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January
Introduction
Excerpts from Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate by Warren Farrell
Everyone’s life experiences create biases
to which they are usually blind (they see them only
as their life experience). I would like to share
mine up front...
Although I am critiquing the feminist analysis
of men and what I perceive to be feminist
dependency on “victim power,” my
background is as a feminist, and I support the
portions of feminism that strive to create new
options for women. Because I feel the underlying
biology of men and women is to adapt, I see the
future as an opportunity to develop more flexible
roles than the past allowed. I feel that the
male-female roles that were functional for the
species for millions of years have become
dysfunctional in an evolutionary instant. I
feel that traditional men and women are incomplete
psychologically. In these respects, I differ from
most conservatives.
Without feminism, fewer companies would have
experimented with part-time workers, flexible
schedules, childcare options, and improved safety
standards. Without women in police work, few police
forces would have discovered that 95% of conflicts
are not resolved by physical strength; without
women doctors, few hospitals would be cutting back
90-hour work weeks for doctors; without women
therapists, short-term counseling and couple
counseling would be much less available.... The
feminist movement has allowed thousands of
workplace assumptions to be re-examined; feminism
brought into the workplace not only females, but
female energy.
When I see girls playing baseball, my eyes well
up with tears of happiness (Farrell is Irish!) for
what I know they are learning about teamwork.
Without the feminist movement, those girls would be
on the sidelines. Without the feminist movement,
millions of girls would see only one dimension of
their mothers and, therefore, of themselves. They
would have to marry more for money than for love.
They would be even more fearful of aging.
My background as a feminist includes serving
three years on the Board of the National
Organization for Women in New York City, starting
hundreds of men and women’s groups, and
speaking around the world from this perspective
during the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. In
the process, I put tens of thousands of men through
“men’s beauty contests” to give them
an emotional experience of what it was like to be
viewed as a “sex object.”
Let me share with you first some of the personal
reasons I was so receptive to feminism, and then
some of what led me to balancing that with equal
empathy for men.
Growing up (in the fifties and sixties), I had
seen my mother move in and out of depression. Into
depression when she was not working, out of
depression when she was working. The jobs were just
temporary, but, she would tell me, “I
don’t have to ask Dad for every penny when
I’m working.” At forty-eight her
depression and a dizzy spell led to a fall that led
to her death.
My mother died before the current feminist
movement was born, but she would often say, "I'm
your mother, not your slave." I can recall coming
home after being elected seventh-grade class
president, proudly announcing it to her, and
saying, "Our class meetings are on Fridays... could
I have an ironed shirt when I have to preside in
front of the class?" She said "sure" and without
missing a beat, took out the ironing board and
showed me how to iron my shirts.
Whether for these reasons or others, when the
women’s movement surfaced, it made sense to me
in an instant. I found myself at the homes of
emerging feminist friends in Manhattan, plopped in
front of their husbands with instructions to
“tell him what you told me.” Soon I was
involved with the National Organization for Women,
formed men’s groups, gave up my position as an
assistant to the president of NYU, wrote a book
called The Liberated Man on the value of
women’s independence to men, and began
speaking around the world on these issues.
Some years later, though, another family
experience was to open my eyes differently. My
brother Wayne, twelve years my junior, and his
woman friend went cross-country skiing in the Grand
Tetons. They came to a dangerous pass. It was
April, and they both feared the avalanches. Two of
them going forward would put them both in danger,
yet would give each the opportunity to save the
other. Wayne went forward alone. The snow slipped
from the mountain, gathered momentum and tumbled
its thousands of frozen pounds over my brother.
Burying him 40 feet under. He would have been
twenty-one.
Wayne and his woman friend had unconsciously
agreed that it was his life that would be risked
– and in this case sacrificed – as he and
she both played out their roles. I would soon see
much more evidence of how deeply ingrained it is
both for women to unconsciously expect men’s
protection (even when it means the man sacrificing
his life), and for men to compete to give it in
exchange for approval, respect and love.
The experience with Wayne catalyzed my thinking
about male vulnerability. In my presentations,
rather than just having men walk a mile “in
the beauty contest of everyday life” that
women experience, I asked women to experience male
vulnerability by asking men out on a “role
reversal date,” and risking just a few of the
150 or so risks of rejection that men might
experience between eye contact and intercourse.
Risking rejection male-style opened up
women’s eyes to male vulnerability and opened
up men’s mouths about their feelings.
Especially men’s feelings of powerlessness
that evolve from his sexual desire—whether
he’s in college or “single again”
after a divorce. For example, a man who talks about
the compulsive sexual feelings he has is being
vulnerable exactly because he is revealing his
compulsiveness. This makes the woman he’d like
to feel closer to feel less special, and more
distant from him—and therefore makes him
vulnerable to losing her love.
I began to see men’s vulnerability in other
ways. After divorce, a man is ten times as
likely to commit suicide as is the woman. Why?
Women are more likely to have the children --
someone to love them and need them. People who feel
loved and needed rarely commit suicide.
And women develop support systems.
Women’s traditional support systems support
women to be vulnerable; men’s traditional
support systems support men to be invulnerable.
This creates a paradox: the support men get to
be invulnerable makes them more vulnerable; the
support women get to be vulnerable makes them less
vulnerable. It is just one example of how
women’s strength is their façade of
weakness and men’s weakness is their
façade of strength.
Take, for example, the most archetypal of
men’s support systems -- the cheerleader, his
football team, and his family. When a cheerleader
says, “first and ten, do it again!” she
isn’t saying “first get in touch with
your feelings again." Nor is his coach. Nor are his
parents cheering in the stands. All of us are
unwittingly supporting him to “risk a
concussion again.” His motto is, “When
the going gets tough, the tough get going”
(they don’t cry to the school therapist). If,
instead of getting a touchdown, he gets in touch
with his feelings, and quits his position on the
team to avoid the concussion, the cheerleader
doesn’t say, “Next week I’m going to
cheer for you -- I noticed how open and vulnerable
you were when you were playing football." Yes, next
week she does cheer. But she cheers for his
replaceable part.
Expressing feelings of vulnerability brings
women affection and men rejection.
© 2010, Warren
Farrell (with Steven Svoboda) vs. James P.
Sterba
* * *
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow
victim. - Betty Friedan
Warren
Farrell, Ph.D., is the author of numerous
international best-sellers on men and women,
including Why
Men Are The Way They Are
and The
Myth of Male Power.
Women
Can't Hear What Men Don't
Say was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection and
Father
and Child Reunion has
led to Dr. Farrell doing expert witness work that
has encouraged many judges to keep dads in
children’s lives. Dr. Farrell’s released
Why
Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay
Gap and What Women Can Do About
It in 2005 and
Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate
in 2008.
Warren is the only man in the US
ever elected three times to the Board of Directors
of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New
York City. He has been chosen by The Financial
Times as one of the world’s top 100
thought leaders, is in Who’s Who in America
and in Who’s Who in the World. He has taught
in five disciplines, most recently at the School of
Medicine at the University of California in San
Diego, and is ranked by the International
Biographic Centre of London as one of the
world’s top 2000 scholars of the Twentieth
Century. He has appeared on over 1,000 TV shows
worldwide and lives in Mill Valley, California with
his wife and two daughters.You can visit him at
www.warrenfarrell.com
or E-Mail
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