Evangelical publishers marketed explicit marital sex guides that outsold feminist sex literature

Evidence

In 1968, LaHaye published a guide to marriage with the curious but telling title How to Be Happy Though Married. The book promoted “male headship,” the notion based on New Testament teachings that the husband was “the head of the wife,” that he had authority over her and was responsible for her; for LaHaye, this was particularly relevant in matters of finances. In addition to other more mundane topics, LaHaye included a chapter on “Physical Joys” that contained a helpful glossary of terms (“clitoris,” “vulva area,” “glans penis,” “areas of sexual sensitivity”) and two detailed charts of male and female sexual anatomy. This book was published by the evangelical Tyndale House Publishers two years before the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves, and by 1973 it was already in its sixteenth printing, with more than 300,000 copies in print. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 205

Categorization

• CANDY: A best-selling evangelical sex manual with anatomical charts predating Our Bodies, Ourselves is a great dinner-party fact.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s immodesty article and to William Graham Sumner’s observation about the sexual double standard among the devout; also to the continuity-vs-hypocrisy thesis — the commercial sex guide complicates the image of prudish evangelicals.