Bare Marriage

Episode 250: Not All Men—But How Do We Tell?

September 12, 2024 • Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 250

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We know it’s not all men who are predators. But it’s far too many. And a recent horrible court case in France is reminding women all over the world that far too many men are willing and eager to do the unthinkable. The only way to tell who is safe is to look at their words and their actions. And the words of far too many evangelical leaders and authors and pastors are straight up rape culture. After what happened to Gisele Pelicot, I’m not willing to put up with it anymore. No more Every Man’s Battle rape culture mindset in the church!

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Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And I have a really, really great conversation coming up later on the podcast with my husband, Keith.  Recently in France, there’s a criminal case that is making headlines all over the world, and I want to talk about it.  I’m angry, and I want to talk about the intersection of that case with the way that evangelicals talk about sex.  And it’s going to be a fire conversation.  But if you are really—if sexual assault is something that’s difficult for you to hear about, you might want to just listen to the first half of this podcast and then skip that conversation.  But there is stuff I just need to say.  It is burning inside me.  And so even though I had another podcast scheduled for this week, listening to that case in France, I knew there was something else I had to say because we, as evangelical Christians, cannot—we absolutely cannot permit the conversation around sex that is happening right now to continue.  Not the way it is because we are enabling sexual assault.  And so that’s coming up in a minute.  But before I get to that, there’s something important that I need to say.  A couple of weeks ago I made an offhand comment in a podcast.  I don’t even remember what podcast it was now, but I said that Jesus is the Word of God.  Jesus is the ultimate word, and we interpret Scripture through Jesus.  And I have had so many social media messages and emails about that with people not having a clue what I’m talking about.  And I realized wow.  This is so fundamental to Christianity, to our whole belief system, and a lot of people don’t even understand.  And so this is crucial.  And I want to unpack it.  So really quickly I want to walk through the argument that I was making, okay?  So let’s start with the book of John.  The book of John opens by saying that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  And the Word that he is talking about is Jesus, right?  Jesus came into the world.  The Word of God is Jesus.  Colossians.  The book of Colossians tells us that He is the image of the invisible God.  In the gospel of John, John also says—or John also quotes Jesus saying that “whoever as seen Him has seen the Father.”  All right?  So Jesus teaches us what God is like, who God is like, because Jesus is part of the Godhead with flesh on.  Jesus is God that we can see.  And that means that everything that we read in Scripture about God has to line up with the personhood of Jesus.  If it doesn’t, that is a sign that we are interpreting Scripture wrong or we’re not understanding the original purpose of that Scripture, okay?  Because if Jesus is the way that God reveals Himself in perfection, all right?  Jesus is flesh—is God with flesh on.  Jesus came to show us what God is like, and so Jesus needs to be the ultimate arbiter of everything.  Scripture is meant to point us to Jesus, okay?  So we interpret Scripture through Jesus.  We are Christians who follow Christ.  And He is the ultimate arbiter of everything.  I’m old enough to remember when the vast majority of Bibles were red letter editions.  I don’t think they are anymore.  But when I grew up, almost every Bible that you bought was a red letter edition.  And by that, I mean that the words of Jesus were different.  They were printed in red, not black, because that was a signal that we were supposed to understand, “Hey, these words are special.  These words are set apart from the rest of Scripture because they’re actually from Jesus.”  And in liturgical churches, often where mainline churches—we also understand that too.  When I grew up in evangelical churches, I thought, “Oh, in evangelical churches, we revere the Bible.  But in mainline churches, they don’t.”  And I find that so funny that I used to think that because there is so much Scripture in mainline church services.  There’s often four Scripture readings, okay?  There’s an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, a Gospel reading, and then a Psalm, which is often read responsively.  Every single service.  And it all rotates on a two-year basis so that over the course of two years you read through basically the whole of Scripture so that there is nothing that you can ignore.  Okay?  So this is the way that mainline liturgical churches work.  But the difference is when the pastor reads the Gospel or whoever is reading the Gospel reads the Gospel the congregation stands.  And that’s to signal that the Gospel reading is different than the Old Testament readings and the New Testament reading than the Psalms.  So the red letter edition told us the words of Jesus are different.  Standing for the Gospel signaled, no, this is different because Jesus is the center focus.  And in our church, in the church that I go to now, the pastor always preaches on the Gospel reading.  I mean he’ll often bring in the other readings as they support the Gospel reading, but the focus is always on what is Jesus trying to tell us.  What are we supposed to learn from Jesus?  I mean even the Holy Spirit—John 16:14 Jesus says of the Holy Spirit, “He will glorify Me because it is from Me that He will receive what He will make known to you.”  So the Holy Spirit’s purpose is to glorify Jesus.  And everything comes back to Jesus.  It is Jesus’ voice that we follow.  And this needs—please hear me on this.  This needs to inform how we see Scripture.  Okay?  Think of how many times Jesus said, “You have hard it said, but I say to you.”  He was correcting things that they misunderstood from the Old Testament.  And what worries me today is that many churches have put other Scriptures above the words of Jesus and basically ignore Him.  So they’ll preach on marriage using verses that ripped out of context about how women are to submit without ever mentioning how Jesus treated women, how He elevated women, how He praised women for asking questions, how He didn’t expect women to just wait on men, and how He even praised women who deliberately went against those cultural expectations.  None of that gets mentioned.  And Paul would be appalled, I think, at the way that people are using his words ripped out from the context of the gospel.  Because when Paul was writing his letters, it was to supplement what they already knew of Jesus.  And we are using them with the exclusion of Jesus.  And yeah.  I think Paul would be really quite upset by that.  I have sat through so many months of sermons at many evangelical churches where we were never in the Gospels.  Jesus was mentioned in the songs.  We prayed in His name, but the teaching left Him out.  And you can often tell that because they’ll talk about God.  What God wants from you, what God wants from you.  But they don’t use the name Jesus because it doesn’t match.  What they’re teaching doesn’t match with the character and actions of Jesus.  And when your interpretation of Scripture leaves Jesus out, you’re missing something.  You’re missing something really important, and that’s how I often judge books and sermons.  Do they talk about Jesus, or do they just talk about God?  Because if they only talk about God without Jesus, it’s probably true that what they’re saying just doesn’t match.  It just doesn’t match what Jesus would do.  So keep Jesus at the front and center, people, because He is our Savior.  He is the one that we follow.  He is the voice that we are supposed to listen to and recognize.  That’s what I was trying to say.  And I really hope that the church gets this because it’s so important.  And if you want to dive deeper into this, you can read Pete Enns’, The Bible Tells Me So.  Listen to the podcast, The Bible for Normal People.  If you want an academic work, N. T. Wright’s books, The Day the Revolution Began or How God Became King, are really good.  There’s so many books out there about this.  But let’s keep Jesus front and center, and let’s remember that He is the ultimate word.  And we interpret Scripture through Him, and that’s what I meant.  Okay.  Going along with this, there’s something really exciting happening in the evangelical church this week.  September 8th to 15th.  And I want to be a part of it, and so I want to tell you about it.  It’s called the Confession of Evangelical Conviction.  And it was written, I believe, by Skye Jethani from the Holy Post podcast.  But hundreds of evangelical people have put their names to it including me.  And what we’re asking is that people read this confession, that they adopt it, that they talk to people about it, that they share it because there’s some really deeply disturbing things happening in the evangelical movement.  And we need to call the evangelical church back to Jesus.  And so number one in the evangelical confession is that we give our allegiance to Jesus Christ alone.  That’s kind of what I was talking about in the whole beginning of this podcast.  That Jesus is the word, and that our worship belongs to Him.  It then goes on.  There’s seven points.  But to talk about what that means as we live out that.  The fact that we value every person as created in God’s image, that we lead with love and not fear, that we don’t define ourselves by what we are against and by trying to ostracize people but instead by loving people, that we’re not going to get ahead by using the tools of the world but remember that Jesus is above everything.  And we need to keep Jesus above everything.  And that we recognize godly people through their character.  That that has to matter.  And it’s a really important confession.  I’m really glad that Skye and others wrote it.  And I am going to share this, and I encourage you to read it.  Please share it with your friends.  But the church is getting really off track.  The church, I think, is adopting worldly tools where we’re trying to do things by power and by oppressing people and by being proud of, oh, thank you, God, that I’m not like that person as opposed to entering in and humbling ourselves and—as Jesus did in serving.  So please read that confession.  I’m going to put the link in the podcast notes.  I want to thank the sponsor of this week’s Bare Marriage podcast, the book, Rebecoming by Dr. Merry Lin.  Dr. Merry was on the podcast last week, and we had such a great conversation.  And I absolutely loved this book.  I have never read a book that explains certain concepts that are so common and important in counseling circles as this one did.  Stuff about attachment, about triggers, about the Stone Age brain, about IFS, so much stuff, about trauma—that just explains it in laymen’s terms.  But best of all in the book at the end of each chapter, it gives you specific exercises that you can work through so that you can really achieve growth and change and just get unstuck and get back to who you were meant to be.  I’m working through this book myself, and it’s so helpful.  And I really, really encourage you to pick up Rebecoming.  It’s not a long read, but it is a read that can change your life.  So check it out.  Rebecoming: Come Out of Hiding to Live as Your God-Given Essential Self.  The link is in the podcast notes.  I have brought my husband, Keith, on the podcast.

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And you are a good man.    

Keith: Thanks. 

Sheila: You are a very good man.  But we are here to talk about something that I’m really angry about.  This has just been a horrible story about how way too many men are not good men.  And I think that the evangelical church is actually mimicking a lot of the language, and that’s what is really bothering me.  So yeah.  Like I said at the beginning of the podcast, this might be triggering for a lot of people because I do want to talk about a really horrific case that’s going on in France.  And I don’t always talk about this stuff.  I don’t want to be a true crime podcast.  I know the world is dark enough as it is, but this one is just so bad that I am angry.  And I think there is an army of women around the world who are angry, and we have to stop this.  And the way we stop it is by looking at the root causes.  And a lot of that in evangelicalism is how we talk about sex.  So okay.  I’m going to try to calm down and tell the story.  Okay.  So there’s a court case that started in France last week.  A woman, named Gisele Pelicot who has come forward because she was sexually assaulted when she was unconscious by more than 70 men at the request of her husband.  And she didn’t know any of this was happening.  It was over a period of 10 years.  And normally, cases like this would be secret, but she asked for it to be public because she wants every single one of those men to be in the news.  And she wants people to know that this going on to raise awareness so that it doesn’t happen again.  And so I’m just so in awe.  This woman is really brave and really, really awesome.  And her daughter has been very vocal about this too and just a lot of bravery and heroic women in that family.  But over a period of 10 years, her husband, Dominique Pelicot, had an ad on a website in France inviting men to come and basically rape his unconscious wife.  And all of these men came.  They live in a small town of 6,000.  And these men are from that small town.  One of them was her neighbor, who was kind and always smiled at her, and she thought she had a great relationship with him.  She was married for 50 years to this guy.  Had no idea anything was wrong.  She said, “I thought we were a great couple.”  They had just retired.  They had moved to this new community.  She had thought they were great.  Okay?  But over the last 10 years, she’s been having these memory lapses, and she was going to the doctor.  She was trying to figure out why she was blacking out, why she couldn’t remember things.  They were telling her she was getting Alzheimer’s.  They were blowing her off.  And she was like, “No.  I know something is wrong.”  And then police arrested him on another charge, which we’ll get to in a minute because it’s another important part of this.  And they ended up looking at his computer, and they found all of these rapes were documented.  And it turned out that the website, which has now been shut down by the French authorities—but he would invite these men over.  I think it was like 75 of them came, and only 3 of them refused to go through with it.  But they would be told to sometimes wait in a parking lot for an hour and a half while the drugs took effect, and then they were told don’t wear anything that—with strong smells so that she won’t suspect anything.  So they knew what they were doing.  They knew what they were doing.  And four of them had STD—she had four STDs.  One of them had HIV although she never contracted HIV.  And he came six times or something.  So the police over two years managed to identify 50 of the perpetrators.  They still haven’t identified 22.  But thousands of men saw this ad, and not a single one called the police.  Those three men who came but didn’t go through with it—they didn’t call the police either.  So nobody called the police.  And there was a city councilor.  There was—a lot of these men were just normal everyday people from this small town.  And the husband managed to find that many who would just rape his unconscious wife.  

Keith: It’s horrendous.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And so I am sorry.  I know this is a terrible thing to be talking about.  But when people say not all men, I get it.  I know it’s not all men.  I love you.  I love your sons-in-law.  I know so many great men.  But it is way too many men.  It is way too many men. 

Keith: Yeah.  And I think when you say not all men, especially as a guy, then in a way you’re discounting the fear that women have which is quite legitimate.  And I think that men in general need to spend a lot more time making the world a safe place instead of trying to gaslight women that it’s safer than they think it is.  It’s really, really sad.

Sheila: And I think what really is scary about this is how normal looking these guys are.  Again, the good thing about her going public with this and asking for the trial to be public is that we’re able to see the faces of all of these guys, and they look normal.  A lot of them look really normal.  They were aged 22 to 70.  Okay?  So broad range of age.  Yeah.  There was a nurse, a city councilor.  They were normal everyday professions.  There was her neighbor that she would say hi to every day.  And I can just imagine how devastating that is.  But it shows women can’t know.  We can’t know who is dangerous and who is not.  That this many men would take the opportunity to rape an unconscious woman is just terrible.  But—and this is why I want to talk about this today.  That is what we are taught men are like and that God made men this way.  That is what our evangelical resources have been teaching is that this is normal for men.  Yeah.  There’s a graphic from an Instagram account called Coin Swallow, which Andrew Bauman shared on his page.  And I’ll put it up for those of you who are watching on YouTube, and I’ll put a link to it in the podcast notes because it’s really, really good because it kind of encapsulates what I want to talk about today.  But it says that way most of us think about this is the vast majority of men are good men.  And then there’s a few really crazed evil men, okay?  The men that would do this.  The husband.  They’re crazed, evil men.  But what if it’s not like that.  What if it’s like a spectrum?  Okay?  Where there are—there’s heroic men, who would—who will intervene in something, who know that this is bad, and they would intervene.  And I would put you in that category because you are intervening, right?  We’re writing books.  We’re trying to change the conversation.  There’s heroic men who do that.  And there’s well meaning men, who understand the issue.  They wouldn’t necessarily intervene, but they understand what’s going on.  And then there’s men, who think predation is kind of just an unfortunate fact of life.  Then there’s men who think certain women deserve it, but they aren’t actual predators.  So what were they wearing kind of thing.  Then there’s men who passively enjoy or consume or encourage predation.  So men who watch pornography like this, men who don’t actively fight against it.  Then there’s your textbook predators, and then there would be your massively so cruel, we can’t even fathom them, people.  All right?  And so that’s all a spectrum.  And the problem is that a lot of evangelicals are in the middle of that spectrum.  

Keith: Yeah.  Well, when you actually say in books like Every Man’s Battle, right?  That every man’s fantasy is to use his wife as much as he can and that she—that her personhood, her agency, her choice in the matter is an annoyance basically is what they’re saying, right?  The ideal wife is a wife who has no will of her own but just will have sex with him whenever he wants it.  That’s the ideal fantasy wife.  They say that in their books.  And they don’t realize how depraved and horrible that is.  They say that unsarcastically, unironically.  I mean it feeds this behavior.  I mean there is a mentality in the world that women exist for men.  Men have a right to women’s bodies.  There’s a mentality of that in the world.  And it’s so sad that in the evangelical church instead of saying men do not have a right to women’s bodies they are saying, in essence, men have a right to women’s bodies.  But they should only use one woman.  Right?  It’s really what they’re saying.

Sheila: Yeah.  She is your lawful, sexual outlet as Doug Wilson calls women.  Yeah.

Keith:   Yeah.  So there’s a narrative that says men are horrific, predatory beasts.  And instead of coming with the words of Jesus, the One who is gentle and humble of heart, who said turn the other cheek, who modeled kindness and humility and gentleness, instead of going with that, we say, “Yeah.  A real man is dangerous.”  And then we wonder why stuff like this happens.  Right?

Sheila: Yeah.  Well, Every Man’s Battle—they literally said, okay?  Men don’t have that Christian view of sex.  

Keith: Yeah.  That was in Every Heart Restored.

Sheila: Yeah.  That was in Every Heart Restored written by Fred Stoeker and his wife although the chapter that that was in was written by Fred Stoker, not his wife.  It’s interesting when you read that book how the book disagrees with itself.  Some chapters are written by him.  Some chapters are written by her, and they disagree with themselves.  It’s crazy.  But it’s under the Steve Arterburn’s umbrella.  In Every Man’s Battle, they say, “When it comes to sexual sin—men’s sexual sin we got there naturally.  Simply by being male.”  And that’s actually one of their chapters.  Just by being male.

Keith: Just by being male.  And I wonder about that, right?  Because there’s only two ways that that can be true.  Because, again, theologically—because what’s happening to them is they have a theology that starts with the assumption that men matter more than women do.  And I know they’re going to say, “No.  We don’t.  No.  We don’t.”  But they do.  That is the starting point.  Because if you start out with the starting point that men and women are created with equal value before God, all the questions about how to interpret these silly verses that put men over top of women would be in a totally different context.  But, anyway, they start with the assumption that men are in charge over women, right?  And then they come to this thing that men are these horrible sexual beasts.  So either one of two things happened.  That’s the way that God made them before the Fall.  In which case, God made men to be worse people than women, but He wants women to be under them.  So that they can predate them at will which is horrific.  Or they believe that this sexual predilection for men to be like this is a post Fall thing, but that we’re just supposed to live in the Fall.  And we’re supposed to lean into the Fall.  I mean theologically there’s no way that this works out with any sort of consistency that is not morally repugnant to me. 

Sheila: Yeah.  But we hear this all the time.  That this is naturally the way men are, right?  That we get there naturally simply by being male.  There is a story in Every Heart Restored where they give this long story in a woman’s own words of how she feels because her husband is using her—using her body with no regards to her.  And she says, “I feel like a human toilet for semen.”  Okay.  We tried to quote that in Great Sex Rescue, and our original editor said that’s just too—that’s just so awful.  We can’t put that in the book.  And I’m like but we’re actually quoting another book where it already is.  That book put out by WaterBrook Multnomah, a huge Christian publisher, already has that in there, and Baker said we just can’t do it.  We just can’t go that far.

Keith:   You’re not allowed to say it’s wrong to say that when they said it.

Sheila: They were like it’s just so awful.  It’s just so awful.  So anyway, so she says this.  And the response in the book—the response by Fred Stoker is, “I mean, yes, that’s sad that you feel that way.  But you need to understand how men are, and you need to satisfy his desires.”  So it’s like, yes, God just made men to want a human toilet for semen.  

Keith: That’s their view.

Sheila: That is their view.  Mark Driscoll saying that women were created to be homes for penises.  This is their view.  And when they teach this, they are enabling rape culture.  They are giving the exact same messages about sex that lead to what Gisele Pelicot went through.  

Keith:   And it’s ridiculous because the entire New Testament, right?  All through the New Testament.  Put lust to death.  Let there be no hint of sexual immorality among you.  These people are not biblical.  They say that women need to be like this.  Women need to do this.  Women need to give their husbands whatever they want because that’s biblical.  And they’re ignoring all the verses, which talk about being sexually pure.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because the only way that they have to be sexually pure—they have two options.  One is to use your wife as your sexual outlet.  And remember, for instance, Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho, there was a pedophile.  And he encouraged him to get married so that he could use his wife for a sexual outlet because he needed a sexual outlet so that he didn’t act out on kids.  Of course, that didn’t work.  He still acted out on his own kids, right?

Keith: Of course, it didn’t work.

Sheila: Of course, it didn’t work.  That isn’t it.  But this idea that if you have another sexual outlet you won’t do these things.  

Keith: Yeah.  As opposed to believing in the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in your life, as opposed to believing that when it says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” that is real, that that means something.

Sheila: So they have two ways—they have, one, use your wife.  The other one is to bounce your eyes and just not even think about women, not even look at women.  If you go into an office—this is literally what it says in Every Man’s Battle.  If you go into an office, immediately turn away because often it’s a female receptionist.  And female receptionists bend over a lot.  And so just don’t even look at the receptionist.  Look away as you’re asking for whatever it is that you need.  So women are the threat.  Women are the problem.  Right?  And it’s like no.  No.  No.  Women are not the problem.  You are the problem.  If we can get that many men who would rape an unconscious woman and who would find that fun and then we have evangelicals giving the exact same message, that this is just the way men are.   Men were created just to want to use a woman’s body.  That is what they are saying.  And the way that God prevents men from using every woman’s body is by giving him a wife so that he can use her.  Right?  And presumably, their answer to what was going on in the Pelicot was if all of those 72 men had had wives who were putting out then they wouldn’t have raped Gisele Pelicot.     

Keith: Yeah.  Well, they wouldn’t have an answer because they would just go, “They’re just a sinful person.”  They dismiss things so callously.  It’s ridiculous.

Sheila: Yeah.  So I want to play a clip.  Okay?  That I think relates to this.  Some may say that it doesn’t.  But I think it does.  This is from Josh Howerton.  I’ve talked about it on the blog and on social media.  But I don’t think I’ve put it in the podcast yet.  I recorded a podcast with Christa Brown that’s coming out later where we talked about the same clip.  But I want to bring it into this conversation too, and I think it’s bad enough we can discuss it twice.  So when you hear it again in a couple of weeks, excuse me for that.  But I want to play this clip from Josh Howerton talking about how women are temptations and are enemies that need to be run from.

Josh Howerton: This is really interesting.  The book of Ephesians says to you, men, that if you—that if the devil literally, physically, appears to you and says, “What you need to do is stand firm against the fiery darts of the evil one.”  But then the same books says to flee sexual immorality.  Do you know what that means?  If you go out of one of our campuses, get to your car, and the literal physical devil, horns and tail and fang, standing right there, you need to stand up and bow up.  And the Bible is going, “Hey, fight.”  But if you go out there and it’s like some shady little girl in a mini skirt, run, Forrest, run.  You are no match for this enemy.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So what do you think of that?

Keith: Yeah.  No.  That’s just horrific.  Horrific.  I mean this is the issue is that this whole mindset of the objectification of women, that women are—they can’t even see women as people, right?  She is a demonic force.  He would fight the devil face to face, toe to toe, but he will run from a little girl in a skirt.  Right?  She’s not even a person.  She’s a little girl—shady little girl in a skirt.  Right?  He can’t even see her as a human being.

Sheila: So the devil—he’s strong enough to fight the devil.  

Keith: He believes that.  Yeah.

Sheila: But he’s not strong enough to fight a little girl in a mini skirt in a church parking lot.  And he says, “You are no match for her.”  She is your enemy.  You need to run, Forrest, run.  And I’m sorry.  A little girl in a mini skirt in a church parking lot and you think that she is shady and she is the problem.  She is seducing you.  She is a little girl.  That is an underage girl.  And I mean I’m just—I’m absolutely floored that he said this out loud.  So if you are getting out of church, adult men, elders in the church, and you see a little girl in a mini skirt in the church parking lot, that is so dangerous.  And my question is why is that dangerous.  What does he think is going to happen?  Okay. 

Keith: It’s telling about where his heart is with respect to women.

Sheila: There is a little girl in a mini skirt.  What danger does he—does she pose to him?  Seriously.  Why is she dangerous?  

Keith: He’s worried that he’s going to be tempted to do something to her.  And so then he’s going to feel bad, and he’s going to have sinned.  But there’s no thought that he will have done something to her because she’s not a person.  And this is the point is that this isn’t—their whole mindset is they do not see the humanity of women.  Right?  And that is why they can’t change their mindset because it would require seeing women as equal image bearers to them.  And that is unacceptable to them because that takes men out of their place of priority over women.  And they will not give that up.  And so they give themselves over to debauchery and diabolical, disgusting sexual perversions rather than give up that hill.  It makes me so angry and so disgusted because the idea that men are over women is so important to them when that is the ideology that is fueling predation and all kinds of horrendous, horrific things that the New Testament talks about again and again and again.  And they point to one verse in something, and they relegate women to a lower status.  I can’t even.  And they don’t even see it.  When you force them to see it, they just don’t care.  

Sheila: That’s it.  They just don’t care.  They just don’t care because painting a little girl in a mini skirt as the enemy, as a danger to you, when if anything happened between you and a little girl in a mini skirt, it would be a crime that you committed against her.   So he’s saying, “Run, Forrest, run because you are so in danger of committing a crime.”  Does he honestly think that all of the men in his congregation could fight the devil but when it came to a little girl in a mini skirt they are so close to raping her that they’d better run?  If that is what he thinks, why are they letting any girls in that church?  Why aren’t they saying, “This is an unsafe place for any female ever.  We’re going to be a place where men come to just realize how evil we are and do work on ourselves”?  Or better still why don’t they keep all the men out and just let it be a place for women because they’re admitting that they’re rapists?  He may not think that’s what he said.  But if you look solely at his words, that is what he said.  And you may argue that’s not what he meant.  I don’t care what he meant.  Look at his words.  What is the danger there?

Keith: Yeah.  But it’s the whole mentality.  It’s the whole mentality.

Sheila: If the danger is, oh, well, a shady little girl in a mini skirt in a church parking lot, by the way, given this story—a shady little girl in a mini skirt in a church parking lot.  She’s waiting there to try to seduce you when you come out of church.  You think that little teenage girls or preteens or whatever a little girl is—you think they’re trying to seduce an adult man.  So you’re going to blame them if something happens then.  And that’s exactly what Every Man’s Battle does, by the way.  They have a story in there of a youth volunteer, who rapes a 15 year old.  She was just flirting with him.  And when he asked her to take her pants down, she did.  And I mean what did you expect him to do.  This father of three.  Right?  This is how men are.  

Keith: And how does that happen, right?  I don’t understand—I mean we obviously think it happens because of the view of women that the church is espousing.  But how do they think it happens?  They can’t get away from the fact that this is sinful behavior on the part of these men, right?  How is it that they get away with just saying, “Well, that’s just the way men are”?  How can they let that happen?  For instance, I’ve seen people with you online saying, “Oh, he didn’t mean a little girl like underage.  He meant a small woman,” right?  Well, whatever.  He didn’t say that but whatever.  Even if it meant a small woman, it’s the same problem, right?  What happens to her doesn’t matter to them.  They just don’t see women.  They don’t care.  How do they explain that?

Sheila: And how does treating a woman like the enemy solve the problem?  Because Jesus did not treat women like His enemies.  Jesus did not look at an attractive woman and say, “Oh, you are My enemy.  I need to flee from you.”  Jesus didn’t bounce His eyes.  Jesus didn’t refuse to look at women.  Jesus chose to truly see women.

Keith: Yeah.  So they are so massively failing to be like Jesus.  How do they not see that they’ve missed the boat?  How can they not see that?

Sheila: Because they are so focused on men’s sexual needs and they think that the reason that God gave marriage is so that men can get their sexual needs met, and that’s why the gospel for them revolves so much around sex.  It’s just unreal.  And I’m so flipping angry.  I joke, but I’m actually serious about this.  I have a list that I keep of men that I will never be in a room with based on how they teach.  And Josh Howerton would be one of them based on what he says about sex and women.  They are telling on themselves.  They are telling what they think when they are with a woman.  And I’m not going to be in a room like that.  I don’t want to be uncomfortable.  I don’t want to—wondering what he’s thinking.  Because this is the thing, we know that in that small town of 6,000 people he was able to get that many men to come and rape his wife.  And those men look normal.  And so when we go in to church, we don’t have any way of knowing who is normal by looking at men.  We have no way.  And so the only way that we have of knowing if a man is safe is by what they say and how they act.  And so when men are saying that men just don’t have that Christian view of sex, when men are normalizing marital rape doing what Tim LaHaye did where he talks about a rapist and his rape victim as being equally unhappy, when Willard Harley in His Needs, Her Needs says a man—a man says, “I feel like I’m raping her, but I can’t help it.  I need to make love,” so when they are equating raping someone with making love to someone—

Keith:   Yeah.  They don’t see the difference.

Sheila: - I will never, ever trust them because they don’t get it.  They don’t understand what intimacy is.  They don’t understand what real sex is.  And they don’t respect women.  And so we know that rape happens because men believe certain things, right?  Men who respect women, men who care about women, men who value intimacy over power, they don’t rape people.  Okay?  People who rape people do it because they think they have an entitlement to women’s bodies.  They do it because they have so disrupted their sexuality that it is expressed in a violent way, in a need to have power and control over someone.  So when I hear people talking about how God made men to want power and control what I’m thinking is you believe rape myths.  There is no way I’m ever going to be safe with you.  And that’s what we need to start doing, women.  We need to start saying to these guys, who are teaching this stuff, that is a rape myth.  And that means you are unsafe because there are way too many men who are unsafe.  And those men should not—we should not be letting our teenage girls babysit for men like that.  We should not be letting our kids go to youth groups run by men like that.  This is not okay.  This just can’t be okay anymore.  I don't know.  I’m just so angry.  If you’re listening to this podcast, you know that we give out a lot of content here at Bare Marriage for free.  We have three blog posts a week.  We have a podcast.  We have social media, and I’m often very active in the comments because we are absolutely committed to changing the evangelical conversation about sex.  And we want people to be able to find us.  But at the same time, we can’t do this for free.  And so we so appreciate the people who buy our books, who support us by buying our courses, buying our merch, but also the people who partner with us every month especially our patrons, who given even just a small amount of money, even just $5, $8 a month, that can help fund what we’re doing.  And if you want to be a part of that, the link is in the podcast notes.  It’s patreon.com/baremarriage.  And when you give, you also get a chance to join our Facebook group, which is an awesome place where we recharge and where we often try out some of the thoughts we’re having before they even make it to the podcast.  But we also have dreams to bring this beyond our podcast and our blog to bring the work that we’re doing into the wider evangelical and Christian sphere through writing papers in academic journals, through doing more research surveys, through translating our work into different languages, through getting involved in pastoral training and seminaries and pelvic floor physiotherapist continuing education, counseling continuing education, and more.  And if you want to support us in that in getting this stuff even bigger, you can do that through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  Any donations are tax deductible within the United States.  We are working on that in other countries, but we don’t have it yet.  But you can find the link to that in the podcast notes, and we really appreciate those who partner with us in what we’re doing.  Thank you.

Keith: No.  I agree.  And the other thing is the group of—the whole group of men that didn’t do anything about it.  They didn’t participate in the actual assault, but then they didn’t say anything.  They didn’t speak up.  And I guess that would be sort of—because I suspect probably most people listening to this podcast are not the guys—sorry.  I expect the most men who are listening to this podcast are not men who are actively promoting the sort of misogynistic and demeaning views of women that you’re combating all the time.  They’re probably more allied with the way you think on these things.  But a lot of times we don’t speak up, and we don’t call people out.  And we don’t say—we don’t stand up to other men and say, “That’s ridiculous.”  And so I guess the big call I would say for the men out there is to never discount women’s experience of their own lives.  And even if it makes you feel uncomfortable, sit in that discomfort because this did happen in France.  Right?  And women are going to be scared of us because of that.  And that makes sense.  And we should tell them that makes sense, and we should do our best to make this a world where that kind of stuff doesn’t happen.  But telling women, “Well, I’m not like that,” or, “All men aren’t like that,” or that kind of stuff, you’re making it about you.  And it’s not about you.  So don’t do that.  Don’t do that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Nobody thinks all men are like that.  But way too many of them are.  And the thing is the only way we have of telling the difference is what you say and how you act.  And I wonder too—okay.  I wonder how much of these pastors and authors normalizing predation is part of them wanting not to feel badly about the stuff they’re doing.  

Keith: Or their thought life.  Right?  Because that’s the thing about—can I just interject here?  Because the every man’s battle message, that’s the thing is they—they’re constantly saying, “All men are like this.  All men are like this.  All men are—you want to lust.  But you shouldn’t.  You want to think about women this way, but you shouldn’t.”  And what they’re doing is they’re generating a way of thinking.  It’s like saying don’t think of a red elephant, right?  As soon as you say that, you’re going to start thinking of a red elephant.  I suspect the thought life of a lot of these people is very messed up because they’ve got themselves in a tizzy rather than just being able to say—have a normal view of sexuality and women.  So I think their brains are so crazy, and they feel immensely guilty about that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And they’re trying not to feel guilty.  So the way they don’t have to feel guilty is if they believe that all men are like this, right?  And so in Every Man’s Battle—and we have a one sheet on this, by the way, that you can download.  It’s got quotes from different pages.  It just talks about all of the problems with Every Man’s Battle, and we did this.  We did a podcast on this when we started our one sheets.  So a couple years ago now.  And I will put a link to how you can download this one sheet.  But I just want to read to you a little bit about what we have in there.  So Every Man’s Battle accuses all of their readers of sexual predation.  Okay.  So they make it sound normal.  So they say things like, “You know that you’ve lurked,” right?

Keith: You know that you’ve lurked.  Yeah.

Sheila: “You forced your wife to perform like a porn star for you,” as if that’s normal.  Okay?  No.  Most men have not forced their wives to perform like a porn star.  And if they have, that is sexual assault.  So they are normalizing this.  Fred Stoeker.  And we played a clip of this on the podcast awhile ago, when he went on Focus on the Family, talks about how men routinely push the boundaries of their girlfriends.  No.  Pushing the sexual boundaries of your girlfriend is sexual assault and normalizing sexual assault is not okay.  And then throughout the book, they describe abusive or criminal behavior as part of normal male sexual activity.  They talk about maybe you’ve driven your car to a gym parking lot and masturbated as you watched—or maybe you’ve driven your rental car to a gym parking lot and masturbated.

Keith: Yeah.  It’s oddly specific.

Sheila: It is oddly specific.  And masturbated as you watched the women going in and out.  It talks about indecent exposure, voyeurism, coercion, sexual assault, the rape of minors, deceiving your wives to get more sex, adultery, clergy abuse, domestic violence.  It talks about all of these things as normal without ever saying, “Hey, these are actually illegal.”  And most of them are.  They don’t say—the only one they ever admit is illegal is the raping the 15 year old.  But still they still blame her.

Keith: Yeah.  But even then if it’s not—even if it’s not illegal, these people say that they’re biblical.  How is that biblical?  How is that in keeping with the sexual morality of the New Testament?  It doesn’t fit at all.  But they just—well, that’s just the way it is.  You’ve had that before to where you’ve had pastors argue with you online when you’d say that we should not be lusting.  And they just say that all men lust.  That’s the way that men are.  And they’ve argued with you.  And you’ve said, “Paul said put lust to death.”  And they tell you you don’t understand the Bible.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I don’t understand men, and I’m just shaming men.  No.  You know what?  Well, no.  72 men raped an unconscious woman.  72 men who looked perfectly normal in that very small community.  That husband managed to find men who wanted to do this over a 10-year period.  And I am really sorry.  But if you are—unless you are saying, “No.  You know what, guys?  You are not entitled to your wife’s body.  You are not—you do not just need physical release the way Emerson Eggerichs talks about.”  Emerson Eggerichs says if you don’t get physical release you’ll come under satanic attack.  No.  No.  You were not created for physical release.  You were created for intimacy.  And yes.  The sexual act is a big part of that but not if it’s only about physical release.  If it is, you are an animal.  You are not a human being.  

Keith:   Well, and that’s the thing is that a lot of men do think that because they’re being taught that.  And to me when you see men acting like this in France, the Christian response shouldn’t be, “Well, yeah.  Men are just like that.”   The Christian response should be we should be teaching men a better way than this.  And the way you teach them that is to value women and to respect women.

Sheila: It’s not just not to rape unconscious women.  That’s not enough.  You can’t just say this was wrong.  You have to go back to first principles.  

Keith: Yeah.  And it’s not to say only rape one person the rest of your life which they basically say in a lot of these books.  The one you did that podcast where Emerson Eggerichs was—Emerson Eggerichs was counseling that woman who wrote a letter because she was crying in the shower before she let her husband use her yet again.  And his response is, “You’re faithfully following Jesus.”

Sheila: Yeah.  “And he’s got a gold mine in you.”

Keith: The Christian response is you are the daughter of the Lord, and you are valuable.  And you are worthy.  And you should not be treated like this.  And I don’t understand how anybody, who has read the Bible, cannot see that.  The only thing is they’ve been blinded by their own idolatrous view that men are over women.  And women are there for the purpose of satisfying and building up men.  And they will not give up that idol, and they bow down to it.  And this is the sacrifice that they give to this idol.  We, as Christians, have a better view.  We have a much better view.  And everything that I read in Every Man’s Battle and all these other people it’s not that view.  That is not a Christian view.  It just isn’t.  And how do they not see how far off they are.  I just don’t get it.

Sheila: Yeah.  And you know what?  Josh Howerton isn’t going to understand why he’s part of this conversation.  He’s going to be like, “I never said rape was okay.  You’re talking about raping an unconscious woman.  I would never do that or condone that.  I obviously think that’s sin.”  And yeah.  You know what?  He probably does.  But in that anecdote, he still treated the little girl as the enemy.  His conclusion to that anecdote wasn’t, “Guys, she is made in the image of God.  You need to respect her.  And if you can’t respect her, then you are the problem.”  That wasn’t his conclusion.    

Keith: And if you honestly believe that men just desire mindless sexual release and don’t value intimacy the solution is to teach men to value intimacy, to teach men to be healthy.  But to do that, you’re going to have to give up power and control.  

Sheila: And entitlement.

Keith: And entitlement.

Sheila: And so instead, the church is often preaching power and control and entitlement for men, and that is why this stuff happens.  50% of married men in evangelical churches are currently watching porn in some way.  And what does pornography have?  I think it was 88% of porn videos are violent in some way.  It is men exercising violent control over women.  And 50% of men—married men in evangelical churches are currently watching it.  And the solution is not to say, “Oh, well, obviously, all men lust.  And we just need to quit it.”  No.  The solution is to say, “Okay.  Why am I drawn to this?  How is this changing me?  Why do I self soothe by watching pornography instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what I really need?  Why am I hiding in porn so that I can feel powerful instead of doing work on myself and figuring out how I can show up authentically and be vulnerable and not have to have power over people?”  Please, please, Christian, start doing that work because I’ll tell you.  There’s so many spaces that I won’t even step foot in now because I just don’t trust the men there.  If you’re teaching this stuff—and you men, who go to Lakepointe Church, if you didn’t stand up and walk out when Josh Howerton said that, you’re part of the problem.

Keith: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: You are part of the problem.  And you are making this pornified mindset spread.  And it’s not just Josh.  I mean I used that clip as an example, but—      

Keith:   Oh, it’s everywhere.    

Sheila: And we used Every Man’s Battle as an example.  But it’s everywhere.  Please, please, please read The Great Sex Rescue because we have so many examples of this in there.  And we show you with our stats what this actually does to women, what this does to marriage relationships.  This whole way of seeing sex as something that a man needs and a woman provides like Jimmy Evans teaches, right?  We’re going to talk about that book soon.  Marriage on the Rock.  About how men have these sexual needs.  And God made women to give to meet these sexual needs that men have.  That isn’t what sex is, people.  Sex is intimate.  Sex is mutual.  It is not him taking and her giving.  That isn’t sex.  And when you don’t even have the basics right, you don’t understand intimacy.  And if you don’t understand intimacy with your wife, there is no way you understand intimacy with God either.  There’s just no way because you see Christianity as a way of just soothing yourself and giving you entitlement.  And it’s not.  That’s not the message of Jesus.  It isn’t.  You need to respect women.  You need to get vulnerable with the women in your life.  You need to stop trying to have power and control over everybody.   And we need to fight against this stuff.  And I’m angry.  And women around the world are angry right now.  It’s not just what’s going on in France.  It’s Afghanistan outlawing women’s voices in public.  So women aren’t allowed to sing or talk or anything in public.  There was an Olympian, a woman who competed in the Olympics in Paris, her boyfriend poured petrol over her, and she died.  And this is something that is a crisis in east Africa.  A lot of Olympic athletes have been killed by their boyfriends or husbands.  This isn’t okay.  And I am so tired of women being blamed for it because we’re the enemy.  Even when we’re just a little girl, we are the enemy that you need to flee from.  Run, Forrest, run because you’re no match for us because we’re so powerful.  No.  You know what?  You’re the enemy if you believe that.  And Jesus—that’s not of God.  You’re the dangerous one.  Not her.  Not  of God.  And we need to do better.  Please.  We need to do better.  So please, guys, I know this has been a rough one.  But please read The Great Sex Rescue.  Please share our one sheets with your pastor.  

Keith:   Speak up.  

Sheila: Speak out.  This can’t keep happening.  This isn’t right.  This isn’t fair.  And women deserve to live in a world where we don’t have to look at all the men around us and wonder would you have done that.  Would you have done that?  Show us that you wouldn’t by changing the way that you talk and think and by changing what you laugh at and by not watching porn that degrades and hurts us because we deserve better than this.

Keith: Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  All right.  That was a rough one.  Sorry.  I’ve just been shaking all week since I’ve been reading this case.  And if you know—okay.  If you know that you want to change, we have a toolkit available that you can download that has all of these one sheets, that has all of the different toxic teachings that are prevalent in the evangelical church and shows you how to combat them.  If you want to speak up, please get that toolkit.  I will put the link in the podcast notes.  And I want to say thank you again to our sponsor, the book Rebecoming by Merry Lin.  A lot of us are stuck.  A lot of us are stuck in marriages where we can’t speak up, where our partner might be entitled and we don’t know how to speak up.  And this will show you why you find it difficult to speak up and maybe give you some courage to do that.  Or if you’re just—yeah.  I grew up needing to self soothe with pornography, and I don’t want to do that anymore.  Please see a licensed therapist.  Please read some of Andrew Bauman’s work.  But even something like this and just getting back to the heart of some of the emotional wounds that you’re carrying can be really, really helpful.  So we’re going to put the links in the podcast notes to the book, to Rebecoming, to our toolkit, to our Every Man’s Battle one sheet, but we’ve got to do something because it can’t keep going on this way. 

Keith: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: Yeah.