Why Every Man's Battle Made Lust Problems Worse

It was based on the idea that lust is “every man’s battle”, and the reason men lust is because of how God made men (“we got there naturally, simply by being male.”)

God made men to visually consume women and to obtain sexual gratification through the eyes, and so lust is something that all men struggle with, apparently.

And it was authored by two psychologists using peer reviewed research, right?

Of course not!

It was authored by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, two men who had absolutely zero qualifications for writing about recovery from unwanted sexual behaviors—except that they were both self-proclaimed former sex addicts (the former is up for debate, as you shall see in the excerpts I’m going to show you in a minute that will make your hair stand on end).

The book was so popular it spawned a whole industry of “every man” and “every woman” books that eventually sold over 4,000,000 copies.

Every Man’s Battle was one of the main books we looked at for our book The Great Sex Rescue, because it was so formative in how evangelicals think about sex, and it basically discipled a whole generation of men into their ideas. Even if men didn’t read the book, pastors and many counsellors took it as gospel truth, teaching its ideas to men.

• You lust because you’re male

• God doesn’t want you to lust, even though he made you visual

• The way to stop lusting is to “bounce your eyes” from women and not look at them, and to obtain sexual gratification from your wife, treating her as your “methadone”

I’m not even kidding about that last bit—they literally called women the “methadone” for their husbands’ sex addictions.

The whole concept that “all men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle” is a terrible one. We measured it in several of our surveys, and being taught this, even if you don’t believe it, results in women having lower libidos and less trust in their husbands. If they do believe it, we also see lower orgasm rates and more rates of sexual pain.

On the men’s side, if men believe it we see terrible outcomes too. They’re worse lovers. They do less foreplay. They complain that their wives aren’t adventurous enough in bed. Teaching millions of people this concept has literally hurt millions of marriages.

But I want today to focus on something else that’s central to the book, and it’s this:

In the every man’s battle world, it’s men themselves who are the victims of their own lust, because men lose their purity. The only time the word “victim” is mentioned in the book is referring to a man being a victim of a woman’s wiles.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t mention sexual assault, sexual abuse, and outright crimes. They just simply ignore the effects of these things on the actual victims, erasing their stories.

To set the stage of the passages I want to share, here are a few Fixed It For Yous I’ve done of one of the authors, Fred Stoeker, ignoring the reality of date rape:

To see more Fixed It for Yous, be sure to follow me on Instagram!

He phrases sexual assault as “pushing against the boundaries of our girlfriends” to obscure what he’s really talking about. He paints it as not actually that bad, because he refuses to think about the experience from the point of view of said girlfriend.

But we see this in even more horrifying ways in Every Man’s Battle itself.

In this passage, we hear a story about a man, presumably in his 30s, married and the father of 3, grooming a 15-year-old girl for rape. Note all the language that he uses to minimize what was done–he talks as if she participated fully, and he was hardly to blame because she was a “knockout” who “looked more like 20.”

We never hear how she feels. Usually in books like this all names are changed, so we can’t identify who it is, but they gave him a name and not her. He is the only one who is personalized here, who we are invited to care about. And what happens?

Kevin jokes with her sexually, dares her to do sexual things, that escalate to having intercourse. He describes this as completely consensual.

But the girl immediately told her parents who now want to press charges. This was rape, on so many levels. It was statutory rape because she was 15; it was unwanted because she immediately told her parents; and it was abuse of power because he was an adult leader at her youth group. This was rape-rape-rape. (All rape is horrific, but I just want to show that they had absolutely no excuse in ignoring the reality of what was happening here).

The book, though, never actually calls him a rapist–just announces in panicked tones that the parents are going to have him charged with rape. It never talks about the harm done to the unnamed girl, just the devastating consequences for him because he got “out of control” and “somehow” had sex with her.

And look how Stoeker and Arterburn frame this whole encounter: it’s in a passage about “lurking at your neighbour’s door”, and going somewhere you shouldn’t be. It frames statutory rape of a minor as the same thing as infidelity with a married friend.

This is absolutely horrifying.

Then there’s this example of “Alex” masturbating to the sight of his sleeping sister-in-law.

This is not merely a “sin.” The authors say that Alex masturbated out in the open to the sight of his sister-in-law. We don’t know the age of this sister-in-law either, but I get the sense she’s likely a teenager (she’s falling asleep on the floor).

I have so many questions about this! How do we know she stayed asleep? I can imagine a girl waking up to hear what he’s doing and pretending to still be asleep!

How do we know this didn’t escalate to anything else? Perhaps I’m just too Canadian for this, but when I hear of a man masturbating to his teen sister-in-law, I just think Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka murdering Karla’s sister Tammy.

But how do they frame this? He participated in “visual gratification” which led to him defiling the marriage bed. So his sin was against his marriage bed, and presumably against his wife. But the sister-in-law? She’s completely absent from the discussion. She was asleep, after all. No need to talk about her! She was just the object.

Rebecca and I talked about these examples in our podcast last week!

The problem is not that these stories are in the books. The problem is how they were told. Let’s take the Kevin story. Here’s how they could have told the same story, in a way that would have actually been helpful:

Consider Kevin, who had so given himself over to objectification of girls and women and his lust that he abused and seriously hurt a young girl under his care.

Kevin deliberately volunteered as a youth group worker in order to get access to the kinds of young girls he fantasized about. He tried to deny this was the case, and portrayed himself as a godly man wanting to help youth, but his actions showed his true motive.

Soon after volunteering he met Cassandra (name changed for privacy reasons), who was only 15 years old. He began grooming her, testing her by teasing her about her boyfriends and her appearance. Cassandra was naive, and respected him because he was in his 30s, and a father of three adorable children. She didn’t know what to do with his behavior, and so she fawned.

One night, Kevin pushed her and raped her. She immediately told her parents, and he was charged with statutory rape of a minor. Instead of dealing with his objectification of teen girls, he groomed a girl for his own pleasure, hurting her terribly in the process, and wounding his own wife and kids too.

That’s not so hard, is it? Just tell the story in an accurate way that puts the blame where it belongs and reminds men who the real victims are. But Arterburn and Stoeker prefer to ignore the effects of their own lust.

The word “victim” rarely appears in their books, and when it does, the man is usually described as a victim of a woman wearing tight clothing or seducing him. In their book for teen boys Every Young Man’s Battle (one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read, far worse than the one for adult men), they narrate multiple date rape examples without ever naming them as date rape.

Arterburn and Stoeker simply can’t be this ignorant. This is willful. These are conscious decisions to never, ever think about the effects of men’s acting out sexually and assaulting women and girls from the women’s and girls’ points of view. What women think and experience is irrelevant; only the men’s experiences matter.

As one commenter said, perhaps the reason they can’t acknowledge it is that to do so means acknowledging that they themselves have been rapists. They prefer to think of themselves as promiscuous, but not as rapists. That seems plausible to me.

Millions of men got their idea of sex and what sexual integrity looked like from reading these books. As many men said on my Facebook page when I published these images, they’re horrified they never saw these problems when they read the books.

But of course they didn’t! They were reading books by “experts” that were published by one of the largest Christian publishers. Editors and publishers had read and okayed these words; Focus on the Family had promoted them. This was the gold standard. Who were they to question it?

And so millions of men were discipled into a sexuality that completely ignored the effects of their behaviour on women.

All that mattered was men staying pure for men’s sake.

After all, lust is the objectification of women and girls—using their bodies for your own gratification, rather than seeing them as whole people.

And what do Arterburn and Stoeker do in the name of fighting lust?

They present women and girls as objects too. They’re not even named. Their experiences and perspectives are ignored. They’re not real people; they’re merely objects of temptation to men.

You can’t fight lust by agreeing with its central premise.

And that’s why these books made everything worse.

I want an apology from Waterbrook/Multnomah (full disclosure: they published one of my older books). I want an apology from Stoeker and Arterburn who, instead of apologizing, have disparaged us and had us threatened behind the scenes (or at least one has). I want them to publicly apologize to evangelical women.

I’m not holding my breath, of course. But it would be so healing. And until that apology comes, we will just have to keep giving examples of how absolutely horrifying their books were, because when people see pics of the actual pages, somehow it hits harder.

• Our write-up of all the problems with Every Man’s Battle

• Our write-up of all the problems with Every Young Man’s Battle (it’s even more horrifying)

• Our book The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, which goes into the effects on men of this teaching

• Our book The Great Sex Rescue, which talks about the effects on women of this teaching

• Does our messaging about lust create lust problems for teen boys?