WAH Criticisms Part 1

Ah, Madame M! No implication was implied as to overall qualifications to answer anything, only that my gender put me at a disadvantage in critiquing that part of Eldredge’s book. While I can frequently be arrogant and in need of the humble stick, in this case, it was only my lack of care in phrasing!

Interesting insights and views into the female psyche/emotions! And a rather scathing indictment of men’s selfish or thoughtless attitudes about matters of central importance to women; I offer no meaningful disagreement here, as it seems far too often the case just as you have laid it out!

Please expound just a bit, if you would, on what you mean by sacrificially.

Ah, think of the progress of the human condition if more people of both genders would love others and be loved for who they are! Those questions women ask verbally and nonverbally might decrease significantly in frequency too. If more of the human race can become spiritually sophisticated as you have well described, we will have taken a colossal step forward in the human condition!

Now for the Eldredge criticisms:

John Eldredge and I are not going to agree on a fair number of things. :)

To see nearly everything in this world, as he does, as Satan-tainted—well, I disagree strongly, for a lot of reasons, one of them rejecting this Biblical passage inference (an inference itself loaded with questionables) that God abdicates the world to the whims of an evil being. And what would be the point anyway?

Eldredge needlessly overreaches with blanket statements:
Blanket statement 1A: “Masturbation IS sabotage.” Leaving aside for the moment many other considerations of this statement, the needless overreach comes from not using "CAN BE."

Or Blanket statement 1B: “He could be a lustful man, but he’s not.” Inferring that biological desire MAKES a man something terrible, and that not being this way doesn’t. Just the categorization invites tremendous disagreement.

His fixation with this interpretation of sexuality is more indicative of his own personal wrestling WITHIN the twin channeling poles of religious interpretation and American historical cultural legacies. Good heavens, we Americans have done enough sexual damage to our psyche by making evil too many natural things. We demonize biological sexuality and the desire to non-conform to social-religious constructs. So Eldredge gets no agreement on this from me. Seems to me he sometimes has his own issues he is projecting to all.

Or Blanket statement 2, that women ONLY desire men strongly because they are missing a father’s affection: This is a rather narrow view of female sexuality. Almost sounds like something one of the more female-repressive societies of the world might say! This view--that all women who have no father-substitute issues have thence somehow escaped strong biological desire--is demonstrably false.

His assertion about being accountable: While accountable to another man is a good concept that can be useful in many things, the underlying premise can backfire and perpetuate an already dismissive view of the American male found in, as you have stated, too many TV programs and other things. The idea that all men are supremely foolish sinners who have to have someone guard them from their foolishness, is more self-defeating perpetuation. The same presumption that men are so “bad” and so lustful they must guard each other, also is prevalent throughout our society. It’s a sick and self-defeating way to think. For instance, in the military, the sexual assault prevention and response program, while laudable on the surface, goes beyond basic awareness and prevention and makes this premise of “bad men” an underlying message to our men (and women) in uniform. Not only are most men not like what this generated fear is creating, but it is emasculating them in the process by insinuating this message that they can’t be trusted, that they are animals, that they have to watch each other. When it doesn’t emasculate, this sentiment a little too often further isolates, angers, and creates self-loathing in the already tetherless, mentor-less, American male, so that when all that does burst through on some individuals, it helps create the very sexual violence the program is supposedly trying to prevent!

And once again, denying basic biological reality, or worse, twisting it into something “evil,” does more unnecessary damage. Too often, our social-religious human constructs try to make human nature something it isn’t. Such efforts, because they deny reality, usually fail destructively.

So, like many Christian moralizers of one sort or another, Eldredge has a fixation on sexual “wrong.” Like many, he cannot come to grips with the fact that sometimes there is no desire beneath the desire. Sometimes desire is all there is, and, is in fact, perfectly natural (now, whether the consummation of that desire is one of weal is a bit more variable!).

Eldredge makes a supposition that all men are explorer personalities in large measure. Not so. While I may be, and many are, some are more social intensive, others more reserved, others more stay around home, others more quietly analytical, etc. As for his probable counter-assertion that all really WANT to be explorers, I am going to ponder that one a bit!