For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men
Reviewed date: 2025 Feb 5
228 pages
I read the first edition of the book published in 2004, not the revised edition published in 2013.
Thumbs down.
It relies heavily on stereotypes about men and women. It has a demeaning view of men, portraying them as creatures unable to control their sexual and lustful thoughts when confronted with something as dangerous as a woman entering their field of view. It's not true! Lust is not a constant struggle or an everyday battle.
Shaunti Feldhahn's big draw is that her book is backed up by research in the form of a survey. The problem is her survey questions are poorly worded: some of them are double-barrelled questions that even her survey-design expert warned her would yield bad results. She proudly admits this fact in the book. E.g., this question:
Think about what these two negative experiences would be like: to feel alone and unloved in the world OR to feel inadequate and disrespected by everyone. If you were forced to choose one, which would you prefer? Would you rather feel...?
- Alone and Unloved
- Inadequate and Disrespected
You can't conclude anything from that question, because it has four options but only breaks them down into two categories. And also, she only asked the men—she didn't compare the results from the men's answers to what women would have answered. And yet she concludes from her results that this reveals a difference between men and women: that women want love and men want respect.
Other questions have a list of possible answers that are designed to get the result she wants. E.g., this question:
Imagine you are sitting alone in a train station and a woman with a great body walks in and stands in a nearby line. What is your reaction to the woman? [Choose One Answer]
- I openly stare at her, and drool forms on my lower lip.
- I'm drawn to look at her, and I sneak a peek or glance at her from the corner of my eye.
- It is impossible not to be aware that she is there, but I try to stop myself from looking.
- Nothing happens; it doesn't affect me.
Drool? Seriously? And with the range of possible answers that Feldhahn gives, she's assuming that anything other than "Nothing happens; it doesn't affect me" is a "can't not be attracted" response, which she uses to conclude that hey, men are hardwired to want to ogle pretty women. But she doesn't give an option for noticing the presence of the woman without wanting to stare or ogle. It's either notice and want to stare, or don't even notice. But if you are sitting in a train station and another human being walks in, unless you are blind you will notice. The question even presupposes that you notice—otherwise how would you know she is a woman and not a man? It's impossible for this question to not give her the result she wants: that men are incapable of not wanting to stare at pretty women.
And then there's this question, where she gets a result but draws a conclusion about something that the question doesn't ask:
Many men have a mental set of sensual images that rise up or can be conjured up in their minds. Does this apply to you?In total, 87 percent of men say these images pop up in their heads.
- 62% - Yes, and these images are regularly changing; for example, the great body I just saw in the train station could be recalled hours or days later
- 25% - Yes, they are mostly images from years gone by
- 13% - No, I don't have a mental set of sensual images
The conclusion she draws is not what the survey results indicate. The survey result indicates that 87% of men answered that they have a mental set of images that "rise up or can be conjured up," but she concludes that 87% of men "say these images pop up in their heads." The survey doesn't tell us how many men have images popping up in their heads. It only asked how many men have a mental set of images. Nothing about whether or not they pop up.
This question isn't actually asking what Feldhahn thinks it's asking. She thinks it's asking whether men have sensual images pop up, unbidden, in their minds. What it's actually asking seems to be whether men have the mental ability to form visual images in their mind, or whether they are among the small percent who experience aphantasia, which is the inability to visualize things in their mind's eye.
I'd heard criticism of this book before reading it, but even so, I'd expected it to be better than this. This presents outdated stereotypes about emotionally immature men, backed up with poorly-designed survey questions.