David Shields: Men Should Acknowledge Their Brokenness

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon showing two men seated at a bar and one is saying to the other, “I’ve always been attracted to warm, beautiful women which, I think, says something about me.” It suggests that the objects of our desires also reflect our true, and in some cases, baser, selves.

It also says something about David Shields’s latest offering, The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power; its aim, Shields states at the book’s beginning, is to be a “short intensive immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy.” The exploration takes the form of a letter to his wife, whom he addresses as “you,” and whose profound, at times crippling, effect on Shields casts light on his marriage’s (indeed all marriages’) destructive and self-destructive ways of setting up house. “I’m married to someone,” he writes, “who either has nothing or wants nothing, rendering me in possession of nothing.” His hope, a putative goal, is to either resuscitate his marriage or memorialize its end.

Shields does all this using his trademark technique of appropriating and collaging text from other writers, including himself, andthe reader includeda part of everything else. Which is both sobering and electrifying.