First Day Response

We were supposed to pick a text that we were interested in. I chose Captivating, which is technically by a woman and her husband, Stasi and John Eldredge, but it specifies who is writing and it’s mostly by a woman and for women, so I figured it worked. It would be hard to sum up the work in a few short sentences. It discusses women’s desire to be beautiful and to be loved and then explores the different ways that women have sought out validation of love and beauty in ways that have led to destruction. It illustrates how women attempt to define themselves in terms of how the world responds to them and the consequential assault that is waged on women’s hearts. It also looks at how men are able to make the problem better and/or worse, and explains some of the effects that destructive searches for love and beauty have on individuals and on society. The point that Stasi ends up making is that only the One who created women’s hearts knows how to fulfill and satisfy them. As far as being “womanly” goes, I think it is and it isn’t. The book is womanly in that it addresses problems that I believe are common to all women, which surprised me and is what ended up getting me to finish the book. To be honest, I stopped reading it after the first five or six chapters because she made it seem like women could just recognize that we were looking for confirmation in the wrong places and could change it easily enough, but I hadn’t found that to be the case. Stasi talks about women feeling bad because they think they overwhelm the men in their lives, and women feeling perpetually lonely for indiscernible reasons. I think that, even though women come from innumerable backgrounds and experiences, she gets at the root of a common struggle – to know that we are loved. At the same time, when I think of something today as “womanly,” I think of the WWII poster with the “We Can Do It!” slogan and the woman showing her bicep. Captivating doesn’t stress equality at all in the terms we think of it today. She explains that women’s hearts were designed to desire love, and that men’s were designed to desire respect; we get both love and respect from the Lord, and we assume complementary roles. That doesn’t mean that Stasi thinks women should stay at home and cook or not play sports, but it does mean that women’s and men’s needs are different. In today’s society, I think that women try to deny their own hearts in order to reach what they perceive to be equality. Stasi publishes a book, which would argue against her being opposed to women’s equality in terms of intelligence or abilities to influence society, but she does represent a position that I think is frowned upon by society at large as old-fashioned and weak, but which I think, if given a chance, both men and women would find more fulfilling.