If I had to guess at the book’s central themes, I would wager that they include the following points. And just for the record I’m not arguing against these points here, only guessing what they are and clarifying them.

First; the rules and restrictions and expectations of others are part of the shackles that religion and an oppressive patriarchy put on you to enslave your true power. This is what I like to think of as the “Elsa ethos.” It’s what Elsa sings about in the Frozen movies, especially the second one. It sounds beautiful and brave, but it could also be a supervillain origin song. Throw off the chains holding you back. Embrace your freedom and power.

Second: worship of the self. The self as divine guide. The usual new age psychological spirituality, probably packaged more discreetly and in a more contemporary and progressive way. The supremacy of the inner voice and following your bliss, seeking and creating your identity as the great project of life. othing helps you establish your identity like a rejection of the restrictions placed upon it by society, the patriarchy, religion, etc. I call this the “Raskolnikov ethos,” the heroic divinity of the self.

In a morally relativistic world, the only thing that still has reality and moral meaning is the self. Establishing the heroic self-sufficiency of that identity often requires an act of deliberate casting away of the rules and restrictions the shadow world places upon you. For Raskolnikov that meant murdering someone, casting off the regulation of his aggression, and maybe that is what what a man would think of. Women are more likely to hone in on something less aggressive and violent, but no less symbolic for them. An act of social disruption.

Third, and I’ve already touched on this: the theme of inventing your own meaning. The meaning of who you are or should be or who women are or should be isn’t up to men or religion or society to decide. It’s up to women to decide what it is they want to be and to take what they want and be what they want to be. And the world will be better for it.

I’m not sure women would really be happy to grant this same kind of carte blanche to men. I have a feeling they would like to control and restrain men’s masculine inner wildness quite a bit and are legitimately afraid of the consequences if men did this. But they think women are better, women can do no wrong, and so it’s good if women do it. The important thing is to trust yourself, because women at least (if not all humans) are inherently trustworthy. I suppose you could sum this idea up as the “be yourself, trust yourself” ethos. I’m not entirely sure that it applies to men, though, particularly straight white men, so maybe it should be restricted to “trust women”.

Fourth: another narrative I’m guessing is included but am less certain of is the assertion that “I am worthy, I am good enough, I deserve it”. This is a fairly standard self-help mantra. This, along with several other ideas I already laid out, all fall under the umbrella of believing in yourself. It’s positive self-talk for those who feel ground down by the millstone of the competitive hierarchy. When things go badly and people don’t get what they want or expected, when their status falls or doesn’t seem to measure up, their instinct is to self-indict. This theme is a rejection of that instinct as a false artifact with no real justification behind it.

I call this the “This is me” ethos. I know I deserve your love. There’s nothing I’m not worthy of. No more defeatist or self-critical thinking. You are your only perfect judge. This theme is also tied up with the idea of “my best life”, which is the modern version of “the good life”, adapted for a more postmodern sensibility. It’s not the good life, it’s my best life. It’s not only mine to live and enjoy, it’s mine to judge and determine. It’s subjective; it answers only to my own conscience, not arbitrary and false measures imposed on it from the outside by society. It’s relative; it is my best, not the good, because it is for me to judge relative to myself and my own life and judgements and feelings. It’s relational, my best life for me; not definitional, the good life for humans.

Fifth: a final narrative that I’m just taking a wild swing that it might be included, simply because of its position in the pantheon alongside these others, is some kind of racial narrative about white privilege and the debt that must be paid to enact racial reconciliation. I really can’t imagine how it might connect or fit in. But it’s a key lynchpin of these philosophies, so that you hardly ever see them seperated for long, and so would I guess that it must come in somewhere, somehow.

There’s a predictability to postmodern pop philosophy. There are certain themes that just always seem to go together. This one in particular isn’t simply a comment on the state of the black community or black culture, in particular it’s about the primacy of the need for white people to address their status and their history and their position and their feelings about themselves as a abstract entity. In some ways its not really a story about black people, so much as it is a story of white guilt. It is the “ethos of white guilt.” Educated, prosperous, beourgois white guilt specifically. I suppose LGBTQ could also be made the subject of this particular moral melodrama, it fills a similar role. But either black liberation or LGBTQ liberation is likely to make an appearance somewhere. Both provide an opportunity for criticism and a symbolic rejection of the preceding cultural mileau.

So there, those are my primary predictions about the content of the book. I don’t know exactly how she might explain these themes, these are just five major themes I would expect to form some of the core conclusions of a book called Untamed. I’m sure she brings her points to life in a compelling manner. That isn’t really a positive or a negative for the content, only of the skill of the author. Anything, especially a personal narrative, can be made to sound compelling and engaging. History has taught us that. And the fact that there are other people who seem to like being themselves and find their own stories and lives and beliefs compelling.

So, liberation of personal power (the Elsa ethos), rejection of imposed external restrictions (the Raskolnikov ethos), finding meaning within yourself (self-determination of meaning, the Trust-Yourself, Trust-Women ethos), believing in your own worthiness and the justice of your desires (the This is Me ethos), and (speculatively, I still can’t see where it fits in, I just think it might) the White Guilt ethos. Add all these up, and you get girls gone wild, the good version. An untamed, strong, liberated, self-determining woman.

Now, as far as I can tell, none of this has anything to do with Christianity in the slightest, and is closer to a liberal version of Ayn Rand than anything else that comes to mind. But I have the vague feeling that I’ve heard of the author before and that she has something to do with women and Christianity. And probably she’s the sort of popular writer that many Christian women feel they want to and should be reading, both spiritually deep and culturally hip and progressive. A brief glance at the endorsements on the back made that clear enough. It falls neatly into the kind of new-age, self-help sort of religion that Oprah (and by extension a large section of all American women) adores. Probably it contains a decent amount of scripture recontextualized into a gospel of personal liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. This would all fit well with the current wave of critical theory, Postmodernism, and fourth wave feminism that is being specifically marketed to white, educated women and increasingly to those morally and religiously inclined women who were especially alienated by the election of Donald Trump.

I’m sure the author takes you on a journey inside her soul and her experiences in a way that makes you feel the oppresssion and injustice of her previous state and embraces her emancipation as a triumph of freedom and goodness and positive power. And no doubt there are endless numbers of women out there (as there are men) enslaved to false masters that bleed you slowly dry. So it’s a narrative that will resonate.

Now, why do I assume that these are some of the points the book makes? Well, in part because these are very common narratives and arguments that form the bedrock of the postmodern viewpoint. It’s packaged up nicely for the intended audience, but all the markers are written right on the face of it. I only glanced at the endorsements, maybe read one quarter of the text, and read maybe a third to half of the dust jacket blurb. I feel fairly confident in making these predictions because these aren’t ideas this author invented, they’ve been around for decades in philosophical circles, this is just one woman’s person story of how she came to believe in their gospel and be freed.

And it’s not like these sentiments are even new to philosophy. Postmodernists didn’t really invent their ideas, they just arranged them in a nice new structure. So they’re freely available in the human lexicon and well represented both currently in our culture and historically, if you know how to abstract from the examples to the underlying ideas.

Of course, there’s obviously a lot that’s attractive about liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. Everyone wants that. Everyone is after that. Children seek it instinctually. It is part of the assertion of self against the world that arises as soon as the self can be conceived. The question, why shouldn’t I have and do exactly as I want? Why should I be restrained by the world around me? It is a good question, and not easy to answer. But it isn’t, as parents know, a question without an answer. And to those who might criticize the project of the book as a whole, I would say that, yes, the author probably does need liberation, empowerment, and fulfillment. As do her readers. And for the record, it isn’t only women who feel this way. The feelings and instincts she identifies as being part of the female experience are in fact well established parts of the human experience.

Without giving any detailed response to any of these specific narratives (and personal stories are very hard to argue with because their power lies in the authenticity of the experience, not their status as a coherent interconnected thesis) I would simply say that I don’t actually think these are beliefs that can be effectively universalized into guiding principles upon which to base a life or a society, and that in the long run they do not represent the best way to actually gain the things they promise to secure. All human attempts at a system for guiding our lives tend to be a bit unstable and prone to abuse. And that includes those attempts the authors likely rejects in this book. But I think that the philosophies she is selling are also prone to instability and abuse, in fact they’re remarkably prone to it. And they are dishonest about human nature and the human experience, as well as the deep struggles of the human condition.

I’m very tempted to look up a summary of the book, particularly a list of chapter headings. I could probably figure out the trajectory much better. And there’s no point arguing with someone’s personal experience. Experience is experience. Especially in a relativistic worldview, experience is king. It can’t be argued with. But boiling ideas down to their underlying theses does give you something to work with, as does abstracting from particular events to guiding principles. And since she’s written a book about it that seems to fall somewhere between self helf and memior, I would guess that she tells personal stories and uses them to explore and sell her abstracted principles. The lessons she learned from her experience.

So why, then, was I not able to remain in the room while the book was being read? I guess we all have some limits. I’m all for free exploration. And my wife basically asked me, don’t you trust me? And the real answer is, I don’t even trust myself! If I’ve learned anything from being me, it’s that immersing yourself in any set of ideas or any person’s story sufficiently will inevitably draw you into understanding them and even becoming a bit like them. Especially if they’re very persuasive and the medium has enough existential immediacy, if there’s a sympathy there to build on, or if the proferred viewpoint is sweet enough. And the longer you spend there, the easier it is to let it sweep you up. It takes a lot to keep your head, even for me. And there are some ideas that are so tasty, so seductive, that you can’t really spend much time with them without risking yourself. There are some narratives I have to keep myself away from as a man, as a human, because I know how much they would appease and feed some part of me that I know I can’t fully trust.

One of the problems with responding to any of these narratives is that they’re such fundamentally agreeable positions, that to deny them is to be so inherently disagreeable as to lose all credibility. After all, if I disagree with these narratives, then I must be asserting their opposite. You don’t deserve it, you aren’t worthy, you can’t be trusted, you shouldn’t be empowered or fulfilled, the world isn’t bettered by your finding meaning, Race isn’t a problem. This is where the real brilliance of the polemic shines through. If you can state your position in such a way that any contradiction of it appears obviously wrong, then you’ve won the battle without really having to fight it.

It’s a bit like the brilliance behind naming your organization after something everybody wants and almost no one disagrees with. That way, no one can criticize you without instantly losing their credibility. They’re obligated by the nature of the stated ends to endorse the rightness of your cause. Americans for freedom. People for a better tomorrow. Coloradoans for prosperity. All those sorts of vague names that political action committees have. It makes them sound friendly, because they want the same things you do. And anyone who is against them is evil and is against freedom, prosperity, etc. Black Lives Matter is a perfect example. The name has won the argument before its been had.

Of course at heart BLM, like all those other political action committees, goes beyond the abstract universal things that, frankly, everybody wants and agrees with and actually gets into specific beliefs and arguments about what the state of things is, what the causes are, and how to address them. And like many such entities, the funds they raise don’t go toward some vague “good stuff for black people” fund or “prosperity” fund or “freedom” fund, the money goes to political campaigns and candidates and lobbying, all of which are very specific.

And with BLM, as with all these other movements like Americans for Prosperity, that’s where there can be and is actual disagreement. There might be real relevant data to consider and bring up when it comes to what the state of affairs is, as well as its causes. And there might be considerable disagreement about what the best way is to maje things better or get closer to that desired ultimate shared value. There might be considerable disagreement about who is actually most qualified and likely to secure “freedom” or “prosperity” or a better tomorrow. But political action committees like to use their labeling as a cudgel to force people to accept their facts and explanations and solution a priori, or risk being labeled a malevolent actor who is against the whole project.

And that’s what I don’t like. The false narratives. That simply by expressing your desire to pursue something almost everyone wants, that you’re by definition in the right, and that anyone who disagrees with how you seek it is simply an evil person who doesn’t believe in those things. It creates a very compelling personal narrative, a heroic one. Of the oppressed and virtuous hero, held back by the evil cabal that has down nothing but suppress and oppress them. Oddly enough, this narrative resonates especially well with well-off Americans.

People do want someone to blame that isn’t themselves. And given the choice between believing that there might be something fundamentally difficult and broken about yourself and maybe the whole world, or that there is some conspiracy that is to blame whose elimination would remove all the restrictions and negative feelings and frustration and aimlessness, whose elimination would mean freedom and prosperity and meaning, it’s easy to see which is more compelling. It’s a beautiful story. Heroic. Passionate. Wild and liberated. It’s a rejection of everything that has so disappointed and betrayed us. It’s superhuman. Divine.

But I still think that that is all a matter of positioning and anecdotes and good marketing. The truth is that almost everyone wants those things, even the people we think of as being especially terrible. In fact they might be the best at following some of the personal value narratives I outlined earlier. Stripped of the personal context that, frankly, allows everyone to see themselves as the hero of their story, when you extract the ideas behind them and universalize them and imagine what would actually result from a large, mixed slice of humanity putting them in practice, you start to see the problems. If I were to suggest one possible test for this book and it’s ideas, it would be to go through the whole book, and any place it says the word “women”, substitute “men”. Just gender swap every lesson and moral imperative, so they become broadly inclusive of all humanity. Take away the inherent solidarity of sex prejudice and see if that’s how we think humans in general should think and behave.

And then, if you have the patience, do the same thing again, but this time substitute “children” for “women”. See if that’s really what you would wish upon your kids, to succeed in navigating the world. Then maybe try a different nationality, like, say Russians or North Koreans or Saudis (anyone you’re not especially in sympathy with) and see if that makes any difference in how it reads. The real test for the universality and truth of an idea is trying it out in different circumstances. It’s always easy to vote for a new law when it promises to benefit you personally, but it’s always worth considering how you would feel about it if someone else were making use of its benefits.

My final theory that I would be tempted to hazard a guess at, but can’t really prove unless I actually read the book and find that it does, in fact, contain this particular pack of contemporary philosophical and moral narratives, is that the book consists of the author identifying where her belief systems and structures went wrong (about marriage, womanhood, happiness, success, God, meaning, right and wrong) and failed her, and then ends in her rejection of them and liberation from them.

Now this kind of approach is tricky, because it has some real grounding. You can be 100% correct about something being imperfect, corrupt, poorly formulated, prone to abuse, frequently pathological, and even tyrannical, but still be wrong in rejecting it. Humans, after all, have all these flaws. But the solution isn’t to reject humanity, but to seek the good in them and for them. And there’s a real risk in the kind of naiveté that believes that it was just the system that was wrong, and if you had the right system, or no system, there then everything would be perfect. Such a belief is very persuasive, because it both removes personal responsibility and establishes a clear external wrong to be put right, a negative structure to be torn down. And you can begin by tearing it down in your own life and heart and mind.

Rejecting something that’s gone wrong isn’t the same as curing it, though. And embracing something that’s the opposite of what you had believed (and then rejected) as therefore being perfect and trustworthy and incorruptible is a terribly dangerous road to walk down. Trump, for example, gained much of his current halo of perfection not by virtue of what he was, but by what we was opposed to. It’s an inherent tendency of humans to believe that whatever attacks or destroys or weakens something that has hurt us must therefore be good. And it’s hard to argue with getting exactly what you want and getting back at those who kept you from having it. And that’s the kind of freedom you might want to pass on. At least to those well-off, educated, ethical, successful, agreeable, beourgois people like yourself who will use it mostly to feel better about themselves and alleviate some of their existential guilt.

I have no doubt that Utamed is well written. Although I’m not sure that it needs to be especially well written, the ideas (I’m guessing) it promotes are so hot and so culturally on point and in demand. They speak so clearly to a deep reality within us. It’s not, after all, as if there isn’t a universal frustration with the limitations that the world, religion, society, other people, and even ourselves put on us. Men deal with that frustration more often by aggression. Women tend to have more negative feelings, but find solidarity in agreeableness, compliance, unity, and community. And maybe this author is simply saying women need to move more toward men and be a little more aggressive and predatory and wild and disagreeable. Maybe she feels like she was played for a fool by her husband and by marriage as a whole, and got tired of being the patsy and the better, more patient one and wanted to snatch some happiness for herself. And maybe she feels that way so much that she’s lost sight of both some of the value of the feminine character and some of the pitfalls of the masculine character. But maybe she thinks women will wear it better than men, that in them it will be perfected. And maybe when they have it perfectly and get rid of the ones who make it imperfect, they will be rid of men and rid of the terrible world that the patriarchal, religious, white, tyrannical men built. And the primordial utopia that has been suppressed will dawn again, as society returns to its innate perfection.

And maybe she’s right. I confess, if I were to believe in these narratives, I certainly wouldn’t do good things with them. The harvest they would yield in my soul would not be nearly so benign or glorious. And I don’t say that because I find them unattractive prospects. In fact in the short term I think they would be delightful. Or if I could take for granted that I could enjoy their psychic benefits without having them gradually affect my general behavior, that would be nice. I’m not the worst person in the world, but I certainly wouldn’t trust myself, were I to be possessed by these beliefs. I’m pretty sure I need to be tamed. I’m pretty sure women don’t even really realize how important it is that humanity remain tamed. We let ourselves be tamed by our better seoevs, by our higher callings and reasoning. We didn’t follow our hearts into peace and justice. We had to fight ourselves for it.

The natural state of humanity is not so benign as those who live in affluence and freedom from consequence imagine it to be. You’ve watched too many cozy documentaries and Disney cartoons. The single largest, most successful chimpanzee tribe in the world became what it is by ruthless expansion of territory, war, murder, cannibalism, fratricide, infanticide, kidnapping, and genocide. Even the apes aren’t all sitting around playing pattycake. And you might argue that it’s just the males causing problems there too. But that’s nature. And ants practice slavery and war, and they’re almost exclusively female (but admittedly quite different from us mammals). For the moment, though, at least, nature seems determined to keep producing quite a lot of humans as male (as well as male chimpanzees and bull elk and elephant seals, all of whom have some similar qualities). So how do you fix that problem without “fixing” nature itself?

And that is what I mean by the difference between rejecting something and curing it. Curing something means that you still see the inherent value in something and the way it is supposed to function, and you want to preserve and bring forward that value, not reject it or eliminate it. It is the difference between cancer and diabetes. Cancer is something you need to destroy and eliminate. It has no value as healthy tissue, it merely prevents healthy tissue from functioning. Diabetes is a case of a very important and valuable system not working the way it is meant to, causing disease and distress and even, potentially, death. Cancer is also different because it is separate from the healthy tissues, it’s not a natural or functional part of them; it’s removable. And if you remove it, you cure it and restore health. But you can’t remove diabetes. It’s not separable from the structure of the things whose dysfunction makes up its natural being. It must be restored to function. It cannot be removed.

So the question is, are the things that hurt and limited the author of Untamed cancer or diabetes? Are they removable or dysfunctional? Do they require revolution or resolution? It’s important to know, because misdiagnosis can be dangerous. If you try to stop or remove something that you actually need in its proper function, however sick it might be, you won’t make yourself healthier in the end.

Let’s be honest. Men suck. Religion sucks. Society sucks. The relationship between the sexes sucks. Gender roles suck. Marriage sucks. White people suck. The dominance hierarchy sucks. Rationalism sucks. Laws and restrictions suck. Capitalism sucks. Traditional culture sucks. It’s all one big mess from beginning to end. And it’s also that mess that got us where we are, got us everything we have and enjoy, including the freedom and prosperity to criticize and reject it. And if you bother looking closely you’ll notice that everything else sucks too, even more so in some cases, and usually just as much, but in different ways. Women suck too. And countries other than America aren’t exactly utopia. Neither has socialism been all that was promised. Or lawlessness. Or other religions or atheistic philosophies. Or relationships outside marriage. Or life without men or without women. So just maybe, before we tear it all down and set ourselves free, we should consider into what space we are freeing ourselves. Is the value and greatness of our individual selves really large enough to fill that void? That’s a question people have been asking since Neitzsche. If we eliminate God, are we really great enough and good enough to fill his shoes?

What exactly do women imagine the message of pornography is? I deserve it, I am worthy of it. I should get it exactly what I want. I can have whatever I want. There are no limits, no restrictions. This makes me happy. This gives me what I want. The restrictions placed upon me are unfair and cruel. I shouldn’t be restricted. I shouldn’t have to be ashamed. This is who I am. This is who I’m meant to be. This makes me complete as a person. Let the animal free. Let it run, let it chase, let it have what it hungers for. That is its function.

That is what pornography says to a man. That’s the argument it presents to justify itself. Are you going to tell me that I can’t have what I want but you can? Who made your desires so special? In a relativistic world where your internal judgments and feelings, not the restrictions of others or outside authorities, rule; why are my desires any less good or relevant than yours? Why do you and all these other people who make up oppositional or minority positions get to pursue what you want, but the strong and the majority are supposed to give it up? Doesn’t your empowerment apply to everyone equally? If I want something you don’t approve of, you don’t hold some special right to censor me. That would just be the tyranny of society again, just a different, more ratified (but really now quite common and hegemonic) society. Isn’t my rebellion against your current hegemony just as valid as your rebellion against the previous one?

I have a feeling that the author of Untamed doesn’t approve of pornography. But I don’t really see much difference between these narratives and the narratives that pornography (and a culture of sexual license) whispers to me. I don’t feel like being faithful. I tame myself because women demand it, and because my faith, which I believe has my best interests in mind, demands it. I feel like being unfaithful and having what I want instead absolutely every single damn day of my life.

So what, really is the substantive difference between me sitting and looking at pornography next to my wife, and someone sitting there reading something making rh exact same pitch. I could make the same arguments for why it’s ok for me to watch Game of Thrones or other explicit cable shows. I’m a big boy. I’m an adult. I can be trusted to watch this and enjoy this and immerse myself in this and take the fun stories out of it and not be affected by it, not have it settle into some part of my brain and affect my thoughts and behavior.

And maybe I could handle Game of Thrones. Everyone has their limits. Maybe this is within mine. Maybe I can be trusted to taste a world where the restrictions on my seeing beautiful naked women are lifted just a little and not have it affect my behavior and relationships. Maybe I could handle a lot, actually. Most people seem to think you can just enjoy porn outright and it doesn’t matter. In fact it’s something you really have to take for granted as being normal, even in the majority of Christian relationships.

So why should everyone else get to enjoy a freedom that I don’t? If the real truth is that social and religious restrictions are an unnatural cancerous imposition and we should be free to follow my heart and desires and fulfillment, whatever I believe that to be (not what someone else says they should be), why don’t I get that too? If you’re going to sit there granting yourself that kind of license, you can sure as hell guarantee that I’m going to be wondering why I shouldn’t do exactly the same.

The greatest risk to the postmodern society is the possibility that someone might actually take it seriously and start doing exactly what they thought best and work to seriously remove the cancers that stand in their way. They might actually take literally something that was meant as an exercise in self-therapy, an attempt to remove the ghosts and goblins of an oppressive past. The author of Untamed did something relatively socially acceptable, even praiseworthy in contemporary circles, even praiseworthy in many religious circles. She saw someone across the room, wanted to be with them, divorced her unfaithful husband, broke up her family and marriage to marry her new (female, but that incidental) partner, and lived happily ever after and wrote a book about it.

I’m not even saying that what she did was wrong. It certainly wasn’t wrong by general societal standards. It was maybe even heroic. She’s certainly selling it that way, both figuratively and literally. Her actions were certainly a far cry from acceptable by traditional or religious standards, but as an act of rejection of those standards and the false chains of (that specific) society and religion and as an act of self-empowerment and liberation and the ascention of her own divinity, it was pretty effective.

Still, I wonder how those actions and ideas would look to us coming from someone else, or if the situation, the context, was a little different. How would you feel if your husband or wife used them to justify leaving you? How would you feel if your spouse or your child, rather than you, became untamed? What about your neighbor, or your less than stellar coworker, or that girl you really disliked in high school? That personal story and the way it directs our sympathies has such a large effect on how we interpret what someone says and does and believes.

Elsa’s song “Show Yourself” in Frozen 2 is cute and empowering because it’s Elsa singing it. To reiterate in case you don’t recall, Elsa says that she’s different, that normal rules don’t apply to her, that she needs to embrace her power, and that she is the meaning of her own life. It’s a weirdly aggressive and sexual song, where she discovers that the meaning and quest of her life is herself and the flowering of her identity and power. The whole song is sung to herself, essentially. It’s a love ballad between herself and her empowered and unleashed self. And the moment that unlocks it all is when she realizes that she’s not seeking anything outside her or bigger than her, because there isn’t anything: she was always just looking for herself, and discovers that she’s the biggest, most magical and divine and powerful thing around.

The movies have gone out of their way to make Elsa seem sympathetic and show us she’s the good guy (or girl). She’s adorable, like a giant, slender baby. So the fact that she’s saying the same things that a Nacississtic supervillain would say in their moment of coming into their character just don’t register with us. We can’t recognize the idea outside its context. We just say, well, I know Elsa, she doesn’t mean it like that. She won’t take it that way or that far. And the two thoughts that arise in my mind are, “Yes, but someone else might;” and, “What in the actual content of the idea (not the person or situation it’s embedded in) prevents that?”

There is a covenant and understanding between us humans that we are not all going to do exactly as we please. That we’re going to tame ourselves for the sake of ourselves, and for the sake of each other, for the sake of our being together, and for the sake of what we have determined through wisdom and reason and experience to be good. And if you don’t think men are holding themselves back, if you don’t think women have tamed them, if you don’t think they’ve made some real progress in taming their inner impulses, but still struggle with them, if you think that they’ve done exactly as they want without a thought for others and haven’t resented paying that price, then you don’t know much about men.

Maybe in Untamed the author has some balancing ideals to head off the ideological consequences of the typical postmodern narratives. But I haven’t usually experienced that to be the case. Usually there’s more of an expectation that you’ll trust them and take for granted it will be fine because you trust and believe in the virtue and restraint of the person the message is coming from (even if the message itself contains no such safeguards). Usually people take a fairly extreme position of identifying the structures that failed them or resisted them as a cancer. Usually the natal temptation to embrace self-divinity is pretty hard to resist, once you’ve given up on the major forces that keep it at bay (society, religion, etc). Maybe Untamed doesn’t fall into those traps, but I would be surprised if it avoided them.

I have a very low tolerance for the condensed miasma of postmodern politico-moral-psychological-spirituality. I should be more patient with it, but I saw it coming fifteen years ago in college (a lot of its major elements started gaining broader cultural traction in the 90s but began intellectually long before that) and haven’t learned to like it more now that it’s the default worldview espoused everywhere. I find it to be deeply anti-intellectual. And it runs counter to the received wisdom of the majority of all major cultures across time (which were bought dearly through a process of historical experimentation and selection, a very high stakes and costly empirical process).

Well, I’ve said a lot here about a book I haven’t even read. And that’s probably pretty unfair. Since I didn’t feel like reading it, I suppose my reaction should be judged by how accurately I was able to predict the content and conclusions of the author, if not the specific means by which she arrived at them. Someone once said that you can identify someone who has been ideologically possessed by how accurately you can predict most of what they’re going to say based on just a tiny representative sample. I’ve seen a lot of postmodernism, and this book’s cover flashed the signs and seems to be aiming for that audience, and so I intuit its direction. To be honest, I hope I’m wrong. It’s such a popular book, apparently. And if it is what I think it is, it’s easy to see why.