Men have been offered only two attitudes toward their own desire: silence, or defensive posturing. Neither works. Say nothing, and desire leaks out sideways - into secrecy, addiction, or affairs. Push back against the critique, and you risk becoming the very thing the critique warns against. What's been missing is a third way.
Transmuting Male Desire: A Love Affair with the Goddess Who Is Many offers that third way. Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, Christian and Sufi mysticism, Hindu tantra, and five decades spent in wilderness and contemplative practice, Stephen K. Hatch makes the case that male desire - for a variety of partners, for physical beauty, for a woman who leaves him quietly undone - is not a problem to be managed or a shame to be hidden. It is raw material for genuine spiritual transformation, when faced honestly rather than denied or acted upon. The payoff isn't only a man's own peace of mind. A man who has done this work, Hatch argues, develops a lighter touch - someone who asks nothing of the women around him, and who women can therefore feel genuinely safe being near.
Hatch works through the actual, specific texture of male desire most books merely talk around: the pull toward a variety of women even while in a committed relationship, the vulnerability of being undone by feminine beauty, the ache of rejection, the charge of male-female friendship, and the case for what physical objectifying might, when transmuted into spirituality, get right. Drawing on sources as varied as the Song of Songs, Rumi, the Christian mystics, and contemporary voices like Nancy Qualls-Corbett, James Hillman and Deena Metzger, this is a book unafraid of its own subject matter.
Hatch writes in continuity with David Deida's work on masculine and feminine spiritual practice, and with the same conviction that facing desire head-on is the most effective path, both for men and for the women who love them. This is not a book for everyone. It intended for men who want sincerely to work on their own desire rather than act on it, and for the women in their lives curious what such honesty might actually sound like.
