Professor J,
And an indulgence well deserved I'm sure. Since you say that it's rare, my copy of Fast Food Nation and I will stand down. :)
Margaret Mead once said “Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.” and society (and the women's movement in particular) has been treating, not just fathers, but all men like that ever since. How rapidly we went from Father Knows Best to Dad is Incompetent, Goofy and Can't be Trusted With Anything Important as a sitcom staple. Who can blame men for alternately being angry, and doing the easy thing which is to play to the low expectations of society? Deep inside, a man knowing he is meant for so much more than what we tell him we want from him now, is going to die a little. The lack of respect he is getting from the culture and from the woman in his life (because she is being sent a whole bag of mixed messages and no longer knows what she wants) is killing him a little more day by day and hoping perhaps he won't notice.
Now personally, I've always maintained that if I had a man I could control I wouldn't want him. Early in my marriage I made the odd attempt (generally encouraged by other females) but soon found that it expended heaps of emotional and mental energy and when it worked, well...it didn't make either of us very happy. Coercion associated with love is something I don't get, especially if it is liable to have long term negative effects. Twenty-seven years on I think we would both say that allowing the other person to be their authentic self is one of the greatest demonstrations of love and respect.
I thought Eldredge did an excellent job of laying out some of the struggles of women in all of this, which he and his wife later more fully address in the book, Captivating which caused no end of controversy among some in the Christian community. While there are exceptions to all the generalizations he lays out in both books, I do think he's on to something.
The anger many men feel and which you so eloquently describe is often matched in women by an unspoken, unnamed, longing for the intimacy and adventure from the quote in my previous post. We have tamed and domesticated our boys/men and when we have what we think we want (what modern society has told us we SHOULD want, namely a man we can control) we see a James Bond film and leave the theater wondering where THAT kind of man is (apparently Bond is the standard of desirable masculinity for both sides lol).
And why is it that if a real man is what a woman wants, that we spend so much time trying to manage him and make him over into something less than that? It's because we need that dangerousness and wildness to be good the way it is in a man who is fighting for something he believes in, defending the weak, or dispensing justice. Modern women are used to things being sanitized, safe, predictable. We've so removed ourselves from any sort of danger or risk that we often fail to see the beauty in the uncontrollable. We fear that wild, dangerous, and uncontrollable are synonymous with bad. It is a lack of trust. We do not trust that males in our lives, given the freedom to be who they need to be, are capable of using that strength and power for good. Isn't that what the book is really about -- giving men the freedom to go about the business of being who they were created to be and using all that wildness and fierceness for good?
What did you think of his assertion that many males choose females who don't challenge them much as men?
On a semi related note: A reader has asked if colleges are doing enough to even the playing field (in testing for instance) for males. It seems like the entire framework of education is suited more to girls who can sit quietly for long periods of time, a quality which educators value. Are our boys losing out at the college level and is the system (based so strongly on standardized testing) skewed in the favor of girls?
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