What (Not All) Women Want

I was looking at Christianity Today yesterday and ran across this article. It's a review of Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul, the book by John and Stasi Eldredge of Wild at Heart renown.

Here's a snippet:

I may not be an Eldredge kind of lady, but I know beauty when I see it. And the most regrettable failure of Captivating is its tame idea of beauty. "Beauty is core to a woman—who she is and what she longs to be," Stasi Eldredge writes. "Beauty is what the world longs to experience from a woman." She gives examples: "Pioneer women brought china teacups into the wilderness, and I bring a pretty tablecloth to eat on when my family camps. We wear perfume, paint our toenails, color our hair, and pierce our ears, all in an effort to be ever more beautiful." Sure. But there's so much more.

Beauty draws blood to the heart and speeds up the pulse; sometimes it evokes repentance. I wish more Christians were comfortable with its pull. Too often, beauty raptures us so forcibly that we fear it will lead to temptation. So we avert our eyes. What if we turned our ecstasy into worship?

With provocative hyperbole, a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot predicts that beauty will save the world. Commenting on this line, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn imagined that "if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light," then "perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three."

But it won't be the beauty described in Captivating. That beauty isn't wild enough; it's mere prettification, a tendency toward sentimental adornment. For some reason, the Eldredges restrict the source of beauty to women. Sorry, Rubens, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Bach, and men with stunning looks—you don't make the list.

True beauty is precarious, unbound.

It cannot be confined to pre-approved tastes or to one gender. It is wild at heart. Like Christ. And like the complicated men and women who follow him (some of whom room alone when they travel).

What do you think? Is the reviewer on the nose? Or is she so far off the mark that she might also think The Colbert Report isn't satire? More importantly, what does it mean to live as a woman and a follower of Christ? Is that answer different for single women and married ones?