something else which is better that they really want, but they'll settle for you.
Michael John CusickWell, and no wonder there's so much sexual brokenness um around the world and the way that this plays out in so many different ways is because at the most intimate level, where it's supposed to be good and free and whole, and you have a whole list of peas in the alliteration that you can talk about that if it's just one-on-one in the bedroom in the most intimate place, that's gonna spill over in every other way. What would you say to a woman who you're sitting with or you're teaching at a conference, and they come up to you afterwards and say, I am the one you're talking about. I have been giving obligation sex for, you know, weeks into my new marriage or decades into my long-term marriage.
First of all, talk to your husband about it. Because we did focus groups after our survey, and we talked to a lot of women just to try to flesh out what they meant by certain answers in the survey. And over and over again, we heard story after story from women who had had this obligation sex experience. They they felt that that's what they had to do. They also felt like they had to be the methadona. I mean, all these negative messages. But then when they talked to their husbands, their husbands were horrified. Like a lot of men do not believe this stuff. And a lot of men don't realize this is what their wives are being taught. Because it's women who read the marriage books, it's women who read the sex books. You know, every man's battle, yes, that one was written for men. So men may have read that one. But on the whole, women read this stuff a lot more than men do. And women go to Bible studies where this stuff is studied. You know, we'll do where they'll do studies on this. And so many guys, when their wives talk to them about it, they just said, you know what? I don't ever want you to have sex with me if you're doing it because you think I need it. I need it to be a choice that you are freely making. And one guy, um, one particular story stuck with me. He said to her, if we're ever in the middle of something and it just doesn't feel good for you, or you change your mind, I want you to stop. And that ability to stop in the middle of sex changed everything for her. And she had been someone who had been orgasmic before she'd had children, and then she'd had some postpartum trauma, like just all kinds, birth trauma, all kinds of things. And after four kids, it just wasn't working for her anymore. But she kept going through the motions every 72 hours because she felt like he needed release every 72 hours. And when they talked about it and he said that, she found that a lot of the pain went away. And a lot of women told us similar things. It was like being free from that message. I had gone to pelvic floor physiotherapists, which I strongly recommend, by the way, just if you're having pain, please see a pelvic floor physiotherapist. But a lot of women had seen those physiotherapists, but what they really needed too was just to hear their husbands give them permission to not be treated that way. Um, so that's a big thing, is that a lot of us might be projecting this on our husbands when our husbands would be horrified to think this is what we're thinking. Now, if your husband truly is thinking it though, then I think what I would say, and this is what I recommend in the book, is saying to him something like, Hun, I want to make love to you. I want to have an awesome sex life with you where we experience passion, where we both experience pleasure, where it's a wonderful, life-giving thing. But right now, sex isn't, because right now, sex is only focused on what you need, and I am not getting anything out of it. And I am no longer willing to have one-sided intercourse. So I will gladly make love with you when it becomes about both of us expressing our relationship and feeling close, but I'm no longer willing to be used.
Michael John CusickSo, what you're talking about is uh a woman having a voice and being empowered, and it sounds like so much of the harmful teaching, whether it's in the books or in uh that you that you talk about in your book or the interpretation of scripture, that it's taking power away from women and putting it all in the hands of men.
That's right. And and I just want to say, too, as we've already alluded to, this is terribly demeaning to men as well. I mean, this doesn't just hurt women, it hurts men. Men have a real capacity for intimacy, and men's greatest need is also for intimacy. And I think what's happened is that we have channeled their need for intimacy into intercourse alone, and they haven't learned how to open up in other ways because we just haven't taught men or um praised men for that or anything. And so a lot of guys are really intimately anorexic. They don't know what to do, they don't know how to how to form real intimate bonds or how to experience real intimacy during sex, and it's hurting all of us. And we just need to get back to what God meant for relationship.
Michael John CusickSheila, I really appreciate uh both those words and your your humility there because uh I think it's relatively common, maybe not as much for Christians, but that when a woman is trying to advocate for women's needs and in this case, mutuality in sex, it can often come across or in fact be kind of anti-man. So to be pro-woman is to be anti-man. And so I really appreciate you saying that it takes its toll on men as well. And I might have misspoken earlier, but you did a nice correction, and that's saying that men's greatest need is for intimacy, our deepest longing. And though there may be that the the focus from these books that's saying that men need sex more than women, that the intimacy is still the deepest longing in the heart of a man or a woman. So thank you.
Absolutely. And I really do think that what God wants for us all is to experience true deep vulnerability. You know, it's vulnerability when we're real. And God became vulnerable with us. He took on the nature of a human form and lived among us. He became so vulnerable, even vulnerable to the cross, so that he could have intimacy with us. And vulnerability is the key to unlocking libido, it's the key to unlocking pleasure, and it's the key to intimacy. But you can't be vulnerable when we're wounded, when we're broken, when we're hurt. And so I hope that as that the quest for wholeness um is gonna be something which is also gonna result in real beauty and vulnerability and authenticity in the bedroom as well. Because I think that's God's design.
Michael John CusickPhilip Yancey uh once wrote, he said that we are perhaps never more like God than in the act of sex, and precisely because of the mutual vulnerability and the giving that leads to something bigger than the sum of its parts. So I like how you defined it there as vulnerability. Let's talk a little bit more about the data. You talked about the orgasm gap. Uh, we talked some about obligation sex. What are some of the other findings from the data?
Um well. For instance, if you believe the all men struggle with lust message, you know, that it's every man's battle, women are far more likely, I think it's like sixty seven percent more likely, although I could be wrong on that, there's so many numbers, but to have sex only because they feel like they need to or that their husband needs it. So they're less likely to have sex because they want to or because they're excited about sex. They're also far less likely to be aroused when they do have sex. And that's actually something that's quite interesting. We measured that across a variety of different findings, and we ended up putting a whole chapter in our book that we weren't planning on writing. It was it was the one finding that we weren't expecting to come up so much. But this idea of arousal is something that is really missing for many women. It's I call it the missing piece. We often think orgasm is the problem, but what we really found is that arousal is the problem. Because so many women are not getting aroused at all. And if you can't get aroused, you're never going to reach orgasm. And that arousal piece is missing largely because either we've believed obligation sex messages or because we've never figured out how to help women listen to their bodies. And, you know, the to get a little bit more into just the sex side of it and less into the bot the mind side of it. You know, I I grew up watching Happy Days. I'm that age. You probably are too. Did you watch Happy Days? Yeah, okay. And Richie Cunningham. Absolutely. And Richie Cunningham, you know, the goal that they all had, Arthur or Richie Potsey, and whoever the other Ralph, whatever the guy was, you know, was to take the girls up to Blueberry Hill, the makeout spot. And every time they did, um, Richie Cunningham would sing that song, you know, I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill. And it was like a big part of the show, right? And I got thinking about that. Why was it that making out was so fun? Because they weren't having sex, you know, they were hoping to get to second base or something, but it really honestly was just heavy making out. And as teenagers, we don't, you know, we as parents, we often don't want our teenagers to make out because we're so afraid of where it's gonna lead. But why is it that we're afraid it's gonna lead somewhere? And I think the reason is because when teenagers make out for hours on end, it often does lead somewhere because you get excited and then you want to do the next thing. That's why it's called second base, third base home run, because it's the next thing and your body naturally leads you there. But what happens is we get married, and maybe all we've done before is kissing. And I'm not saying I do believe in a biblical sexual ethic, I do believe that sex is meant for marriage, but that doesn't mean that you have to have sex as soon as you enter the hotel room once you're married. And when you go from kissing to intercourse, and you never follow the sexual progression that Richie Cunningham knew, you know, that you kiss for a bit until her body is saying, Oh, touch me somewhere. And then you touch her somewhere until her body is saying, Oh, keep doing that, until her body is saying, okay, let's start sex. She has no idea what arousal feels like. And she has no idea how to listen to her body because the key to orgasm is learning to listen to your body. And so all of these things which make arousal less likely, and we've got a lot of different markers that make arousal less likely or problematic, but they they compound if when the couple is first married, they never figure out that sexual progression piece and they just go straight to intercourse. And then they both just figure she's broken and she just doesn't like sex.
Michael John CusickRight. Right. And men are not instructed anywhere, um, and their arousal pattern is different from women. They're not instructed to either understand or how to create the context for that arousal. Um, and so it naturally goes that direction.
Yeah, you know, there's the sexual response cycle is kind of interesting. We tend to think of it as, you know, um desire. So you want sex, excitement, you get excited, you get aroused, and then you reach orgasm. And that's what we tend to think the sexual response cycle is. To put it in more layman's terms, um, if you're watching TV, a movie, whatever it is, the plot when it comes to sex is all always goes something like this, right? So the couple is together and they're panting. And so they start to kiss and then their clothes come off and they end up in bed. So no matter what you're watching, it's pretty much it, right? Like they're panting, they kiss, the clothes, the bed. So that's what we think that sex is pant, kiss, clothes, bed. And then you're at home and you're waiting to pant. And a lot of women never pant. And so they figure, I guess I just don't like sex. But what we forget is that for some people it's not pant, kiss, close bed. For some people, it's bed, kiss, clothes, pant. And maybe even brush your teeth, bed, kiss, close, pant. Like as long as you're panting at some point, it doesn't matter when the panting starts. And so a lot of women, we asked follow-up surveys on this one too. A lot of women start sex without being aroused, but they're confident they're gonna get aroused at some point. And those women are just as likely to reach orgasm as those who start making out already aroused. So it doesn't matter when you pant, as long as you do at some point, you then she's just as likely to reach orgasm. But because men's sexual response cycle tends to start with him panting, it's very easy for both of them to think that she doesn't have a libido if she's not panting first. And in sexual literature, it's called responsive libido versus spontaneous libido, but you don't need to remember that if that's too confusing. You can just think about panting. I find that a lot easier. Right. But we tend to see things through the man, through a male experience of sex. You pant first, and intercourse does it for you.
Michael John CusickYeah.
Sheila Wray GregoireAnd when we try to put women in that mold, it doesn't work.
Michael John CusickYeah. I always try to share some of my personal journey. And I wrote a book about my sexual sin history. And of course, I'm not going to go into detail about my sexual relationship with my wife. However, as we sat on, we're both therapists, and as we have sat on the couch with therapists, you know, and we had many of the classic conversations about how come we don't have it more often. I would say things like, Why aren't you more responsive? And the most transformational sentence that my wife said to me was, Why don't you give me something that I can respond to? And what she was saying was, you're not connected to your heart, you're not connected toward your strength, you're not moving toward me in a way where you're back to your word, vulnerable. You use those two words again because you said we don't have to remember it that way for listeners, but I think it's really important spontaneous arousal versus responsive arousal.
Sheila Wray GregoireYeah, so some people are just ready to go right away. And some people they need warming up. And it really honestly doesn't matter. One is not better than the other, one does not mean you're broken. But if your spouse is more responsive, you need to give them something to respond to. But I would also say the other way, if your spouse is more spontaneous, sometimes you need to also woo them. Because I think a lot of times it tends to be only one person ever initiating, and that can feel empty as well. So no matter whether you're spontaneous or responsive, make sure that you are initiating at least some of the time because everybody needs to feel pursued, I think.
You've done a lot of writing prior to the release of the book about lust. And I have to confess, before I read the book and before I got to know you, I kind of saw you on Twitter as the anti-evyman's battle writer. And you're you are so much more than that. Obviously, there's there's just a depth of knowledge that you have about human sexuality and certainly based on this data, and you're really an extraordinary writer. But you learned a lot about lust and how we talk about that in Christian circles. Can you talk about that?
Sheila Wray GregoireThe big problem is that we don't recognize why lust is sinful. Every man's battle talks about the sin of lust as being against his purity and how he has damaged his own purity by lusting. And when I read that book, there's something fundamentally missing, and that's any kind of respect for women. The key to winning the battle with lust is not to white knuckle it and to try really hard not to lust, and it's certainly not to avoid women, which is what I think their prescriptions lead to. Um, and it's not just their book, it's in other books as well. Um, Through a Man's Eyes by Craig Gross and Shanti Feldon talk about a man at work who deliberately turns his chair away from a coworker so that he doesn't see her, and who tries to avoid different women. Jesus never tried to avoid women. What Jesus did was he saw women. And I love the story of Hagar in the Old Testament. She most of us will remember her primarily by who her boss was. Abraham and Sarah, she was a slave in their household. And when Sarah wasn't getting pregnant after they'd been given the promise, Sarah suggested that Abraham have a child through her maidservant Hagar, which he did. There's no evidence that Hagar would have consented. I don't know that she could have consented, she wouldn't have had a choice. And then when Sarah finally did have a child, they saw that Hagar's son Ishmael was a threat, and so they banished Hagar and her son into the desert. And Hagar has the has just an amazing encounter with God there, and she's given the privilege of being the first person to ever name God. And she calls God the God who sees me. He is the God who sees us, and Jesus sees us. The solution to lust is to see women. It isn't to avoid them, it's to see women as whole people made in the image of God. And when the lust message treats women like we're dangerous and we're temptresses and we are a potential stumbling block to his purity, it destroys the relationships that God wants among us, just as fellow co-workers in Christ, let alone the romantic dimensions of that. And I find that that is one of the primary things that's missing is any concern for women. They think they're concerned for women because they say, Oh, we're trying to get him not to lust. I don't want him not just not to lust. I want him to respect and see me. And that's a whole other level.
Michael John CusickYeah, it's it seems like one end of the continuum of lusting and making a woman an object to making the woman invisible.
Sheila Wray GregoireMm-hmm. And either way, you're still, yeah, you're still objectifying her. If you're saying I'm going to avoid her so I don't lust, then you're still seeing her in terms of her body parts. You know, you're still seeing her primarily as an object, and that's just not Jesus. That is not of Jesus.
So I can hear men that are listening uh saying, oh, that sounds really important, and it sounds really great. And sign me up for really seeing my wife or a woman. What does that mean? So I won't let men off the hook, but as a woman with that category in mind, what does it mean for you for a man to see you? For example, your husband, um, uh a colleague in ministry?
Sheila Wray GregoireI think just to treat me like he would a good friend, anybody. You know, don't you don't need to treat women differently, like we're dangerous. Just talk to me. Um, that's one of the big things. But I really believe that that the problem that we have with lust is primarily a definitional one, um, in that lust and sexual attraction are not the same thing. Just because you notice that a woman is curvy and pretty and you're attracted to her does not mean that you've lusted after her. 75% of men say that they struggle daily with lust. But when we gave men all kinds of opportunities to show how they struggle, so either with porn or with having a mental Rolodex and having images of women come into their mind and fixating on them, um, or actually struggling with not objectifying women in four different scenarios, only half of them did any of those things. So 75% of men think they struggle with lust, but only half of the ones who think they do actually show any sign of it. And I believe what's happening is that we have so demonized men's sexuality that men feel such shame and guilt anytime they notice a woman has breasts. Even if they've never imagined doing anything with those breasts, they've never imagined doing anything with that woman, they just notice she has breasts and they immediately think they've sinned.
Michael John CusickRight.
Sheila Wray GregoireAnd that's not a sin.
Michael John CusickRight. Even if there's a strong visceral physical reaction, and then I think they said this to you in a tweet, then someone came along somewhere and said, Well, lust is the second look. And I don't think that's necessarily true because the second look can still come out of a place of curiosity and attraction and just responsiveness without necessarily coveting and saying, I have to make that mine, or she has to be mine.
Sheila Wray GregoireExactly. Like if someone walks by you out of the corner of your eye and they stick out in some way, either they're really beautiful, or even if they're really ugly or something, you know, we have that primitive side of our brain which registers things which are out of the ordinary, and we're gonna take that second look. And I look at beautiful women who go who go by. I'm not sexually like I'm not attracted to them. I don't want anything sexually from them, but you notice them when they're stunning. And I'll take that second look. But as soon as you know, if you dwell on it, if you stare, if in your mind you start to say things like, I wonder what, or what about, or what does she look like, when you start to ask those questions, then you've you've crossed a line. But if all you're doing is look, is is looking almost involuntarily, that's not the same thing. Jesus said, whoever looks at a woman with lust. He didn't say whoever sees a woman, whoever is attracted to a woman. He didn't even say whoever looks at a woman. He said he said whoever looks at a woman with lust. And I believe that we have heaped a whole pile of shame on men they were never meant to have, and that's at the root of a lot of our bad teachings.
And it's it's that shame which then fuels compulsiveness and addiction. And that cycle just goes around and around because when we feel shame, we're far less likely or we're incapable of being vulnerable and intimate with another person. I just want to say that in in my book I wrote about lust that the the Greek word for lust, when Jesus refers to that in Matthew 5, is epithumia, and it means strong desire. And the same word is used in the Passover Last Supper meal when Jesus said, I have eagerly desired to have this meal with you. It's the same word about lusting after a woman. And so there's a way that we need to parse it even more where to lust is not the first or the second look or the physical reaction, but a kind of conclusion of I have to have that in order to feed my soul, in order to meet a need, in order to uh plug a hole, if you will. And it's what I talk about, the difference between that initial response, which is desire, and then how that's a demand of I'm gonna clench my fist, and now I'm going to take what is before me and make it mine. That's what I think is the problem. And I love the fact that there's a permission here for men to be men and to be human, in the same way that you would say that as a woman you can have the permission to be attracted, but that that's not what we're defined by.
Sheila Wray GregoireExactly. And the other big thing that's missing from a lot of literature is the idea that women can lust as well. In fact, a lot of our literature says women don't lust, that women are not visual. And actually, the most recent research that's been coming out of brain scans shows that the same parts of a woman's brain lights up as a man's to visual stimulation. There really isn't that gender difference that we think there is, at least biologically. It's just that we've conditioned different responses out of both men and women. And so this idea that women can't lust is a very dangerous one, too.
So I want to wrap up in a couple of minutes uh just to respect your time. I feel like there's kind of a meta message of your book. And it seems to me to be parallel with uh a movement that I see happening in the church today, and that is a reckoning on behalf of women. That um you could take the title of your book, The Great Sex Rescue, and it's almost like this book is rescuing the female sex from the oppression of uh these beliefs and the bad teaching and the bad interpretation. But there's been a lot of diminishment of women and a lot of telling women how they need to be constrained to uh to be quiet, to not have a voice, and frankly, a lot of misogyny. Your book is really empowering in that way. And was that intentional?
Sheila Wray GregoireAbsolutely. I think in a lot of ways, this was I needed to do it for myself too. You know, I read the act of marriage before I got married, and you said that you've shared about your own journey. My journey is when a vaginismus, I shared this in the book, and I've shared it in all my other ones too. For the first few years of our marriage, sex was terrible because sex honestly hurt. And in those days, we didn't know about pelvic floral physiotherapists. They took me to a doctor who told me that it was all in my head, and at some subconscious level, I was rejecting my husband, which I wasn't. And it just caused so many marriage problems. And I I remember reading the act of marriage and reading the part where I was no longer allowed to say no. And it was 1991 before Kindles. I read it in the bathtub, and because that's where I did all my reading, and about two-thirds of the way through, I drowned it. I I held it under the water until it died, and then I put it in the garbage. And I wish I had done that earlier. Um, but I felt my body change after reading that book because until that moment, I had been so looking forward to sex. And after that, even though I wanted to have sex, like I did, I kept thinking in my head, nobody has the right to use me without my permission. And I could never reconcile that. And I still, you know, to this day, my husband still has to convince me, especially as I've been going through menopause and hot flashes and everything. He keeps saying, It's okay to stop if you get a hot flash, you know, like we don't need to keep going. But I have a difficult time with that because I listen to all of this stuff. And, you know, we had to do this, I think my daughter and I and Joanna, who also wrote it, just as our own part of our own catharsis and part of our own journey. For them, it was more fighting back against the purity culture. And for me, it was more this obligation sex message. But it has been a really negative thing. But I'll tell you what's made me the most sad is that all of these books got as popular as they did. You know, I I'm not sad these books got written. There's always going to be bad stuff written. That's just natural. But the fact that pastors didn't speak out about women being called methadone, or, you know, about telling women that you have to have sex even if he's straying or drinking, as Emerson Egridge did, like that should never have been done. And the fact that more people aren't speaking out now, I'm so glad you are. And I have found licensed counselors are the best people. Like they licensed counselors will talk about this stuff, but pastors just aren't. And a lot of the big names that I know personally are not, and I find that difficult.
Michael John CusickWell, thank you, Sheila, for um all that you're doing, especially for the the data. I love how the data and your interpretations of scripture and your experience in ministry, they just all align. And uh just very, very grateful. So thank you for this conversation as well.
Sheila Wray GregoireWonderful, thank you.
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