Popular Christian Blogger Encouraging Marital Rape?

The Transformed Wife responds to accusations of promoting marital rape.

The Transformed Wife, Lori Alexander, responded to the backlash from a video when she told viewers about a wife said she didn’t want sex and then her husband had sex with her in the middle of the night while she was asleep. In the video, she compared ‘providing’ sex to household obligations such as cooking for one’s children, cleaning a toilet or a man going to work. She went on to state that she does not promote marital rape, only teaches women, and that God taught women to not “deprive their husbands of sexual intimacy.”

To Lori, engaging in sexual intercourse despite an absence of desire is an act of love and withdrawing this act will result in a miserable life and marriage. Her reasoning is that God commands women to submit to their husbands as outlined in Ephesians 5:22–24. Lori defines rape as being ‘assaulted by some stranger’ and wanting to call the police as a result of the incident. In addition to this definition of rape, Lori claimed that a woman would not want to call the police on her husband due to him having sex with her in the middle of the night while she was asleep after this woman previously stated that she did not want sex.

She went that a wife can either tell him to wait until the morning or “go along with it and have a great time” if her husband wakes her up with sex out of his “need”. Choosing the latter, to Lori, is “obeying God” and that this surprise sex is where one can “find the blessings”. Going back to the toilet cleaning analogy, Lori compared putting up with unwanted sex to ensure a husband’s happiness to cleaning the toilet so it doesn’t get dirty, the husband working for money, and feeding a baby in the middle of the night. At the beginning of the video, Lori called sex a “sacred cow” that women should treat as a normal household responsibility, but see as an exception due to following one’s feelings rather than God.

To Lori, men are “assaulted by sexuality and scantily clad women” the moment they walk into a public place, which justifies their entitlement to sex with their wife when they want it. Unconsensual marital sex is just one of many ways women can deny themselves and any accusation is a “twisting" of what God considers good. Again, at the end of the video, Lori made another statement about not promoting marital rape.

In a follow-up post titled “No, I do Not Promote Marital Rape", she listed several Bible passages and blamed the “feminist mindset" in “our culture". Regarding the woman who was woken up with unconsensual sex, Lori stated that “no wife should have to experience physical abuse" and that marriage is “consenting with [one’s] husband to give sexual intimacy to each other except for times of prayer and fasting.” Since this woman sought “biblical advice", Lori gave her this advice and encouraged her readers to turn to God for wisdom in relationships rather than secular sources. Lori concluded this post with a statement that one’s body is not their own, but their spouse’s.

One commenter on the blog post agreed with Lori and had a problem with the concept of marital rape in and of itself. Others called this concept an insult to victims of actual rapes and agreed that marriage implies consent to engage in sex, even in the absence of consent and/or desire. However, on the video, several commenters claimed that she did indeed promote marital rape by stating that sex is a wife’s duty to her husband and that she has to have sex with him whether she wants to or not. Another user called Loro a “psycho" and wished that she would not have daughters. In a response video, Mr. Atheist compared nonconsensual marital sex to being expected to clean the toilet with one’s mouth rather than being expected to clean the toilet with the appropriate chemicals and equipment (4:51). However, despite this response, Lori has posted about Mother’s Day and gender equality in the home days after many people responded to her video.