(RNS) — Judging from how in demand therapist Jennifer Finlayson-Fife is these days, it seems Mormons really want to talk about sex.
Finlayson-Fife, 58, has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and has built a career of saying the quiet thing out loud. About 90% of her clients come from Mormon backgrounds, as she does herself. She’s an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has successfully navigated a careful tightrope in the straightlaced LDS world, speaking candidly about sex while not offending the orthodox.
Well, not offending them most of the time. Around 15 years ago when she did an event for a local Relief Society (i.e., an all-female LDS audience), one of the women attending wrote a private question for Finlayson-Fife to read aloud and answer for the whole group.
“This person said, ‘I’ve never had an orgasm. What can I do?’” Finlayson-Fife remembered.
She prefaced her response by saying she didn’t think any of the church’s general authorities would agree with her answer, but her advice as a therapist was to come to orgasm alone, at first: “I think you have to take time with yourself and figure your body out.”
She clarified that she wasn’t advising masturbation just so the woman could “go in the basement and look at porn,” but so she could “enter into her relationship more fully.” For this woman to know her own body enough to understand what would give her pleasure would be a gift to the marriage.
One of the audience members didn’t see it that way and told the bishop that Finlayson-Fife was promoting masturbation in church. The bishop then discouraged the Relief Society women from listening to Finlayson-Fife’s advice (though some signed up for her private class anyway).
But that was then, and this is now. Mormon audiences have become more open and frank about sex.
“When I first was teaching, there was so much anxiety in the group when I would talk about desire and pleasure and the clitoris,” Finlayson-Fife said. She’d receive hate mail after teaching in Salt Lake City, with the senders calling her to repentance. Today, she said, the landscape has changed.
“I feel like people are more open to understanding their sexuality, the body. They better understand the challenges of living in a male-led organization, and what kinds of impacts that may have had on them.” While even just saying the word “patriarchy” a decade ago was controversial and she’d have to introduce the topic gingerly, now people in the audience are bringing it up themselves.
Her audiences are growing, both in person and virtually. When I caught up with Finlayson-Fife, or “JFF” as she is affectionately known by fans, it was just before Valentine’s Day. She was on a trip to Utah and had a whole string of live events crammed into her schedule. There was an all-day Art of Desire course for women, a mini-retreat for newlyweds and “nearlyweds,” some couples’ date nights and a book signing for her 2025 book “That We Might Have Joy: Desire, Divinity, and Intimate Love.” Her publisher, Faith Matters, confirmed it has sold more than 5,000 copies since its September release, a stellar number for a book directed to a niche audience. (Disclosure: As a developmental editor, I helped Finlayson-Fife and her publisher in the early stages of this book project.)
Finlayson-Fife spends a lot of time on the road. Though she lives in Chicago, she and her husband also spend time in Florida and Vermont, where her deceased parents used to live. Their three children are now adults. She leads retreats on marriage and sexuality around the U.S. but also in other parts of the world. In April there will be a couples’ tour to Portugal, followed by another to Austria and Switzerland in July.
She’s also taken groups to northern Italy numerous times, where Intermountain West Mormons are confronted with Tuscany’s unapologetic sensuality in art, food and life. (No wine, however.) “Everything about it exists just to please the senses,” Finlayson-Fife explained. The location helps people from conservative religious backgrounds see “the goodness and the joy that we can receive through the body.”
Finlayson-Fife is an active presence online, with nearly 57,000 Instagram followers and 35,000 in her Facebook group.
Then there are the two nearly-weekly podcasts. “Conversations with Dr. Jennifer” is a wide-ranging free podcast about relationships and sex, tackling a broad range of questions from marital communication to desire and overcoming shame. The more targeted “Room for Two” is a subscription-based podcast in which Finlayson-Fife specifically coaches real-life couples about sex and intimacy. Listening to it feels a bit like reading someone else’s mail, or perhaps having someone read yours: These are actual counseling sessions with actual people who’ve agreed to share their stories.
Finlayson-Fife sees Mormons’ greater openness about sexuality and gender as a positive development, and also applauds the church’s recent movement toward teaching kids about using their agency and making wise sexual choices.
“The new For the Strength of Youth manual has definitely evolved and is a lot less fear-based,” she said. “And I think there’s more thoughtfulness around topics like modesty. A decade ago that was often framed as a woman should be careful about what she reveals about her body to help manage men. I’m sure some of those things still get said, but I think there’s more self-awareness in the church around that now.”
She’s noticed that younger Latter-day Saints don’t have the same default obedience to authority her generation was taught back in the day, and for the most part she is glad about that. They don’t see deference to church leaders as an inherent virtue. At her workshops and in reader responses to her book, she’s noticed a generational divide. The book’s early chapters deal with the strict gender roles that the church taught women and men to assume in marriage — roles that are clearly familiar with Gen Xers and older readers who see their own experiences reflected. But, she said, “for younger people, it’s not as clear. I think they got a broader range of messaging, and some of it was healthier.”
She’s not perfectly sanguine about every change that has affected the youngest members of the church. As a therapist and a church member, she’s concerned about Gen Zers’ social isolation and anxiety. “I see people as feeling more isolated and lonely, and having less of a sense of community and cohesion. There are broader forces at work, with congregations feeling more fractured around political lines, and people spending less time together. But definitely, people are feeling less anchored into their communities, and research shows that the happiest people are in real relationships.”
Finlayson-Fife said the most rewarding aspect of her work is in helping people build and save those relationships. And it’s a privilege to do that for Latter-day Saints, who trust her because she shares the principles and the language of their faith. “A lot of people have told me that because I’m in the culture, it helped them to feel safer and to look at what wasn’t working in their marriages. With someone who was external to the community, or too critical of it, they feel like they might lose something precious. But I can give them the best principles of our faith to offer them a way to think about what it is to grow and to repent and deepen their capacity to love,” she said.
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