LotR suffers partly from its setting (during a war) and partly from its idealism. Wartime is not a time of deep complex releationships between men and women; it is a time of disrupted relationships, long partings filled with worry (on both sides) and occasional moments of desparate "might-have-beens" or even "shouldn't-have-beens".
Getting a deep man/woman relationship into the frame of JRRT's story would have been either pathetically unrealistic or would have required introducing a whole new sub-setting. There's just no point, particularly if you feel that your readers are adult enough to understand what losses the characters are facing, something British crtics in the 50's should have been very aware of.
The idealism in the story is another point where critics struggle. In particular, they see the platonic love of the characters for each other as hard to swallow. As an example of this one review I read of the RotK movie contained the phrase "the homoeroticism between the hobbits is laughable" but I have seen similar, more veiled references to the same thing in other commentaries about the book over the years and in fact the thought is really behind the "boys' story" comments.
The implication really is that adult men are not capable of such strong and non-sexual feelings for each other; such comradeship is the province of pre-pubescent boys.
While such a view might be understandable in a modern time when peace has ruled most Western people's lives for 60 years, it is beyond me how critics that had seen the effects of two world wars could have held them. Particularly, to have lived through the trenches of WWI and not realised that the ending of all hope leads to just such feelings between those facing the Enemy in distant lands far from everything one knew is a serious flaw in those who make this accusation.
To pick one aspect of the book itself which may have helped cause this problem: Tolkien perhaps does not really drive home just how totally hopeless the situation is. No major character dies and there is until the end little that demonstrates the fact that this is a final battle in a war already won. It's true that this is not a global war in the modern sense but in Tolkien's mind it is the final phase of a global conquest.
The dispair that many of the characters feel about this has to be taken on trust a lot of the time. Which is fine with me but a critic frankly is not going to read into the depths of a book this size, they have deadlines to meet, and the absense of overt widespread destruction probably makes it hard for them to grasp just how desparate people like Aragorn actually are. It's not until the final battle at the Black Gate that the reader is absolutely forced to face the fact that Sauron can't lose militarily. The reader's hope is often well out of sync with the characters', especially if the reader is only a casual reader like Muir.
As regards the more general topic of men and women, JRRT wrote very well and realistically about their roles within the setting. To complain about his depiction of women in the society he was writing about is no more sensible than complaining about a writer depicting suffragettes as being weak because he doesn't give them the vote in his story!
I believe that Tolkien's work shows that he was an equalitist writing in and about an inequal world, but that's hardly his fault.
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