Re: Warren Farrell interview - Oct 2007

October 26, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Dear Robert,

With me having read most of his books over the years, Warren Farrell opened my eyes about many of the misconception I had for most of the many years of my prior life. Those misconceptions related to the respective appreciation we as a society have and that I had with regard to the inequalities of the sexes. I am very grateful to Warren Farrell for that.

I should have known better about many things relating to women:

• Having been, like virtually every other man, abused by girls and women - physically and emotionally, but in my case not sexually;
• Having been discriminated against in favour of women and girls;
• Seeing women in power in many different companies, corporations and businesses act as absolute tyrants, without compassion and being absolutely ruthless;
• Experiencing the failed attempt of my teacher (Fraulein Krapot) in Grade II to send my buddy to the concentration camp (”fortunately”, his mother and he - his father already was in camp - had committed suicide just before I came next morning to pick him up for school);
• Seeing that many women possessed less and often much less or none of the sense of fairness inherent in men, and so on.
• Having seen many men study and work hard to achieve success, only then to marry women who did nothing of the sort, men who then became divorced against their will and had those women take those men’s children and almost every cent they had and destroyed those men’s careers to boot, turning loving fathers and even loving and doting husbands into “criminals” because they were then dead-broke and automatically were labelled deadbeats.
• Having experienced, as many of us did, that a good number of good men amongst our friends, acquaintances and co-workers committed suicide because of the insurmountable despair and depression they were in, as they could no longer live without the means to make a living.

Warren Farrell also gave me a lot of information with which to debunk feminist propaganda. I am just as grateful to him for that.

Many fathers rights activists (and I truly hope that the vastly larger number of people in the general public did so) learned from Warren Farrell to be objective when making claims about sex-discrimination against one sex or the other. Many fathers rights activists learned that, but virtually no women’s rights activists ever did, at least none of the ruling ones that came to power. That is no surprise, and there is life after Warren Farrell, or, better, there is life outside of Warren Farrell’s hoped-for Paradise on Earth. There is reality.

Generosity, fairness and honesty are hammered into men, along with “boys never hit girls” (chivalry, that is), beginning when they start walking, but there is absolutely no equivalent or corresponding female virtue that is hammered into women - at least not now anymore.

Women are no longer taught to be feminine. Yes, I know, subservience is said to have been taught along with that, but I never saw any subservient women in my large family and very large extended family or in any of the families of my peers in the neighbourhood I grew up and lived in for the almost 30 years of the beginning of my life. All of them were the undisputed managers, treasurers and rulers of their families, even though virtually all of them respected men and loved their husbands, whom they made sure were the heads of their families. It has been that way since antiquity.

But what difference does it make whether women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.

— Aristotle (Politics)

To my knowledge, no one ever found a substantiated fault with any of the comparisons Warren Farrell made in any of those many, many “gender” comparisons he made (they most definitely are not comparisons of the genders - there are seven genders, with more to come - they are comparisons of the two sexes) in his books. The facts presented in them are objective and well-reasoned, their interpretations not quite so much, and sometimes hardly at all. Mind you, interpretations are to varying extents opinions. Opinions are driven by feelings and facts but not necessarily by facts as much as by indoctrination and ideology, and often are based on no facts at all.

Although I promote Warren Farrell’s books and some of his other writings, I never forget that he is a feminist, in his own words, an “empowerment feminist”.

Much of what is being discussed in the Questions and Answers you forwarded is reasoning based on and promoting feminist objectives for the re-engineering of humanity. Of course, most of what Warren Farrell uses in those Questions and Answers is allegory, but let me apply my reasoning to just one allegory he used (the rowboat) as an illustration of what he wishes humanity would achieve to bring about Paradise on Earth.

What is the reason for manning a rowboat? There could be many, all dealing to some extent with effective use of energy and resources to achieve a goal. Let’s say that we want to stage a race. The goal is to have one boat win the race. We will get four boats ready, all crewed with an equal number of people of average strength and skill — average within their sex groups; men are on average a lot stronger than women are.

1. One boat is manned by men;
2. One boat is crewed by an equal mix of men and women, equally distributed on both sides of the boat;
3. One boat is crewed by an equal mix of men and women, with women on one side and the men on the other side of the boat, and
4. One boat is “womanned” by women.

No one with even only a bit of common sense will doubt that the order in which the different combinations of crews and boats are listed above will also be the order in which they will cross the finish line. I estimate that No. 1 will be way ahead of all the others, that No. 2 and 3 will come in next, with No. 2 followed closely by No. 3, and with No. 4 coming in dead last, about as far behind as No. 1 will be ahead of 2 and 3.

It is all nice and good for Warren Farrell and others like him to promote equal rights for women and men, but that will and has come at a cost with respect to performance.

I stopped reading Warren Farrell’s Questions and Answers after I came to his reasons for demanding that women should be in the armed forces.

Well, I am convinced that just as boat No. 1 will come in first in the race, so an army that is “womanned” by women in the front lines (even only partially or, worse, 50:50) will come in a distant 2nd or 3rd. It will lose every battle with an opposing force comprised only of men.

It is on record in a number of nations that women in fighting forces caused a variety of havoc and calamities of varying extents. That’s the reason why all such attempts to bring about “equal rights” for women were canned in the USSR and even in Israel, except in the modern progressive nations that listened for too long to the ideology that causes Warren Farrell to state what he did in the Questions and Answers you forwarded.

The lower performance when enforcing equal rights for women (it never is “equal rights for men”) is also true of society in general, in which women have every right that men have but few (if any) of men’s obligations and duties, and most definitely fewer of the capabilities of average men. True, that is a major bone of contention that bothers Warren Farrell.

However, most women are far too smart to want to be truly equal with men. That is the way things are going, because women have the power and will get their way. For one thing, they would live on average much shorter lives (ten percent shorter), and women would have to give up far too many comforts that they became accustomed to and that men provide to them - often for free, except at often great costs to men. That is why many women state outright that they don’t want to be feminists - but they nevertheless avail themselves of every possible advantage at the expense of men that feminism provided for them. Can anyone blame them for that? They do nothing other than what is natural for women. They go bargain-hunting; and people like Warren Farrell certainly have a lot of bargains on offer for women, except that some of what is being offered to women is no bargain - and women know it.

There is still no military draft registration for women anywhere. That is something that Warren Farrell keeps harping on.

Notwithstanding all of the harping by the Warren Farrells of this world, women don’t take what they don’t want. There is only a smattering of women in the trenches (combat positions, that is, about 200 or so in the Canadian Armed Forces, even though the Canadian taxpayers - as did taxpayers in many other “progressive nations - paid billions of dollars, the lion’s share, about 70 percent of that, paid by men, to entice women to want to voluntarily be be equal with men and kill and be killed).

However, women now roughly comprise 10 percent of the armed forces in Canada and in any other developed nations that let women join. That is about exactly the percentage of women who were in safe service positions in world war one and world war two. They do much the same jobs, except, for most, for much higher wages, and they rise three times as fast through the ranks than men do who actually do or will do the real fighting. That is “equal rights for women”, not for men.

When it comes to men and women laying their lives on the line for the good of society, you may wish to see where the progress is that gender-equality activists demanded for women for two decades and more. Take a look. (I sent that to you once before, although for different reasons.)

All of that does not mean that women are inferior. Women can excel in many fields. Some of those fields are not accessible to men (e. g.: bearing children) and some of them are barred to men (e. g.: women’s locker rooms, bathrooms and clubs). However, it does mean that men and women can work well with one another and become more productive and effective than as if they compete in many fields for which men are on average better qualified.

It does mean lower overall performance of any system in which men must, just to enable women to function on an equal level, lower their performance, just as they must in the boat race in boats No. 2 and 3, for no other reason then that women should in the name of equality hold “their own” with men.

When women successfully hold their own in traditionally male fields, men most often must hold back to let women measure up. At best, the system’s performance will be mediocre, at worst, disastrous.

I agree with Queen Victoria.

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.— Queen Victoria, March, 1870
http://www.ladiesagainstfeminism.org/index2.htm

We all know that the predictions made by Queen Victoria came to be true, except for the perishing of women - although men still protect and often are now even forced to protect women (something they formerly did voluntarily and eagerly). It is not just women that perish, but all of society is perishing. However, some equal rights activists will fight to the last bullet on this until nothing but rubble and ashes remains.

Here is a quote from Warren Farrell for the last word on all of that. Although it is not quite fair to use that quote now, it is revealing and explains a lot, and he made it far from being secretive about it.

Soon I began distinguishing among the feminism I loved (what I now call empowerment feminism) and the two forms of feminism I feared (victim feminism and competitive feminism).
Empowerment feminism empowers a woman by encouraging her to develop all of her potential without regard to gender. It is the feminism I shall always support.— Warren Farrell
in Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say:
Destroying Myths, Creating Love, p. 2

I wonder whether that means that the other 40 and more different brands of feminism don’t bother Warren Farrell.

No, thanks, I will not promote feminism and women’s equality in Warren Farrell’s sense. It’s a dream that will never come true. It is deadly for men to pursue it, and it would be deadly for women if we ever would get true equality - and women know it! However, it is being enforced and rammed down our throats. Why? For no other reason than to extort more taxes, just as in the child support enforcement systems. And then we wonder why men’s suicides are four times those by women, close our eyes and ears and say nothing.

Equality ueber alles until the last bullet? Not this man, but when it comes to equitability, not necessarily equality, for women and for men, I am all for it. Too bad that almost no feminists are honest enough to see it that way. They forgot all about the important difference between the equitability and equality: fairness.

Those feminists who brought about the state of our current affairs and created the widening rift between the two sexes that is ever more widening have no excuse for forgetting. They didn’t forget. They deliberately excluded fairness and equitability, for the simple reason that if you use those two constraints, feminism will fall flat on its face.

No nation, no civilization and definitely not humanity can function well without the complementarity of the sexes that the differences in the sexes provide. Only by using that complementarity can we hope that any group, family, community, nation and civilization can thrive by being more effective, respecting, loving and productive than the sum of its parts. That turned savages into civilized people.

Competition between the sexes and the war between the sexes do the opposite and turn civilized people into savages. Why do taxpayers need to fund that?

–Walter
http://fathersforlife.org

Robert wrote:

This very recent article re from Warren Farrell would make a good web page, perhaps ?

He has given his permission for us to use it.

RW
———-
Q&A /

WARREN FARRELL, author: ‘The flip side of feminism’

By HYPERLINK:
A new book asks whether lifting women up means taking men down

By HYPERLINK Maureen Downey, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, Published on: 10/21/07

Warren Farrell is a leader in the men’s movement who contends that the culture cares more about saving whales than males. James Sterba is a University of Notre Dame philosophy professor who believes that the feminist ideal of equality has yet to be realized but remains a moral imperative.

The two face off in a provocative new book called “Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?” While the book is aimed at students of gender studies, most women and men can relate to the topics it discusses, from who does more housework to who gets custody of the kids in divorce.

The book is more a friendly skirmish than a war, with both men agreeing that discrimination based on gender is wrong. They disagree strongly, however, over which gender suffers the greater discrimination today.

In a telephone interview with editorial writer Maureen Downey —- who admits to siding far more with Sterba’s position —- Farrell shares his views on the gender divide.

Q: In questioning women’s assigned roles, didn’t the feminist movement also question men’s fixed roles? You seem to argue that feminism didn’t try hard enough to answer those questions about men’s roles, but was that the responsibility of feminism?

A: Historically, we taught women to row, metaphorically, on the right side of the boat, and men on the left. Fortunately, feminism taught women how to row on both sides. Unfortunately, no one re-socialized men to row on both sides. Until we do, we also limit women’s flexibility, because when women row on the left, if men can’t also row on the right, the boat goes in circles. And men and women are in this boat together.

Q: You contend that one of the institutions whose sexism benefits women is the military, because of male-only drafts and combat exclusion of women. But can’t these exclusions hurt women who choose the military, since it’s through combat that officers win the most prestigious positions in the military?

A: First, if we registered only blacks, Jews or women for the draft, we would immediately recognize that as racism, anti-Semitism, or sexism. When we require only our sons to register, we call it responsibility. Thus the U.S. Post Office’s slogan to register our sons is “A Man’s Gotta do What a Man’s Gotta Do”; our slogan for women is “A Woman’s Body, A Woman’s Choice.”

Women are the only group who get the right to vote without responsibility.

Only adolescents expect rights without responsibilities. Adults know they go together.

Second, women are 14 percent of the military but only 2 percent of those killed. Women get administrative and other jobs that are more easily transferable to civilian life than is killing. They become officers at equal rates to men. This protect-the-woman attitude is reinforced by both sexes in all hazardous professions. However, this protection of women also hurts women. It is hard to place women equally at the very top of responsibility if we prevent women from equally sharing the toughest responsibility: death.

Q: You maintain that men die younger than women and that it’s really men’s health that’s been ignored by the medical establishment. Yet aren’t most of the trials for new drugs in this country based on men’s heath conditions and metabolism?

A: Medical database searches show that during the past 40 years women have been studied more than men. Prior to that, drug companies tested new drugs more on men (especially male prisoners) for the same reason they tested them more on rats. They tested them most on what they valued least.

Q: You cite the 5.2-year advantage in life expectancy that women have over men as your best example of discrimination against men in health care. But aren’t many of those early deaths among men due to higher levels of smoking, drinking and car crashes?

A: Yes, speeding is a symptom of our approval for male risk-taking behavior:

We teach boys playing football to call abuse “glory”; we teach girls to call the police. We are unaware that men who divorce are 10 times as likely to commit suicide as their wives; so we take the children away from them, leaving them without purpose and leaving children without dads. We still expect our successful men to repress feelings rather than express feelings, yet success is still his best preventive medicine for avoiding the cancer of female rejection.

Ignoring men’s health is like ignoring global warming. We are all interconnected. When either sex wins, both sexes lose.

Q: You maintain that many date-rape policies on college campuses are unfair to men, specifically those that say a rape can take place if a woman is drunk and thus incapable of expressing unwillingness. Yet if a man signed away his car or his home while drunk, would you say that he should be held to that contract?

A: If a man signs a contract and he is drunk, contract law says he should be held responsible. He made the decision to drink. But the real question here is when a man and woman drink together, why is the woman not held responsible for saying yes to sex and the man is? We either hold them both responsible or we hold neither. More important, why are we treating our daughters like children and treating our sons of the same age like adults?

Q: If men are so powerless, why do they still dominate the nation’s critical institutions —- the U.S. Supreme Court, the Congress, the CEO positions in most companies?

A: To me power is about control over one’s life. I discovered that, when women earn about $100,000 per year, they say, “I have enough money; I need time — for my family, friends, myself, to travel, and for exercise.” Men need to learn this from women. Psychologically, men are about where women were in the 1950s. We need to help our sons question the traditional male definition of power —- feeling obligated to earn money someone else spends while he dies sooner. That’s powerlessness.

ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff Illustration of a woman.

Posted in Men and Women Work, Men's Issues, Feminism, The New World Order | Print | No Comments »

What’s wrong with having equality for women AND men?

October 26, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

The article at the link identified below needs to be put into context.

Women’s group closes after losing its funding

Opposition MPs say Harper government `turning back clock’

Sep 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Les Whittington, Toronto Star
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA–Women’s rights advocates accused the Harper government of ignoring their struggle for equality after a leading women’s group closed its doors because of a lack of federal funding….(Full Story)</blockquote>

During more than 30 years of pushing for equality for women and cramming it down our throats, special interest groups like NAWL (the [Canadian] National Association of Women and the Law) achieved many rights and advantages for women that put men at a distinct disadvantage.

Arguably, in effect the elevation of “equal” rights for women, as opposed to corresponding men’s rights, turned men into second-class citizens and in some sectors in society, especially in jurisprudence, to decidedly being regarded as sub-human.

The list of inequities is too long to be shown here in full, but here are some of the points that immediately come to mind:

1. Pay equity:Women receive preferential hiring and men experience preferential firing.

   The vast majority of the unemployed is comprised of men.

   Controlling for job choices made, level of education, tenure on the job and
   hours worked, many studies show that women’s average annual incomes exceed those of men.

2. Health Care:Funding for medical research for women’s health issues exceeds funding for medical research for men’s health issues.

   Women’s average life expectancy exceeds that of men by almost exactly five years in the whole world, and by seven years in Canada.

   While at the advent of the feminist take-over of our nation there were about 400 female suicides vs. 1,200 male suicides in 1964, those annual suicides now rank in the order of 750 and 3000, respectively. Yet, every little rise in female suicide rates is announced with great fanfare, hue and cry, while the almost inconceivably large increase in the numbers of annual male suicides receives little attention.

3. Job Accidents and Job Fatalities:Roughly nine out of every ten serious casualties and fatalities resulting from job accidents are men.
4. Jurisprudence:Although women commit crimes at about the same frequency as men do, the vast majority of inmates in prisons is comprised of men, at a ratio of about 100:1 in Canada and about 17:1 in the US.

   Child-murder is called “infanticide” when perpetrated by women and “murder” when men do it, resulting in vastly differing sentencing for women and for men, with women rarely being convicted, while men almost always are, with women receiving nominal sentences (two-years-less-a-day, and rarely served) and with men serving many years in prison for the murdering of children.

   Women in divorce and child-custody hearings can lie with impunity and are, if proved to have committed perjury, never indicted or prosecuted for the crime of perjury (one single exception to that rule was the case of a mother who about 20 years ago spent 14 days in jail for her crime of perjury in a child-custody hearing in Edmonton).

   Child-custody is in nine out of ten cases awarded to women.

   Child-support awards paid by men to women exceed those paid by women to men, at about up to 8.5 times the average of women at the same income levels.

   Single custodial fathers average only about one dollar per month in child support for every $50 received by the average custodial mother.

   There are twice as many women non-custodial parents evading child support payments than there are men who do so, and that is even though the number of non-custodial mothers is ten-times less than that of non-custodial fathers.

5. Family Violence:Although women commit partner violence slightly more often than men do, there is roughly $500 million each year in funding for battered-women’s shelters in Canada versus no funding at all for battered-men’s shelters.

   A handful of shelters for battered men sprang up over the years because there is a great need for them, but they invariably had to close down again for lack of funding. There are few deadbeat dads, but many battered men who are dead-broke.

   In at least one case (in Calgary) the government refused to grant an operating licence to a battered-men’s shelter that at great cost had been made operation-ready out of the operator’s own financial resources.

   Biological mothers commit the vast majority of violence against children in families, while biological fathers commit about one-ninth of the violence against children in families that women do. Yet, groups like NAWL never ever mention violence against children by the children’s mothers, while those groups wage a veritable propaganda war against men as the perpetrators of all family violence, alleging that women who are violent always act in self-defence, even though women in cases of family violence comprise the vast majority of aggressors.

6. Public Perception of Women vs. Perception of Men:That can be summed up in four words: Women good, Men bad!

   The mainstream media - on account of preferential hiring of, and due to domination and control by, feminists and feminist sympathizers and camp-followers - has become so saturated with pro-female and anti-male propaganda that now it has become virtually unbearable for respectable men and for any women who still respect men to read or watch or to believe much of what is being put into hearing, view and print.

   Yet, the majority of the public is a virtually captive audience for that all-out anti-male propaganda war. The anti-male propaganda war aimed at putting men into a bad light has been and is effective, increasingly more so.

   During the years of feminist domination and control, the media became so saturated with anti-male propaganda in ads, in commercial, in articles and in programs, that they easily rival and far exceed the impact of similar efforts by other totalitarian regimes to indoctrinate the masses.

   Yet, whenever complaints are launched, they are invariably (with rare exceptions, e. g.: Michelle Landsberg) being scoffed off by explaining that the slighting and outright slandering of men is being committed not out of ill will but in good humour.

   A hate crime still remains a hate crime.

7. Wealth:Men pay 70 percent of all taxes and 70 percent of contributions to pensions-plans, health-care plans, old-age security, employment insurance and other parts of the social-security safety net, yet women receive 70 percent of the payouts and benefits arising out of the social-safety net, mainly due to men’s vastly shorter life expectancy but not the least because the paying for, and the awarding of, such benefits is quite plainly discriminatory against men.

   Women own 70 percent of all corporate equity, largely on account of women having inherited the wealth that deceased men passed on to them, but most importantly also because, when divorces happen, women keep kids, car, cash and castle.

   On average, men quite literally work themselves to death slaving for women, yet, they receive absolutely no credit for doing that.

All of the claims made in the list of inequities are corroborated by credible sources (all of them accessible through http://fathersforlife.org).

You are welcome to contribute links to credible sources of such information that you wish to include with your comments. F4L will ensure that appropriate links contained in your comments will work and are clickable after your comment has been posted.

Posted in Health, Censorship, Men and Women Work, Men's Issues, Feminist Jurisprudence, The New World Order, Propaganda Exposed, Feminism, Women's Violence | Print | No Comments »