Wild at Heart

tldr it could be worse.

Here’s a short and unpopular answer to

Griffin Gooch

about Wild at Heart.

John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart was published in 2001. It perfectly coincides with my young adult years, and it was very influential in my circles. The short version of Wild at Heart is this; Men were created for risk, adventure, and beauty. But the world we live in is remote from these things. Most men, therefore, live with a wound at the heart of their identity, or soul- Do I have what it takes? This comes because they aren’t able to exercise the heroic parts of themselves that would help them connect to their purpose. This wound leads to anger and passivity.

Its an attempt to heal anger and passivity, Eldredge seeks to call men back to a heroic ideal of masculinity. I think Eldredge is right that these are two paradigmatic sins of masculinity. I think its good to heal them. I’m all for that, and I don’t think that this necessarily harms women. It may actually be good for women, if we can be wise about it.¹

I also think we tend to do something dumb when we talk about masculinity or femininity. When I wrote, above, “Men were created for risk, adventure, and beauty”; I will most certainly have women responding with “But were women not created for risk, adventure, and beauty?? I love adventure!”.

Please note that this is not what I’m saying. I see Eldredge not as reifying a masculine ideal, but trying to narrate a set of characteristics that define the life of men. For Eldredge, I’d add a materialist critique- which is that our economies have worked to further remove things like adventure and risk from our everyday experience, and that our economies tend to prioritize female-coded skills, like interpersonal dynamics, acuity at reading body language, and highly developed social, emotional, and verbal skills, for success in higher education and the workplace.

Am I saying women are better at words than men? Well, sort of— statistically speaking. But of course, that does not mean every individual example of a woman will beat every man on the verbal portion of the SAT. That is not how statistics work.

Eldredge can certainly be foolishly interpreted. And by all accounts, because its written for a popular audience, its kind of a dumb book! In the wrong hands, Wild at Heart ends up with Man Act Woman respond, cave man style. It can also feed a version of Mark Driscoll’s masculine ideal. But we do not need to dispense with these sorts of narrative types just because they can be overdrawn or abused. In my opinion, the observations at play here are not only abusive caricatures. We just need to think about what they are for.

I am persuaded that our world places people at too far of a remove from the natural world, where values like risk-taking, caregiving, long-term building and repair were built-in goods. Things like bearing children and raising them to maturity were built in, as were the values of caring for the aging and infirm. I think we are overly cerebral, analytical, and obsessed with things like self-improvement, certainty, and the manipulation of our brains, environments, and loved ones. I do think things like masculine and feminine ideals can help to combat these sorts of techno-cratic distortions.

But it’s not just me that thinks that! I have watched approximately 7284908 Disney movies in the last 15 years. I have also made a habit of doing a literature survey around the classic ones; when she was young my daughter and I would check out a dozen classic versions of fairy tales for each Disney Princess-ified version. There is a lot of pushback against the Princess feminine ideal that Disney offers, but the storyline of female in trouble who needs rescue, or strong male who comes to her aid, or suspicious and evil crone who wishes the young maiden harm- these are as old as time, it seems. I didn’t use to understand the latter, but now that I’m approaching crone age, I do understand the ill intent that arises among older women towards younger ones, whose beauty is more obvious and needs no attention. Its a wild ride to be an aging woman, and it can draw out bad behavior from the crone.

In the original fairy tales, women have a bit more agency than in the Disney versions, but the storylines are much, much darker. The violence and darkness that the prince was coming to rescue the princess from was much more threatening, I think. But the fact that she needed help remained. The female protagonist in many of the original fairy tales was usually on her own adventure, but it was often one where poor planning, poor judgment, impulsivity or inexperience landed her in over her head. No comment, on the gender observations here. The fact that a heroic male showed up with brute strength to rescue the female’s poor planning— it’s just a story, perhaps. But perhaps not.

Of all people, I’m the last one to seek to reinstate traditional female ideals. For one thing, I’m poorly suited to them. I’d fail most traditional femininity tests, except the one at manipulation. But just because they don’t describe me perfectly, I’d be foolish to take the heroic legends of hundreds of years as nothing more than accumulated patriarchy. The war between the sexes is as old as the Garden of Eden. Its time we made it fun again. I could even settle for just a little more interesting. Valuing the (perhaps native!) aptitude of men for risk taking and adventure can go a ways in that direction, I think. From where I sit, we could do worse.

1. Though can we be wise about anything these days?