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March
Ch. 2, “Do Men Have the Power?”
Excerpts from Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate by Warren Farrell
"The weakness of men is their facade of
strength; the strength of women is their facade of
weakness."
There are many ways in which a woman experiences
a greater sense of powerlessness than her male
counterpart: the fears of aging, rape, date rape;
less physical strength and therefore the fear of
being physically overpowered; less socialization to
take a career that pays enough to support a husband
and children, and therefore the fear of economic
dependency or poverty; less exposure to team
sports—especially pick-up team sports-- and
its blend of competitiveness and cooperation that
is so helpful to career preparation; greater
parental pressure to marry and interrupt career for
children without regard for her own wishes; not
being part of an "old boys" network; having less
freedom to walk into a bar without being
bothered....
Men have a different experience of
powerlessness. Men who have seen marriage become
alimony payments, their home become their wife's
home, and their children become child support
payments for children who have been turned against
them psychologically, feel like they are spending
their life working for people who hate them. They
feel desperate for someone to love but fear that
another marriage might ultimately leave them with
another mortgage payment, another set of children
turned against them, and a deeper desperation. When
they are called "commitment-phobic" they don't feel
understood.
When men try to keep up with payments by working
overtime and are told they are insensitive, or try
to handle the stress by drinking and are told they
are drunkards, they don't feel powerful, but
powerless. When they fear a cry for help will be
met with "stop whining," or that a plea to be heard
will be met with "yes, buts," they skip past
attempting suicide as a cry for help, and just
commit suicide. Thus men have remained the silent
sex and increasingly become the suicide sex.
Fortunately, almost all industrialized nations
have acknowledged the female experiences.
Unfortunately, they have acknowledged only the
female experiences--and concluded that women have
problems, and men are the problem.
Industrialization did a better job of creating
better homes and gardens for women than it did to
create safer coal-mines and construction sites for
men. How?
Industrialization pulled men away from the farm
and family and into the factory, alienating
millions of men from their source of love.
Simultaneously, it allowed women to have more
conveniences to handle fewer children, and
therefore be increasingly connected to their
sources of love. For women, industrialization meant
more control over whether or not to have children,
less likelihood of dying in childbirth, and less
likelihood of dying from almost all diseases. It
was this combination that led to women living
almost 50% longer in 1990 than in 1920. And it was
this combination that allowed women to go from
living only one year longer than men in 1920 to
living more than five years longer than men in
2005.
What we have come to call male power,
then—men at the helm of industrialization--
actually produced female power. It literally gave
women a longer life than men.
While the male role in industrialization
expanded women’s options, it retained
men’s obligations. For example, men voted for
women to share the option to vote. But when both
sexes could vote, they still obligated only men to
register for the draft.
We are at a unique moment in history -- when a
woman’s body is affected, we say the choice is
hers; but when a boy’s body is affected, we
say the choice is not his -- the law requires only
our 18 year old sons to register for the draft, and
therefore potential death-if-needed.
"A Woman's Body, A Woman's Choice" vs.
“A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta
Do”
Even as women were touting equality in the
1980’s and 1990’s, in post offices
throughout the United States, Selective Service
posters reminded boys of what is still true
today--that only boys must register for the
draft—that only “A Man’s Gotta Do
What A Man’s Gotta Do.”
If the Post Office had a poster saying "A Jew's
Gotta Do What A Jew's Gotta Do".... Or if "A
Woman's Gotta Do..." were written across the body
of a pregnant woman....
The question is this: How is it that if any
other group were singled out to register for the
draft based merely on its characteristics at
birth--be that group blacks, Jews, women, or
gays--we would immediately recognize it as
genocide, but when men are singled out based on
their sex at birth, men call it power?
The single biggest barrier to getting men to
look within is that what any other group would call
powerlessness, men have been taught to call power.
We don't call "male-killing" sexism; we call it
"glory." We don't call the one million men who were
killed or maimed in one battle in World War I (the
Battle of the Somme) a holocaust, we call it
"serving the country." We don't call those who
selected only men to die "murderers." We call them
"voters."
Our slogan for women is "A Woman's Body, A
Woman's Choice"; our slogan for men is "A Man's
Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do."
I am unaware of a single feminist demonstration
protesting this inequality—or any other
inequality that benefits only women at the expense
of men.
The Power Of Life
We acknowledge that blacks dying six years
sooner than whites reflects the powerlessness of
blacks in American society. Yet men dying in excess
of five years sooner than women is rarely seen as a
reflection of the powerlessness of men in American
society.
Is the five-year gap biological? If it is, it
wouldn't have been just a one-year gap in 1920. (In
many pre-industrialized countries there is only a
small male-female life expectancy gap, and in their
more rural areas men sometimes live longer.)
If men lived more than five years longer than
women, feminists would be helping us understand
that life expectancy was the best measure of who
has the power. And they would be right. Power is
the ability to control one's life. Death tends to
reduce control. Life expectancy is the bottom
line--the ratio of our life's stresses to our
life's rewards.
If power means having control over one's own
life, then perhaps there is no better ranking of
the impact of sex roles and racism on power over
our lives than life expectancy. Here is the
ranking:
Life Expectancy
As A Way Of Seeing Who Has The Power
Females (White) 80.5
Females (Black) 76.1
Males (White) 75.3
Males (Black) 69.0
The white female outlives the black male by more
than 11 years. Imagine the support for affirmative
action if a 49-year-old woman was closer to death
than a 60-year-old man.
I am unaware of a single feminist demonstration
protesting this inequality.
Suicide As Powerlessness
Just as life expectancy is one of the best
indicators of power, suicide is one of the best
indicators of powerlessness.
Item.
- From ages 9 to 14, boys' rate of suicide is
three times as high as girls';
- from 15 to 19, four times as high; and
- from 20 to 24, almost six times as
high.
Item. As boys experience the pressures
of the male role, their suicide rate increases
25,000%.
Item. The suicide rate for men over 85 is
1350% higher than for women of the same age
group.
The Clearest Sign Of Powerlessness
Subjection of a group of people to violence
based on their membership in that group is a clear
indicator of that group's powerlessness, be it
Christians to lions or the underclass to war. If a
society supports violence against that group by its
laws, customs or socialization, it oppresses that
group.
In the United States, women are exposed to
greater violence in the form of rape. And therefore
rape is punished by law, and opposed by religion,
custom, socialization and virtually 100% of men and
women.
In contrast, men’s exposure to violence is
required by law (the draft), supported by religion
and custom (circumcision), by socialization,
scholarship incentive, and the education system
(telling men who are best at bashing their heads
against 11 other men that they have "scholarship
potential"), via approval and “love” of
beautiful women (cheerleaders cheering for men to
“do it again”-- to again risk
concussions, spinal chord injuries, etc.), via
parental approval and love (the parents who attend
the Thanksgiving games at which their sons are
battering each other), via taxpayer money (high
school wrestling and football, ROTC, and the
military), and via our entertainment dollar
(boxing, football, ice hockey, rodeos, car racing,
westerns, war movies...). After we subject only our
sons to this violence (before the age of consent),
we blame them for growing into the more violent
sex.
But here's the rub. When other groups are
subjected to violence, we acknowledge their
powerlessness. Men learn to associate violence
against them with love, respect and power. Instead
of helping men who are subjected to violence, we
bribe men to accept it by giving them money to
entertain us by risking death.
This is deeply ingrained. Virtually every
society that has survived has done so via its
ability to prepare its men to be disposable—to
call it “glory” to be disposable in war,
and eligible for marriage to be disposable at
work.
© 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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