Male-Centric Sex: When Evangelical Teachers Can't Tell the Difference Between Willingness to Have Sex and Arousal

But what if some marriage authors or teachers don’t understand the difference between a woman being willing to have sex and a woman being aroused? Too often, teaching around marriage and sexuality centres the male experience, and portrays women as a passive participant whose needs and feelings are erased from the experience.

Evangelical sex advice often centers the question of, “how can a husband turn his wife on so that she will be willing to let him have sex with her?” The answer to this question is often presented as a man doing the bare minimum in a relationship: praying together, helping with housework, spending time together, etc…

According to these teachers, doing all of this is a surefire way to turn on a woman and will lead to sex. However, this advice skips quite a few steps in the female response cycle. It also seems to equate a connection with one’s spouse as the definition of “turned on.”

We talked about this in a podcast a while back, but I wanted to turn it into a post for easy reference!

One is focused on getting her to agree to have sex with her husband–we’ll call that male-centric sex. And one is focused on making sure that sex is pleasurable and meaningful for both–we’ll call that couple-centric sex. Here’s what the two routes look like:

And these are NOT the same thing whatsoever.

Let’s take a look at how this works out in practice. On the topic of how to turn a woman on, Emerson Eggerichs, author of Love & Respect has this to say:

You turn on a woman sexually by not having anything to do with her sexually….The irony of it all is that what turns a woman on sexually are the nonsexual things. This is a classic truth, an axiom, a basic principle. Gentlemen, if you’ve never learned that, I want you to trust me here… So notice the things that turn her on. It’s so easy to do. Reading a book together, praying together, helping her with the household. Why is it that your wife wants you to vacuum?

It isn’t necessarily because she’s this domestic engineer who has a whip in hand and wants you to abide by every command she gives to you. Maybe she realizes that it’s a sexual turn on to her, and so I want you to just be reminded here that it’s the nonsexual things.

Emerson Eggerichs

Episode 039 - Tuesday Night is Coming Part 2 - A Good Woman’s View of Sex

He’s saying that it’s the nonsexual things that get her aroused, or “turned on.”

• At WILLING TO START, you’re not feeling much of anything yet, except an openness to start being affectionate and seeing if it will go somewhere.

• At EXCITEMENT, you’re starting to feel tingly, and warm, and affectionate. This is when you want lots of kissing and touching (likely not in the erogenous zones) to lead to the next stage.

• At AROUSAL, her vagina is producing lubrication. Her nipples and clitoris are erect. This is when she actually wants stimulation in the erogenous zones, leading towards orgasm.

Now, doing non-sexual things, like connecting, being a fully engaged partner in managing the home and the children, spending time together, is definitely the way to encourage your partner to move from “neutral” to “willing to start affection.” But after that, if you’re expecting women to actually respond physically, you do have to do actual physical things.

Arousal is most definitely sexual, and there are marked physical signs of arousal. When Eggerichs says “you can’t tell if a woman is turned on,” this insinuates that he may not actually understand the sexual response cycle, because it’s hard to imagine that anyone who does would ever make such a claim.

Where are we at as a church when the author of the best-selling marriage curriculum in North American evangelicalism talks about sex by erasing women’s experience and just plain getting basic stuff wrong?

What happens if you see sex as merely intercourse? Women get the short end of the stick (and I didn’t mean that as a pun).

We found in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue followed by our survey of men for The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex that we have a 47-point orgasm gap where 95% of men almost always or always reach orgasm in a given sexual encounter compared to just 48% of women.

Of the women who do reach orgasm, only 40% can do so with virtually no foreplay. Advice, such as the type Emerson gives, leads to a lower satisfaction rate for women because that advice removes sexual stimulation that she would actually enjoy from the equation.

In the Christian world when you read sex advice, what you hear is, “You know she’s not going to want you. But here is what you can do to get her so that she is willing to let you.” What kind of a view of sex is that?

We need to get to a point where men in the Christian world don’t think it’s acceptable to write sex advice that makes it sound like they don’t know how to bring a woman to climax. Because when we accept that kind of advice that erases women, we’re damaging women. And it’s ridiculous that this is understood in the secular world, and it’s completely looked over by the Christian one.

We are normalizing women being erased. We are normalizing women not reaching orgasm. We think it’s so normal that Joshua Butler can write his book Beautiful Union (remember that?) calling sex which focuses on a man’s orgasm during intercourse as an icon of the gospel, while a woman’s orgasm is barely mentioned. Seriously, he talks about semen a ton, but the stuff that tends to bring a woman to orgasm? That, apparently, is not iconic of the gospel.

Please, church: let’s get to the point where it isn’t acceptable to talk about sex without talking about what women experience. It isn’t acceptable to talk about sex where we focus it entirely on a man’s climax during intercourse.

As we talk about in The Great Sex Rescue, sex should be mutual, intimate, pleasurable for both. That needs to be the baseline.

Right now we have this phenomenon of male centric sex across almost all of our resources.

It’s not an unreasonable request to ask for that to change, and I hope that the Christian world will listen.

• The Male-Centric Sex podcast!

• The Instagram reel where I first heard that Emerson Eggerichs admitted that he can’t tell if a woman is aroused—and I spit my tea!

• The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex/Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex to understand the sexual response cycle

• The Orgasm Course to help you figure out how your body works

• The Great Sex Rescue to undo our ideas that men’s experience of sex is the main story