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

By David Shields

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780814276761

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.

Reviews for The Trouble with Men

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

It is; that description says it all, albeit true via a stream-of-consciousness string of pearls, mostly in the shape of quotes from a bunch of notables. However, the author's details are what's most interesting to me.

There are loads of notes on the title, such as this one:

Aristotle’s theory of dramatic structure (introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement) is nothing more or less than a diagram of the sexual act. It doesn’t mean the theory’s true, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It just means sex is everything.

Seeing how men seldom reveal their emotions to each other—and, a lot of the time, to themselves—this book reveals insight into the mental activities, proclivities, and thoughts, as strained through the author's mind.

I’m riveted when people are forced to yield to the demands of war: the moment in Hearts and Minds when two US soldiers, fondling their Vietnamese prostitutes, survey the centerfolds taped to the mirrored walls and (for the benefit of the camera) try to imitate heroic masculinity.

You’re frightened that you’re going to see yourself there. Or that you’re going to find out what your husband/dad/ lover/friend thinks about you that’s different from what you think about yourself. Or that you’re going to find out something about your spouse/child/parent you don’t want to know. Or worst of all that you’re going to like it. [Sallie Tisdale]

Alfred Hitchcock (whose mother would force him to stand at the foot of his bed for several hours as punishment) and cold, regal blondes.

Bernie Madoff ’s mistress has a new book out detailing her affair with everyone’s most hated financial advisor. She notes that he has a small penis, and while that didn’t seem to inhibit their sexual pleasure, she mentions it partially, I assume, in revenge for his treatment (emotional and financial) of her, and partly because she thinks it may somewhat explain his personality. Did Madoff ’s grandiosity emanate at all as compensation for his small penis? Did he know that his wealth would help women overlook the fact that he was underendowed? She seems to think so. Or was he naturally arrogant, insidious, and pathologically unconcerned with the welfare of others? Would he have behaved exactly as he did if he had a very large penis? [Pepper Schwartz]

In short, there are a lot of mini-stories strewn throughout this book, and it's not really provocative, and neither is it sensational, but it is interesting. I like delving into these minds, going for the small payoffs. And they're not small in the sense that I didn't spend time thinking about them, but I did, which is the thing; curt paragraphs, tautly presented, nicely stringed together in chapters that really made sense. I highly recommend reading this book.

We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn. [Michel de Montaigne]