Honestly: We Need Your Help.

I can’t tell you enough how your emails and comments of encouragement have kept us going this last year as we worked on The Great Sex Rescue!

It was a heavy project to do–but I hope and trust that the result is a book that is actually healing and hopeful! And that certainly is the feedback that we’ve been getting.

Normally I speak a lot in a given year, but this year with COVID I haven’t. And that means that I haven’t had the chance to meet readers face to face and to hear your stories and how much this blog and the Bare Marriage podcast has meant to you. Not great timing–to miss out on that personal encouragement just as we embarked on a hugely draining but important project!

Now that the book is out, we have some great plans to take our research even further.

One of our big goals for The Great Sex Rescue is that we set a new standard for research in the Christian world. Our Bare Marriage project, which was the basis for The Great Sex Rescue, surveyed over 20,000 predominantly Christian women, asking a minimum of 130 questions (some had more depending on their answers). And then Joanna performed some pretty nifty statistical analysis so that we could compare groups and tease out important findings.

We have so much data that we’d like to take it further. We’d like to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and we’d love for this to be Joanna’s main job for the next few years. We have data galore; now we need to get it into academic journals so that other researchers can use it in their research.

This is what SHOULD have been the model for research in the evangelical world all along, rather than poorly done survey questions. We should do things so well that it survives academic scrutiny.

Normally, writing papers for academic journals is paid for by either being a graduate student with grant funding or by being a professor with a salary.

We are none of those things (though we are pursuing several partnerships with key universities that do have grant funding!). Ideally Joanna would one day like to get her Ph.D., but right now she’s literally living in the Canadian arctic with two babies, and that’s not feasible.

So we have no way of paying Joanna to do this necessary work.

We also want to branch out of this blog and podcast and allow Rebecca to pursue other social media that tells the story of our research in a more millennial way.

We have great plans for a YouTube channel, and for TikTok, and for some cool stuff on Instagram, but none of that is monetized, and it will be hard to monetize it in the short term.

My blog and podcast are fully funded, mostly with sales from my courses. But I can’t pay Rebecca for time to do things that don’t immediately make money.

The Great Sex Rescue authors before Joanna moved up to the Arctic!

We have this big message we’d like to get out there, and no real way to monetize it.And so we’ve decided to launch a Patreon program.

People can give just a little bit a month–say $5 or $8–and that will help us fund what we’d like to do. That gives people access to a private Facebook group which we’re hoping will be quite active, and private group chats with us and an unfiltered podcast, where Rebecca doesn’t have all her snarkiness edited out by her sister (as happens with the normal podcast when Katie thinks Becca crossed a line).

At higher levels you can get autographed books every year and even merchandise we’re having designed!

But the big thing is that you’ll be helping us.

Hundreds of hours go into writing a peer-reviewed journal article.

We’re starting with getting our rubric of healthy sexuality, and a report card of evangelical teaching on sex, published, and then we want to move on to our ground-breaking research on the causes of vaginismus, coming up with screening tools that pelvic floor physiotherapists can use in treatment. We have so much to share about this problem, and we’d love to take it further.

If you’d like to partner with us, check out our patreon! It’s an awesome platform where you can give whatever you want a month to your favourite creators, and then get “rewards” or get a little more up close and personal with the people you want to support. When everyone gives even a small amount, it adds up!

Yes! I’d like to support your Patreon program! Take me to it! We want to change the whole evangelical conversation about sex, and for that we need some help.

We’ve already reached our first goal of getting the statistics and survey programs paid for on a monthly basis so it’s not out of pocket. Now we’re working on our second goal of getting enough funding to publish one research paper a year. That will soon be covered, and then we’d like to go bigger.

Will you join us? 

Remember–we need your reviews on Amazon, too!

Here’s another very simple thing you could do to help us–leave a rating and a quick review if you’ve read The Great Sex Rescue (or any of my books!). You wouldn’t believe how much this helps us! Amazon and Goodreads are the big sites where we could use it, but anywhere you bought the book is fine!

The Patreon doesn’t fund this blog.

In fact, it doesn’t fund Sheila at all (though we are hoping to take some money once we reach more goals and work at transcribing the podcast and maybe translating some of the blog into other languages). But the money really doesn’t go to me; it goes to getting our message out in ways that we can’t monetize.

So nothing here will change, whether the Patreon is funded or not. The big thing is that we want to get in different channels; we want to get more academic, and we want to reach millennials more. If you can help us, we’d so appreciate it.

The conversation is changing, and we’re so glad that you’re here with us for the ride!

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum

Sheila has been married to Keith for 28 years, and happily married for 25! (It took a while to adjust). She’s also an award-winning author of 8 books, including The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila is passionate about changing the evangelical conversation about sex and marriage to line up with kingdom principles. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts How to Reclaim Sex and Not Make it Ugly

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