Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man: Psychoanalysis and Masculinity. By Donald Moss London/New York:  Routledge, 2012.  150 pp.

This brilliant, audacious book never refers to the eponymous Stevens poem from which its title comes. It is not necessary to know the poem to read the book, but if you know it, you keep finding it everywhere. Here is one example of how the poem quietly, unobtrusively frames the book. Moss opens with this description:

On a billboard dominating a busy New York intersection reclines a gorgeous young man, naked except for his Calvin Klein briefs. Inside the briefs lurks an erection. Next to him leans a beautiful woman, her crotch barely covered by wide-mesh panties. The man has the face of a feasting lion: a mix of intense pleasure and latent ferocity. One of his hands grasps the elastic band of his briefs. He seems about to pull them off. [p. xvii]

Far from reacting with the “wide-ranging, finely tuned appreciation” (p. xvii) of an experienced psychoanalyst, Moss is knocked off center by the ad, day after day, as he drives past it on his way to work. He is variously “furious, provoked, competitive, disgusted, critical, engaged, thoughtful, abject, infantile, aged, superior, indifferent, captured, compliant,” and his reactions shift slightly each morning (p. xvii).

Each day the image produces a volatile, incompatible jumble of emotions and impulses. Though he tries again and again, Moss is unable to generate any thought large enough to conceptualize his different reactions. He never feels that “Yes, now I have it, now I have him, now I know what I'm seeing” (p. xix). All he has is questions, and all his questions are “what-is-it-like” questions: What is it like to be the man I am looking at? What is it like to look at this man? What is it like to want something from him … to be afraid of what I want, and so on?

Moss notes that “when we ask what is it like to look at a man, we place ourselves at