The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended

This book is FANTASTIC and revolutionary. Sheila NAILS it, repeatedly, all over the place. I cannot recommend it highly enough for undoing all the terrible things we were taught about sex!

It's like when we were first married, I was handed a lovely little box of beliefs, neatly packaged up in popular evangelical books. They said if I followed these beliefs, I would be the wife God wanted me to be and my husband would be happy and this was the perfect recipe for marital bliss. Well guess what? These beliefs can actually lead to pain, abuse, enabling addiction, stripping away personhood from women, viewing men as powerless to their urges, and basically just overall literal DISASTER.

In The Great Sex Rescue, Sheila, Rebecca & Joanna literally come to the Rescue and throw back the covers on all the mess:

-Lies we've been fed in the most popular Christian sex & marriage books are uncovered, and exposed for what they are

-The insanity of those beliefs and the broken logic that backfires horribly in marriage is called out

-Abuse is shown to be abuse instead of being excused continually

-Addiction is called what it is instead of being enabled, and they urge you to seek professional help

-Women are called people, deserving of care and basic human kindness. Women are spoken of as being worthy and valued, not merely objects to be used.

-Men are called to be the men that Jesus sees them as and can empower them to be, not helpless

-Men & women are pointed to Jesus instead of formulas that stereotype and paralyze us

This book is for you if:

-you've ever read the popular Christian marriage books and they've sat wrong and you felt more hopeless afterward, like you were broken

-you feel like you are merely an object in your marriage

-you don't enjoy sex or think that your body "just doesn't work how it should"

-if you have pain in sex

-you believe that if you just try harder in your marriage, it will be better. If you give more sex, more happily, more enthusiastically, it will improve and he will be happier

If any of these resound with you, please snatch up this book as fast as you can!!! Maybe you will find that you were building on a broken foundation and no amount of fixing would ever produce the result you are looking for. But there's a better way. There's hope for something better. There's hope for freedom and togetherness and mutuality and safety and pleasure and love where BOTH individuals matter and are allowed to have a say and be able to give willingly.

A few quotes:

-"Women are given a beautiful picture of shame-free, passionate sex but then are bombarded by dangerous teaching rampant in these same books: it's her duty to give him sex when he asks, regardless of how she feels; sex is something he will take from her because he needs it so badly; all men lust, so she needs to do her part if she wants her husband to stay faithful. Our theology of sex has to go beyond the creation story in Genesis, of being naked and not ashamed, and encompass so much more."

-"When you are repeatedly told that you are not allowed to say no to sex and that what you need is less important than what your spouse needs, that is a deep rejection of you as a person."

-"We needed to give people explicit permission to reject the aspect of the evangelical zeitgeist [beliefs] that were holding them back"

-"It is perfectly reasonable for a woman to expect her husband to live out his wedding vows. She isn't being selfish. She isn't failing to understand what it is to be a guy. She is standing on biblical principles."

-"Not being able to look at a woman treats women like threats rather than people. And what do you do with threats? You neutralize them…Well, people treat lust the same – just get rid of the woman! Or at least tell them to cover up…. The irony is that by equating attraction with lust, we've boiled women down to their bodies, whether a man is avoiding her completely or lusting about her…. The key to defeating lust is not to avoid looking at women; it's to actually see them."

-"God does not blame women for causing men to sin simply by existing"

-"You don't build a great sex life by telling a woman that unless she becomes wholly available to her husband in such a vulnerable way, he will betray her by turning to pornography."

-"Your experience matters. God gave you discernment. You're allowed to use it. When you read something or hear something, you don't need to believe it just because it came from a Christian leader. Look for Jesus in what they are saying, and if He is not there, discard it."

I believe that in The Great Sex Rescue, Sheila, Joanna & Rebecca will bring light and hope to countless marriages where pain and defeat currently rule.