Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

I review this book with mixed motives. On the one hand, sexual addiction is so devastating to men and those who love them that almost any assault mounted on its impregnable fortress is worthy of applause. After all, the public leaders with whom I work and whose downfall resounds so loudly are grateful for almost any weapon they can add to their armament.

On the other hand, this battle matters so much that one wants to wage it with appropriate cunning, keeping the eye focused on winning the war rather than lusting for the celebration that comes after every small battle.

Approaches to overcoming sexual addiction can be roughly divided into two, oddly analogous to debates over economic policy or even the traffic of illegal drugs. On the one hand are the demand-side arguments. That is, in order to dry up sexual addiction, the pressing need is to find out what drives the hunger that leads men into sexual addiction. What is missing in lives that motivates guys to try to replace it with pornography and illicit sexual encounters? Those who take this tack typically look for long-term solutions to the demand. Often this approach will rely in part on counseling or therapies that help a man (and the woman he has promised to love) define the need and then seek healthy ways to fill it.

On the other hand lie what I’ll call the supply-side arguments. According to this approach, a man needs to interdict the supply of titillating messages, arousing inputs, and the habits to which they lead by discipline, self-protection, accountability to others, and the like. Supply-siders employ the language of self-discipline, will-power, and accountability. We’re in a war, the narrative runs. Big, important things are at stake. Like any soldier in a war, you seek to evade or kill the enemy, relying on the band of brothers that got you this far alive.

Arterburn’s and Stoeker’s Everyman’s Battle is a battle manual for supply siders seeking to kill off an enemy that has devastated the land. Though the authors don’t say so, one comes to the conclusion that they recognize a demand-side issue, but consider it to be every man’s struggle, fairly conventional in its contours, and perhaps not worth fretting over in time of war.

So they go on the attack. I commend them for their earnestness and I believe many men will find tactical benefit in some of their prescriptions. I wonder, however, whether the war will ever be won in just this way.

The book’s nineteen chapter are divided into six parts: ‘Where Are We?’, ‘How We Got Here’, ‘Choosing Victory’, ‘Victory with Your Eyes’. ‘Victory with Your Mind’, and ‘Victory with Your Heart’. If you have a low tolerance for cringe-worthy self-revelation, you might not want to begin your reading with this book. Both authors are familiar with what it’s like to live on the brink of self-immolating sexual slavery and are not shy about baring their hearts nor even those of their wives, who weigh in by design and with regularity.

In Part One (‘Where Are We?’), the authors establish a low thresh-hold for sexual addiction, one that professionals in the field are likely to consider something close to entrapment. Yet Arterburn and Stoeker are convinced that men in our culture have fallen en masse into sexual addiction by way of an accumulation of sexually lazy decisions. They want to starve the disease before the point where it begins to spread. Theirs is unapologetically an extreme approach.

‘How We Got Here’ (Part II) drives home the point by means of a distinction between ‘excellence’ and ‘obedience’ in sexual purity. For the authors, excellence represents a kind of moral mediocrity when compared with the flawless standard of obedience by which men are called to measure themselves. Arterburn and Stoecker do not engage in nuance. Their description of men’s sexuality in practice is stereotyped to the extreme. Yet I suspect they paint such pictures well aware of the inherent limitations that peacetime might provide the luxury of examining. My own cringe factor would have led me to write the book off at this point if I could not see the faces of men about whom I care very deeply who find heuristic value–though few of them would name them so–in such distinctions. A man falling from a cliff is not picky about the ledges his grasping hands find.

‘Choosing Victory’ (Part III) is a manifesto of victory through planning and exertion. Victory is so sweet and fulfilling, the authors challenge their male readers to accept, that you’re a wimp or a fool to stay mired in impurity and defeat. This is, we recall, a supply-side tract. You go at the enemy where he lurks. Convenience and introspection have little do to with winning the battle.

But how, in concrete steps, does a guy get to victory? Part IV (‘Victory with Your Eyes’) is Arterburn’s and Stoeker’s starting point. Men are visual, they have already pointed out in some details. So you go to the visual presentation of the enemy and you stomp it out the supply of visual stimulation before it has a chance. Chapter that lay out the plan for ‘Bouncing the eyes’ and ‘Starving the eyes’ have moments that seem to this reviewer almost laughable. Yet I recognize what these writers are trying to accomplish and the helplessness in which many of their readers walk each day. It’s difficult, under such circumstances, to do more than register my reluctance to imagine a life of bouncing and starving the eyes in just this way as the fulness of life to which our Maker has called us. Maybe it’s an effective stage of recovery.

The same is true of Part V (‘Victory in Your Mind’), where the operative metaphor for a man’s mind is the mustang and the threatening woman a female horse who must be stymied in her attempts to penetrate the corral. Though my reaction to such images is not receptive, I must confess that even the Bible’s sapiential literature (the book of Proverbs is the key exemplar) traffics in similar images as one element of a sophisticated cataloguing of life’s opportunities and threats. So maybe there is value in this.

The book closes with a summons to honorable action (Part VI, ‘Victory in Your Heart’) and a set of exercises suitable for individual or group study.

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then Everyman’s Battle must be considered friendly stuff. I commend the authors for engaging the fight with a passion that has been diverted from unworthy ends to the honorable task of saving hearts and restoring marriages.

The liability that comes with the package is the danger that men who are worn down by sexual slavery will not seek to understand the solitude at the core of their being, clamoring for reciprocal love, desiring both to give and to receive, wanting forever.