Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say
By Warren Farrell.
New York City: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, November 1999.
Warren
Farrell has written another stunning blockbuster of a book. And yet
it's a bit more complicated than that. The current position of men as
well as of the still somewhat nascent/moribund men's rights movement
seems so problematic that Farrell apparently chose to make this work
as broadly relevant as possible by somewhat surprisingly combining pop
psychology with confrontation of feminist falsehoods. Farrell thus
appears at times to be seeking to help us closer to the promised land
of genuine gender equality by offering us a book which can be all
things to all people, or at least more things to more people than any
one book could normally be expected to satisfy. The genius of the book
is that while not entirely successful at everything it attempts, it
nevertheless pulls off a remarkably enlightening blend of the
self-help and political analysis strands. The author manages to
present an unapologetic masculist perspective while simultaneously
maximizing the palatability of his message. It's quite an impressive
feat.
After an admirably pithy state-of-masculinity
summary of men's current position in American society, Farrell cuts to
the chase and presents a detailed program to improve communication
techniques between the sexes. The most critical and most
therapeutically neglected aspect is learning to handle personal
criticism from one's partner. These ideas appear to owe a heavy (if
unacknowledged) debt to the doctrine of "conscious listening," far
from a novelty in self-help circles. And yet Farrell manages to
provide so many useful nuances and writes so beautifully that this
section still shines. Moreover, its location in a book by Warren
Farrell and prior to some heavier duty masculist material accentuates
its importance. Interestingly, Farrell appears to be applying some of
the information from his most unabashedly radical book to date, The
Myth of Male Power, to the relationship context. In the style of his
more accessible, earlier book, Why Men Are the Way They Are (my
personal introduction to masculist writing), he also includes
male-bashing excerpts from contemporary advertisements and popular
media.
The man does have QUITE the way with words.
Labeling, he tells us, is the lobotomy of our soul. Men are offered a
choice between disposability and powerlessness. Women's feelings are
called both education and entertainment, while men's are repressed
until they become ulcers. Only our daughters are taught to be both
entitled AND angry. In one particular felicitious phrasing that sums
up the goals of many of us in the gender equity movement, he writes:
"Ultimately, this book is about both sexes speaking and both sexes
listening in a radically different way. But prior to the 'ultimately,'
there are reasons why men are the silent sex..."
Surprisingly, argument-provoking feelings are
predominantly expressed by women. Men are more inhibited by angry
women and less comfortable with emotional confrontation. Farrell
states that his goal "is to create a method of communicating that
transforms anger in the way a solar panel transforms heat--by taking
intense heat that would normally leave us hot one moment and cold the
next, and transforming it into energy that keeps us warm all the
time."
Farrell includes a primer on how to get in touch
with one's feelings. (I must confess I do wonder how many men will
actually learn to connect with their emotions by reading a book, but I
suppose everyone must start somewhere.) He explains in detail the
value of men's groups. Farrell provides the rules of the game for
giving criticism so that it can be heard. He never misses a chance to
personalize his points by supplying examples from his own life and
relationships, including a detailed and very humanizing portrait of
his own father.
Later in the book, in the style of his last and most
radical book, The Myth of Male Power, Farrell moves into debunking the
"second shift" myth and the myth that men commit the overwhelming
percentage of domestic violence, adding advice to both sections to
promote male-female relationships. Farrell has unearthed some
fascinating information, such as outright fraud by both the United
Nations and Second Shift author Arlie Hochschild to perpetuate the
second shift mythology.
Farrell never falls into the trap of writing a
blaming book. He notes that regarding the definition of "housework,"
for example, anger toward men is also perpetuated by MEN'S blindness
to the fact that their contributions need to be seen and appreciated
so that BOTH partners in a relationship can benefit. To promote this
possibility, Farrell provides an exhaustive (if not exhausting)
fifty-four-item "male housework" list.
Including a very useful appendix compiling ALL the
two-sex randomized studies of domestic violence completed to date,
Farrell notes the ignorance of feminists who claim that men believe
they are entitled to batter. Men who batter, he notes, represent a
BREAKDOWN of the male role. Thus it is intriguing that in a phenomenal
100% of all advertisements in which only one sex is hitting the other,
it is women who are beating men.
Both men and women, we learn, devalue the importance
of male injuries. Farrell even mentions in passing that the learned
helpless and battered (wo)men's syndromes which feminists have
inserted into the laws would more properly be applied to men. And, of
course, it is well documented, to feminists' evident discomfiture,
that significantly MORE violence occurs with lesbian couples than with
heterosexual ones. Finally, he explains why "battered women's
syndrome" insults women's intelligence by implying that they are not
smart enough to leave their husbands while the men are at work, on a
business trip, etc.
Why is it, as Farrell asks in yet another devilishly
effective formulation, that when a rich older man marries a younger
women we speak of him as robbing the cradle, but we don't say that she
is robbing the bank? Almost every woman who marries thinks on her
wedding day that it is at least likely that her husband's potential
earnings will exceed hers.
By this point, Farrell resembles a prizefighter on a
phenomenal roll, landing one telling blow after another. He follows a
thought-provoking analysis of anti-male greeting cards with a pithy
summary of how men's attitudes toward sex parallel women's attitudes
toward money. And yet when a woman marries a millionaire we
congratulate her, while "in men's area of addiction, sex... there is
no arena in which we have been more judgmental..."
The men's movement has tossed around comparisons of
feminism with Naziism for years, but in one awesomely succinct
passage, Farrell responds to the cover of the book, "No Good Men," by
creating the parodies, "No Good Blacks" and "No Good Jews." Farrell
notes, "We might think the difference in our reaction [to these three
potential book covers] has to do with the perception of men as all-
powerful, but it was exactly that perception of Jews [as all-
powerful] that led to the passive acceptance of such slurs in Nazi
Germany." Later, he adds a great, reasoned comparison of feminism and
Naziism, acknowledging that the analogy is far from perfect, but
noting that some disturbing similarities DO exist.
Farrell provides some fascinating detective work
documenting that, despite the intentional obscuring of this fact by
federal data collection categories, women may kill their husbands more
frequently than they are killed by them. Provocatively, the author
categorized as "domestic violence, female style" such acts as
reputation ruining through false accusations of abuse, career
destruction, and psychological abuse. Farrell labels as "the great
inequality" the fact that women's misuse of their "relationship power"
to triumph in and control arguments is legal, while men's misuse of
their physical power is illegal.
So why are women so angry? Many women are socialized
to expect a prince. When men turn out not to be princes but rather
flawed human beings, the women feel betrayed. In another felicitous
phrase, "women's dream of being swept away is swept away." Today we
have created a sexual double standard which is much more lenient
toward women's affairs then men's, even where the affair puts children
at risk and betrays a loving father. Thus men's problems ruin them,
and men are also held responsible for women's problems. Women's
magazines teach women to seduce their boss, then sue for harassment.
So why haven't men changed? Men haven't changed,
Farrell shows, because men's options haven't changed. We have expanded
women's freedoms and men's obligations, then complained that men
haven't changed. THAT, Farrell notes, must change.
Farrell's last, longest, and most devastating
chapter sketches out the remarkable power of the "Lace Curtain,"
feminism's equally totalitarian, and equally one-sided, answer to
communism's Iron Curtain. Driven by government, education, the media,
and the helping professions, the Lace Curtain runs on victim power and
the "genetic celebrity" power possessed by attractive women.
The results? Justice is murdered, and the reasons
explaining WHY men earn more than women are suppressed. The causes of
men dying seven years earlier than women are ignored. We have women's
studies and no men's studies. Overprotection infantilizes our
daughters. In the end, nobody wins.
Inevitably, Farrell's balancing act between
self-help talk and political talk does not fully succeed all the time.
Nits can always be picked. With his talk of "conscientious feminists,"
he is a bit too charitable towards the realities of the current
women's movement. For my taste, he also throws a few too many sops to
women--a title which implicitly faults men for our predicament today,
his talk of "men's blindness" perpetuating anger toward men, his
questionable statement that men are the passive-aggressive sex.
Occasionally Farrell's suggestions seem a bit silly. Perhaps this is
only because the ideas are so novel, but what would affirmative action
to encourage men to express their feelings look like?
But these are minor complaints indeed. Farrell's
genius is to note feminism's six unspoken rules: Define the issues;
define an oppressor; sell feminism as the champion of the oppressed;
always open options for women; never close options for women; when
something is wrong, never hold women responsible.
Where to go from here? Farrell does retain hope for
a gender transition movement which will transform society. Peppered
throughout the book are suggestions and proposals for change and
political action, many of which may seem idealistic or hopeless in the
present climate. And yet since we got here, Farrell seems to be
saying, there has to be a path back out. Radio (and perhaps the
Internet?) provide our last main bastions against the Lace Curtain.
Men can only get there from here if they do their
homework and have the courage to take their perspectives to the
outside world and ask for women to join them. "Men can't say what men
don't know, and women can't hear what men don't say." Thus concludes
our most celebrated writer's latest brilliant, complex stab at
unravelling anti-male sexism and leading us toward a brighter future.
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
