The Great Sex Rescue

The Great Sex Rescue, Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach and Joanna Sawatsky (Baker Books, 2021) 

Warning:

This is going to be a long review, and contains frank language about sexual expression.

For those that want the condensed version:

This is a challenging and insightful book that encourages Christian marriages to great, passionate, other person-centred sex that is enjoyable for both spouses. It includes lots of research about the things that Christian women experience, enjoy and struggle with in the bedroom, as well as tearing apart the teaching in a range of Christian books on sex and marriage.

Now for the much more detailed review:

The time spent reading this book, and many of the resources around it has been an interesting and eye-opening one. I had never heard of Sheila Wray Gregoire or read any of her books, but she is quite prolific and has an extensive blog & website (To love, honour and vacuum) which specifically addresses sex in marriage, amongst other things.

The Great Sex Rescue (2021) is trying to do three things:

• give sexual and intimacy advice and instruction to married couples who are trying to live in honourable Christian marriages; 
• explore in detail the results of a large survey on sexual intimacy collected by Gregoire of over 20,000 evangelical women, as well as the results of academic research and focus groups; and 
• examine the bestselling Christian marriage and sex books to analyse their teaching and the messages given in them (mainly in order to point out the problems within them). 

These all have value, and need to be done. We need excellent books on sex in marriage, we need research to know and understand women’s (and men’s) experience of sexual intimacy to help us understand people’s joys and challenges. And we need to analyse critically what published resources are saying and hold them up to scrutiny. Having said that, it’s hard to do all three well. This one seems to start with the aim of tearing other arguments down, giving it a combative, polemical feel.

I wish they could have found a more balanced way to provide all the same information by focusing more strongly on the positive messages they wanted to explore, providing advice and insight for couples, while still pointing out the clear faults in some Christian teaching in this arena.

They come up with seven principles about what sex should be:

• personal - so that two truly become one 
• pleasurable - really good for both people 
• pure - each person being responsible to keep themselves free from sexual sin 
• prioritised - even while acknowledging different levels of desire 
• pressure-free - freely given and never achieved through coercion or threat 
• put the other first - considering the other’s needs before their own 
• passionate - to be able to surrender to each other in trust and love 

The remainder of the book explores these principles in detail.

Two chapters explore ‘pleasurable’ in detail - one focussing on orgasm (mainly about enabling more women to experience it) and arousal (noting that sex cannot be pleasurable until you figure out arousal). They posit that:

• no man should be satisfied unless his wife is regularly satisfied 
• women’s sexual pleasure matters for her own sake, not just his 

The chapters on purity starkly and repeatedly point out that women are not responsible for their husband’s purity. Men (and women) are responsible for their own self-control, and their decision to view pornography. Wives have had unrealistic burdens placed on them with the assumption that men cannot control themselves and they are required to ‘keep the home fires burning’ so they do not stray. This message is as insulting to men as is it to women, reducing men to brute beasts, and wives to gatekeepers and receptacles for lust control.

Addressing differences in libido, they note that couples who manage them well “are naturally satisfied during sex and treat each other well outside the bedroom too”. Hardly rocket science! Considering further, they note:

"Perhaps frequency has been used as the main measure of satisfaction because it is easier to tell couples to have more sex than it is to help her reach orgasm or solve underlying marital problems or deal with the stresses of life. But what we’ve found is that when you work on marital satisfaction, reducing stress, and making sex feel pleasurable and passionate, libido difference usually take care of themselves."

They then turn to consider the sexless (or very low sex) marriage, and the main scenarios into which these fall:

• The sexless marriage due to selfishness or brokenness - this is where either laziness or selfishness reigns, or deep seated problems aren’t being addressed 
• The sexless marriage due to emotional protection. Here where one is refusing sex, it is the other’s ongoing behaviour that has prompted it. 
• The sexless marriage in disguise (they are actually having regular intercourse, but for one partner it’s completely void of connection or pleasure) 

They propose five strongly contributing factors to a sexless marriage: pornography use, male sexual dysfunction, anorgasmia, vaginismus, and not feeling close during sex.

Some of the issues addressed very well and very openly in this book are the areas where few others dare to tread. These include:

• the challenges and reality of vaginismus 
• the reality of sexual pain for many women 
• the sexless marriage (above) 
• the concept of duty sex, and the problems it can create 
• the sinfulness of sexual coercion and marital rape 

The final chapters are the better ones - with the exhortment to all to ‘just be nice’. It sounds simplistic, but they are right - if we longed to love the other as much as we love ourselves in marriage, there is so much that could be better, and so many problems that could be overcome. Jesus’ words may be simple, but we all know that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

They try hard to celebrate that there are wonderful men and husbands out there who long for a close, passionate, mutually enjoyable sexual experience with their wives. But a man reading this book could certainly feel like he is much to blame for intimacy problems. It certainly points the finger hard at the unhelpful and sometimes destructive messaging that the church, and certain books, have given to people. And there are elements where this is needed. Some of the quotes included from certain books made my skin crawl. They come down hardest on Love and Respect and Every Man’s Battle. One I have recently stopped recommending, another I have never read.

There is much more that I could say in more depth. Some things might be:

• Just because books are Amazon bestsellers does not mean they are the best books on a subject. I would have liked to see analysis of some books written in the last 15 years, most covered are quite old. 
• However, that’s also a reminder to re-read marriage books. I have certainly changed my views on some over the years (eg Sheet Music, Love and Respect) 
• We need to encourage people to read critically. Just because an author writes it doesn’t make it true, biblical or wise. And this applies to Gregoire et al. as much as others. We need to be discerning. 
• The use of statical data is varied. Sometimes it helps (it is helpful to know how many women are orgasmic, how many experience pain, how much sex people are having). But it also complicated information, and often the data tables weren’t clear. 
• As mentioned above it is more combative that it needs to be. If you spend time on Gregoire’s blog, this is also evident. 

Who should read this?

• Those who want to explore their own perspective on sex and pleasure, and how that may have been impacted by church teaching. 
• Those facing sexual challenges in their marriage, and have uncertainty about where to turn (you could try her blog too to get an idea of the topics she covers, for while some posts are combative, some are very helpful) 
• Those in marriage ministries or counselling Christian marriages (or engaged couples) - to consider what messages, even subtly we might be sending without meaning to 
• Those pastoring marrieds could benefit from understanding more broadly the depth of issues marrieds face, and the challenges some will not openly speak about. 
• NOT those embarking on marriage. This is not for newlyweds. Sadly, many of the issues she addresses do come up early in marriages, but I don’t think this is the best delivery format for that stage.