I read your column in Tuesday's National Post concerning Erin Pizzey's apparent dramatic re-assessment of feminist orthodoxy with great interest. I immediately thought of the work of Warren Farrell and his book "Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?" Farrell was a prominent and celebrated figure in the feminist movement during the 70's in America who, like Pizzey, became a strong critic of the
feminist agenda.As the only man in the US to be elected three times to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, and as the author of the decidedly pro-feminist book "The Liberated Man", Farrell found himself in high demand on the lecture circuit.
However, he describes that when he began including the male perspective into his addresses, the applause and invitations to speaking engagements quickly dried up. He says, "I did two articles that were accepted for Modern Maturity, one of the largest circulation magazines in the US. After the articles were accepted, edited and paid for, one feminist researcher objected to them and got Modern Maturity to drop both articles. And regarding the places like the New York Times in which I had published every single thing I had written when I was a feminist, since I have questioned feminism nothing I have written has been published. When I was doing the Donahue Show as a feminist, I was on seven times. I was on once where I deviated from the feminist position and I was never invited back."
Farrell asserts that "Men don't oppress women any more than women oppress men. The whole concept of men and women oppressing each other is ridiculous. That's a fabrication of the feminist movement. What is true is that both sexes have roles that can legitimately be considered oppressive, but those roles are not roles designed by men or women, they were designed by biological necessity and the necessity of survival. Survival was the oppressor. And in order to survive, you didn't teach people to focus on rights, you taught them to focus on responsibilities, you taught them to focus on obligations, which is why our grandparents listening to this discussion would be disgusted with us. And you have a nation of victims rather than a nation of entrepreneurs because you're focused on competing to be a better victim.
The biology of women in a survival-focused world was the child raising and that left the social role of men to raising the money to support the biological role of women. And it's not been until industrialized societies had enough income to help society progress from what I call a Stage 1, which is survival-focused to Stage 2, which is focused on the balance between survival and self-fulfilment, that we could produce people who were able to focus on what rights and opportunities they had.
But men did not have it all figured out and have a system of rules designed to oppress women. You could make a case that women taught men to play the role of chauffeur in life, that women sat in the back seat as mother and told us in the front seat in the uniforms to drive and we figured out the best way to get there without asking directions and the woman just fired us if we didn't do it right and continued to employ us if we did it right. You could make a case that women addicted men to their sexuality and then withdrew their sexuality until we provided them with a source of income. You could make a case that women figured out a way of brainwashing boys to earn money that the women spend to have better homes while we live out in the mines and construction sites and kill ourselves. You could do that but that would also be an incorrect masculinization and demonization of the female role. The truth is that neither sex had power. Both sexes had roles. Rather than raise children, men's role was to raise money. When you have a role, you have an obligation, you don't have power. Power is the ability to control your own life."
Though I personally find that he has a tendency to overplay his hand somewhat to make his point, he refutes commonly held "accepted truths" of feminism ( e.g. that men earn more money than women do for the same work; that women are more likely than men to be victims of violence; that men are more likely to commit spousal abuse than women; that women never have motivation to lie about rape etc.) with documented research and statistics.
The following is a link to a list of points from another book by Farrell called "The Myth Of Male Power."
http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/
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