Well SJF,

I thought I was almost unshockable, so congradulations on being able to shock me. I was left rather dumbfounded and speechless.

However he wrote that stuff over thirty years ago and I have not seen it mentioned in his recent books that I have read.

Psychologist Toby Green in her book "how to snap out it" also wrote something on incest that well is not particular comfortable and I would imagine would make you pretty mad and I dont wish to post or even quote.

Remind me never to really try to annoy you again.

"Perhaps I failed to notice this while ploughing through your 100s of posts which portray feminists as the most evil creatures that ever walked the earth and as the greatest threat to manhood ever to materialise in the entire history of the world."

I suppose not to annoy you I should just agree with what you wrote, but I really do feel that you have exaggerated my position just a little bit, well to be more honest I feel that you have exaggerated my position quite a lot.

Alot of the material I quote is written by other women, who do not support the excesses of feminism. Yeah I know not all feminists are the same and that there are different types of feminism.

Just today I was glancing through Marie Clarie mag and saw a picture of a man trussed up like a turkey hanging from a tree, but that sort of flys under the radar for most people.

Now let’s see … feminists of all flavours (with the exception of Vanilla ;-), want to specify the criteria for equality, go out and find the best man they possibly can, only to struggle for equality for the rest of their lives.

OK, not all. Some want to convince the state to be counterparty to every marriage and every other inter-gender commercial or social transaction. I guess those feminists instinctively seek out the most equal man to start with, but if personal development takes them in different directions or if their pace of growth is at all mismatched, expect the state to assist with transition to some renewed state of equilibrium.

And then of course, there are those who think that majority of men are fish out of water on bicycles and want nothing at all to do with them, so spend most of their lives criticising and belittling them. They criticise the so-called patriarchal society without ever acknowledging their roles or influences (and never ever, responsibility). How could they, it might suggest equality.

One thing seems fairly certain. Judging by the heated gender debates here on OLO and elsewhere, most feminists prefer focusing on, and building upon perceptions of inequality, rather than taking their equality seriously. It was SJF who said “Because Western women are still unequal in every sense other than legally…”, but never bothered to explain it when asked, presumably because it would take her away from her “inequality” whine. There’s never any sense of hypocrisy, nor any hint of irony, in hardline feminist peddling of disadvantage and insecurity to women who’ve previously perceived some reasonable balance. For me, it is indistinguishable from commercial attacks on the female body image. Especially ads like this, which scream out life is short, and it just may be better to die young in a nice body and boots (even in a car boot), then grow old into some bitter lonely old feminist.

It is both illuminating and depressing for those of us who’ve had no gender studies at uni, to participate in these threads. One can’t help but be overwhelmed by sheer enormity of issues and hyperbole. Sometimes we are dumped on by all three waves of feminism together with men’s rights and their incestuous fantasies, all at once. Then there’s unpaid work, and pay inequality. Seems feminism does indeed work in mysterious ways. Scary.

As a father of two daughters and a son, who are fast approaching but somewhat unprepared for adulthood, I’m all at sea.

James I did some chasing around about that comment.
I've not found anything that I can definately attribute to Farrell on it but have found him quoted by others (including some fierce detractors) which indicated that Farrell claimed that the word used in the interview was not the one he used. No clear answer on that which I've been able to pick.

My impression of what I did find was that Farrell was doing investigation into the impacts of incest. It was treated as one of those ultimate abuses, all who pass beyond will perish etc. Farrell interviewed a bunch of people who had experienced incest to find out their perspectives. He's apparently not released his findings other than that interview but the impression I've gained is that he found that the consequences were more diverse than was acceptable to acknowledge.

Some silly comments in the interview combined with what appears to something similar to what happened with McKinnon and Dorkin's comments about sex and violence which appear to have been embelished by their detractors to paint a more extreme view than was actually expressed.

I'm still undecided about exactly what he believed at the time about incest but regardless that does not take away from the validity of much of what's in The Myth of Male Power.

R0bert

R0bert

‘I've not found anything that I can definately attribute to Farrell on it but have found him quoted by others (including some fierce detractors) which indicated that Farrell claimed that the word used in the interview was not the one he used. No clear answer on that which I've been able to pick.’

I’m not sure what era you went to school but when I went, I was taught that direct quotes are those groups of words that have little squiggly bits at each end. Go back to the ORIGINAL Penthouse article and you’ll find those squiggly bits around statements that Farrell made about ‘positive incest’, which I included in my post (and others that I didn’t include). There is a very ‘clear answer’ there that you are choosing not to see.

And as for his being misquoted by Penthouse, where is the law suit? Where is his request for a retraction? When denying the claims, Farrell changed his story at least once and threatened, slandered and intimidated the feminist who outed him. Then he just went quiet.

This is a man who has styled himself as a guru of modern gender politics. That means he, like Caesar’s wife, should be squeaky clean as a role model. OR, failing that, he should either take some responsibility for his former published views or explain his position. Instead, he did neither. Like so much of the self-pitying rhetoric of the Mens Movement, he blamed everyone but himself

JamesH

I posted my reply to R0bert first, because the points I raised lead into this post. I’m not concerned about whether Warren Farrell is, or is not, a pedophile or a sleazebag. What I am concerned about is that he gave clear indications in the Penthouse article that the young girls in his study were NOT BEING TRUTHFUL (aka ‘selective’) in their reporting of incest, and that the men who enjoyed their incest did so simply because they ‘see relationships differently’. There are other indications in the article (not included in my post) that he believed girls tend to respond negatively to incest merely because of social pressure or, worse, the reaction of the mother.

These are all embedded patriarchal viewpoints that show a chilling lack of a sense of emotional responsibility, or any empathy with women.

There are clear parallels here between the views he expressed in the Penthouse article and the views he expresses about women (particularly, feminists) and men, in his later writings – basically that women are being selective about their disadvantage (i.e. they’re not disadvantaged at all) and that men just see things differently from women (i.e. they're not advantaged at all).

When it comes to sympathetic writing on the human condition as it affects the modern man – minus all the anti-female, anti-feminist hysteria used by the likes of Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers to deliberately cloud the issue – I strongly recommend Susan Faludi’s ‘Stiffed’ or R.W. Connell’s ‘Gender Politics for Men’.

Seeker

‘It was SJF who said “Because Western women are still unequal in every sense other than legally…”, but never bothered to explain it when asked, presumably because it would take her away from her “inequality” whine.’

Presume whatever you like. I make a point of not rising to ‘explain yourself’ baits. Nine times out of ten, they are empty provocations, not genuine requests for clarity.