Opus notes that Sheila Gregoire has realized that sex sells:
she has a book or three to sell and with such salacious titles as Thirty One Days to Great Sex, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, and Honey I don’t have a Headache Tonight, you can see that this woman is selling a form of snake-oil and not without success as the second of these is at number 3,559 on [insert name of long south American river] .com. Getting God to give a plug for your book (blurb on dust-cover – ‘I could not put it down’ – God) is surely the ultimate in endorsements.
But this goes beyond mere clever marketing. Gregoire is clearly obsessed with sex, and deeply conflicted about it. When it comes to sex she and her readers have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. You can see this from her books as well as the posts on her blog. There is a great deal of energy on using sex as a weapon, including when, how, and why to deny sex. The other side to this is all of the energy coming from the deep fear that they will overplay this card and as I described in Frigidity and power, lose their power. What if he watches porn, or even Game of Thrones while I’m denying sex? Then my V will lose its power over him! How do I overcome my own frigidity? If I’m frigid, my V has no power!
They’ve turned having sex into a Rube Goldberg contraption. But all of this works because the audience is already there. They already know how to use sex as a weapon, and they already have deep fears that by doing this they risk losing the very power they are trying to wield. They already sensed that misusing sex was making them frigid. Gregoire and her readers can rationalize to themselves that this is all about healthy Christian sexuality, despite the sea of red flags. Many husbands probably foolishly encourage their wives to read Gregoire, based on the promise of fixing their frigid wife.
See also: A Tale of Two Beaches
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