A recent article in the Deseret News by Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox, titled, “The truth about conservatives and sex,” argues that “the surest path to a good sex life runs through the altar, not away from it, and time spent online does little to foster intimacy.” The article begins by describing sex as an expression of love, intimacy, and human connection. That’s a reasonable description of what sex can be. But then, perhaps predictably, given the authors’ longstanding emphasis on marriage and religious commitment as indicators of social well-being, they rely primarily on sexual frequency as a measure of sexual flourishing. Consider what they report:

Married women reporting sex at least weekly

Conservative wives

55%

Liberal wives

45%

(2022 State of Our Unions Survey, as reported by Baer and Wilcox).

The authors have evidence about how often women have sex. They have considerably less evidence about what that sex means to the women having it. The ten-percentage-point difference is not a measure of sexual satisfaction. It establishes a reported difference in frequency. It does not establish that conservative women experience better sex.

The authors provide no corresponding comparison of:

• Sexual desire and whether sex is mutually wanted.
• Orgasm and physical pleasure.
• Women’s ability to decline sex without negative consequences.
• Whether partners’ sexual needs are treated as equally important.
• Sexual satisfaction independent of frequency.

These distinctions are particularly important in religious marriages where sexual activity may carry expectations of duty, sacrifice, or accommodation. A woman who has sex twice weekly because she genuinely desires it and finds it pleasurable is having a fundamentally different experience from a woman who has sex twice weekly to avoid conflict, disappointment, or accusations of failing her husband. Yet both women are counted identically in this data.

Notably, frequency does not tell us what the authors appear to want it to tell us. And that matters enormously when their conclusion is that conservative religious marriage offers a superior pathway to sexual flourishing.

The evidence and the conclusions are not the same thing

Reported evidence	What it can reasonably establish	What it cannot establish
Religious married couples report more frequent sex	Religious participation is associated with frequency	That religion produces greater sexual satisfaction
Conservative wives report more weekly sex than liberal wives	An ideological difference in reported behavior	That conservative wives experience more sexual pleasure
Married, sexually active adults report greater happiness	Marriage, sexual activity, and happiness are associated	That having more sex or getting married caused the happiness
Liberals report more social media use	A difference in media habits	That online criticism of men causes less marital sex
Pornography use is associated with poorer relationship outcomes	A potentially important relationship risk	That pornography explains the ideological sex-frequency gap

The distinction matters because the authors move between these claims with relatively little attention to the evidentiary gaps. The most revealing methodological issue may be the comparison of happiness. Baer and Wilcox report that married men having regular sex are almost four times as likely to be very happy as unmarried men having little or no sex. They report a roughly threefold difference for women.

But let’s look at the comparison: They’re not comparing married people who have frequent sex with otherwise similar married people who have infrequent sex. They’re comparing people who differ in at least two major respects simultaneously: marital status and sexual frequency.

Those groups may also differ in income, health, age, relationship stability, social support, and other characteristics associated with happiness. Their comparison cannot responsibly isolate the contribution of sex. Furthermore, the causal direction is also unresolved: Sex might contribute to happiness, happiness might contribute to more sex, or a satisfying relationship might contribute to both. More importantly, a population-level association between marriage and happiness cannot determine whether a particular woman’s marriage is good for her

All three are plausible. But there is also a subtler problem: The authors cite research associating sexual frequency with happiness as though it answers the question of whether women would be better off remaining in their marriages rather than seeking different relationships. It does not. A population-level association between marriage and happiness cannot determine whether a particular woman’s marriage is good for her.

Religious sexual formation is a major omitted variable

The authors acknowledge that religiosity appears to explain much of the ideological difference in sexual frequency. But their explanation focuses on religion’s potential benefits: commitment, community, and marital stability. Those are plausible mechanisms. However, religious teachings can also influence sexual behavior through normative expectations, including the belief that wives should provide sex, that refusing sex is selfish, or that a good wife accommodates her husband’s sexual desires. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Religious communities could simultaneously support more frequent mutually satisfying sex for some couples and encourage unwanted sexual accommodation for others. Without measuring those experiences, the authors cannot determine the relative contributions.

This raises a question central to understanding religious sexual formation:

Are religious women having more sex because their marriages are more sexually fulfilling, or because they have been taught that being a good wife includes making themselves sexually available? It would be a mistake to assume the second explanation. But it is equally mistaken to assume the first. The research as presented does not adjudicate between them. And that is a significant omission in an article specifically celebrating religious marital sexuality.

Women’s critical consciousness is treated as a potential obstacle to intimacy

This is where the article becomes particularly interesting ideologically. Baer and Wilcox cite findings that Democratic women are more likely to identify men as contributors to women’s social difficulties. They connect this with what they characterize as increasing anti-male attitudes, social media exposure, and diminished confidence in marriage.

But these are not equivalent concepts. Recognizing that men disproportionately occupy positions of institutional power, or that gender inequality has material consequences for women, is not inherently hostility toward men. The authors do not establish that women’s recognition of inequality causes diminished sexual intimacy.

Consider an alternative explanation:

A woman becomes more aware of unequal domestic labor, sexual expectations, or patterns of entitlement within her marriage. She begins questioning arrangements she previously accepted as normal. Her willingness to participate in sex that primarily accommodates her husband’s desires declines.

Under the article’s framework, that could register as a deterioration in marital intimacy. Under another framework, it might represent increased sexual agency. And in still another case, greater awareness might improve intimacy by prompting a couple to renegotiate their relationship. The critical question is whether a reduction in sexual frequency necessarily represents a loss of something valuable, or whether it can sometimes represent a refusal to continue something inequitable, unsatisfying and potentially even harmful. That possibility is almost entirely missing from the authors’ interpretation.

The statistical difference between husbands and wives deserves scrutiny

The authors explicitly acknowledge that the ideological difference in frequency among husbands is not statistically significant in either of the two surveys they discuss. Yet the difference among wives becomes a central element of their argument. This doesn’t automatically invalidate the findings. Different samples, sampling variation, and differences in statistical power can produce different results.

But two points deserve attention: First, a statistically significant difference among wives and a nonsignificant difference among husbands does not, by itself, establish that the ideological association genuinely differs by gender. That requires testing the difference between the two estimated effects.

Second, because these are heterosexual married populations, it would be useful to know whether the studies measure both spouses in the same marriages or survey individuals separately. Individual reports of marital frequency can differ, and separate samples need not have identical ideological compositions. The article doesn’t provide sufficient methodological information to resolve these questions. It is important to examine the original survey tables, weighting, sample sizes within ideological groups, controls, and confidence intervals before treating the wife-specific finding as particularly meaningful.

What I find most significant: the moral framework remains invisible

The article’s closing argument is that couples should spend less time online, invest in real relationships, and prioritize intimacy. There is nothing inherently objectionable about those recommendations. But consider the questions the authors never really ask:

• What if women’s reduced willingness to have sex reflects a legitimate dissatisfaction with the sexual arrangements available to them?
• What if conservative religious women report more frequent sex while experiencing less autonomy over whether, when, and how that sex occurs?
• What if women who become more critical of marriage are responding to genuine inequalities within society and their relationships rather than being misled by social media?

These possibilities would not prove the authors wrong about the benefits of marriage or religious participation. They would, however, require a more sophisticated understanding of sexual flourishing. The article operates within a framework in which more marriage, more marital sex, and greater religious commitment are generally treated as indicators of social health.

Women’s sexual agency is not an organizing principle of the analysis. That is especially consequential because the research is being used not merely to describe differences between populations, but to suggest how people ought to live.

What should we also be investigating?

Instead of asking whether conservative religious women have more sex than liberal women:

• Do women in conservative religious marriages experience the same degree of sexual autonomy, mutual pleasure, and freedom from unwanted sexual accommodation as women in other marriages?
• How do those outcomes relate to frequency, marital satisfaction, religious beliefs, and gender-role expectations?

That could produce some genuinely interesting findings. Religious marriages can provide meaningful protective benefits. But religious teachings and expectations can also contribute to harmful marital dynamics. This complexity is reflected in research by research from BYU by Dr. Chelom Leavitt and colleagues examining 198 religious couples from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish backgrounds. They found both beneficial and potentially damaging religious influences on sexuality and emphasized the importance of how couples interpret and apply their beliefs.

As another counterpoint to Baer and Wilcox, Sheila Wray Gregoire and colleagues at Bare Marriage have examined how religious teachings about sex, gender roles, obligation, and marital intimacy relate to women’s sexual experiences. Rather than simply asking whether religious couples have sex more frequently, their work investigates which beliefs and practices are associated with greater sexual satisfaction, mutuality, and well-being—and which are associated with harm. That’s much more useful if the goal is strengthening marriages and families rather than defending a particular cultural model of marriage.

Studies from Bare Marriage include more than 20,000 women in the original Great Sex Rescue research, approximately 3,000 men in a subsequent survey, and a later matched-pair marriage survey in which both spouses participated. Matched pair surveys can give us particularly valuable information.

Research from Bare Marriage found:

Men regularly reaching orgasm

95.1%

Women regularly reaching orgasm

48%

They also report that women endorsing an obligation-sex message were 37% more likely to experience primary sexual pain and 29% more likely not to reliably orgasm. These are associations, not proof of causation. These findings are directly relevant to the claims Baer and Wilcox are making. A higher frequency of sex is not, by itself, evidence of a healthier sexual relationship, especially if the sexual experiences of husbands and wives differ substantially.

Bare Marriage’s research also has limitations. Its original survey used nonprobability snowball sampling, so its large sample is not nationally representative. However, the researchers used established measures of marital and sexual satisfaction, and by May 2026, the team produced three peer-reviewed publications with another in process.

In April 2025, Bare Marriage published an article titled Should You Prioritize Sex? Why Frequency Is the Wrong Measure. I highly recommend it.  Gregoire challenges prioritizing frequency over the conditions that make sex mutually desirable and satisfying. An important difference between Bare Marriage’s matched-couple research and Baer and Wilcox’s research is an examination of how one spouse’s beliefs affect the other spouse’s marital satisfaction, including beliefs about entitlement and unequal domestic responsibility.

Simply including women’s responses in a survey doesn’t give us the whole picture. We need to recognize that one person’s marital satisfaction may be sustained partly through arrangements that impose costs on the other person. A marriage can be stable, sexually active, and highly satisfying to one spouse while being exploitative to the other.

Religious commitment and sexual frequency alone tell us too little about the quality of a marriage. We need to examine how religious beliefs are interpreted, taught, and enacted within intimate relationships. If our goal is genuinely healthy marriages and families, rigorous scholarship requires us to critically examine our assumptions, consider alternative explanations, and resist mistaking findings that affirm our ideological commitments for evidence that those arrangements actually serve the well-being of everyone involved.