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    The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
    The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
    The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power

    By David Shields

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    About this ebook

    David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint. While unashamedly intellectual, it’s also irresistibly readable and extremely moving. Over five increasingly intimate chapters, Shields probes the contours of his own psyche and marriage, marshalling a chorus of other voices that leaven, deepen, and universalize his experience; his goal is nothing less than a deconstruction of eros and conventional masculinity. Masterfully woven throughout is an unmistakable and surprisingly tender cri de coeur to his wife. The risk and vulnerability on display are in the service of radical candor, acerbic wit, real emotion, and profound insight—exactly what we’ve come to expect from Shields, who, in an open invitation to the reader, leaves everything on the page.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio State University Press
    Release dateFeb 25, 2019
    ISBN9780814277164
    The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
    Author

    David Shields

    David Shields is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead; Reality Hunger, named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications; and Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

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      Book preview

      The Trouble with Men - David Shields

      Michels

       I 

      LET’S SAY

      I’M WRITING

      A LOVE LETTER

      TO YOU

      Many years ago I read, with deepening fervor, installments of my graduate student Michael Jarmer’s novel about a foot fetishist, who says, I turned the volume all the way down so I could concentrate on the images before me: the shoes holding the squirming victim down, the heels threatening harm, the feet disrobed, deshoed, desocked, destockinged, the foot in the mouth, both naked feet in the groin, the cum shot between the toes, the whole nine yards. Feet have never been my thing, but reading Michael’s manuscript ignited something in me. I would think it would be somewhat analogous to realizing, midway through one’s life, that one is gay.

      In dozens of complex, various, and subtle ways, you seem to me, subtly, sadistic; I am, perhaps not quite so subtly, masochistic. This tinge is there as an undercurrent—an odd, unspoken tug—in our relationship (in our sexual relationship in particular). It’s there as a shadow of something strange and mysterious and deep.

      *

      This book aims to be a short, intensive immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy.

      How did I get this way? What is this way? Our marriage involving this way. Attempt to stop being this way. Implications of being this way.

      Or: What is it like to be this way? How did I get this way? What is it like for you that I’m this way? Can I live with being this way? Can I stop being this way?

      Or: Hamartia; childhood; marital strife; irreparable damage; ah, but we are all like this.

      Or: The nature of; the sources of; our marriage involving; my attempts to rid myself of; a partial defense of.

      Or: Human history of; psychic sources of; our marriage involving; attempt to eliminate and/or suppress and/or attempt to disentangle from (and/or affirm?); psychological/philosophical implications of, etc.

      Or: How 1) one is wounded; 2) one tries to overcome these wounds; 3) these wounds become the very theater of one’s self; 4) one despairs that one will ever overcome those wounds, and these wounds lead one to anger/violence; and 5) finally, we connect to other people by realizing we are all wounded (this is our scar tissue and our glue, etc.).

      Or: The nature of masochism. The origins of masochism. Our marriage involving masochism. Attempt to surmount masochism. A philosophy (and/or a psychology?) of masochism.

      Or: Acknowledgment of my masochistic tendencies. Biological, psychological, and philosophical sources. Manifestation in our marriage. The sense that all there is in the author’s life/heart is suffering. The sense that, for all human beings, existence is suffering.

      Or: On Being One’s Own Bitch.

      *

      Perhaps the real subject is my willingness, or at least desire/impulse, to write this book, to risk our marriage—

      Do I love you?

      Do you love me?

      What kind of marriage do we want?

      How real?

      Or: Do you like me?

      Do you care about me?

      Or: Are you in love with me?

      Do you like making love with me?

      Do you love making love with me?

      (Don’t answer.)

      *

      The agon, then: [Lawrence Durrell]

      What is it then between us? [Walt

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