Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Warren Farrell and James P. Sterba. Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? Oxford UP, 2007. xiv, 258 pp. US$16.95 (softcover)
<1> Until I began contemplating this review, I had never considered warning my readers about the content of my work despite my specialization and frequent engagement with gender, sex and sexuality. Indeed, I have been an anti-censorship advocate and I have written many times in defence of books that school boards were considering removing. Yet, I cannot cover Warren Farrell's "debate" with Daniel Sterba adequately without revealing the depth of the reductive, offensive and juvenile approach offered in the section written by Farrell and which claims to demonstrate the ways in which feminism discriminates against men. Simply put, how do I present it without presenting it? I feel the need to do more than point out that as is his norm, Farrell never mentions which (version of) feminism discriminates against men. As well, I cannot honestly treat the book without making several admissions of my own positioning. First, people who write as Farrell does make my job almost impossible, and I am certain, have cost me the opportunity for serious consideration when I have applied for tenure stream jobs in Gender Studies. Understandably, the first reaction to any male applicant has to be one of suspicion given the fraught histories of Gender Studies and of Warren Farrell. I do recall that at the first conference I attended which was devoted entirely to masculinities, the final session was on things men might appropriate from feminism and use against feminism. Even so, I believe that my effort to distance myself from "masculists" has in the end made me a better scholar; although the end hardly justifies the means and should not really be the metric within a field so dedicated to the eradication of such measures. I do fear that in the current milieu, there is actually greater acceptance for positions which suggest that feminism does discriminate against men and there is a willingness to tolerate and possibly to take seriously the kind of patently offensive material published in the first half of the Oxford UP title I am reviewing here (I also should admit that of the book reps with whom I have dealt, I probably liked my Oxford rep the best, which is too bad, because I am going to consider seriously my future dealings with them).
<2> What I fear is that my approach will give too much credence to the ugly part of the book. I am not going to comment on Sterba's half in any meaningful way because it was not presented in a fashion in which it could be meaningful itself. Sterba submitted himself to a situation in which the title and the ordering of the book sets him up at a sizeable semantic disadvantage before he begins. Moreover, the content, in which he responds to Farrell's assertions means that Farrell controls the terms and the scope of the debate. Farrell leads; Sterba follows. In what should have been an affirmative debate, Sterba is left playing a version of the schoolyard game of "yeah, but." This, too, is a terrain of Farrell's choosing and a terrain over which he is a master. For example, Farrell has taken to referring to feminists as "adolescents" because they allegedly "talk more about women's rights than responsibilities" (23). Yet, his entire oeuvre is based on nothing more than the infantile rejoinder of "so there." By couching his juvenalia in a discourse which claims to be based on a utopic vision of equality, Farrell enables himself to write some of the more ridiculous and offensive things I have read recently.
<3> In the name of gender diversity he offers up a newspaper cartoon which has the caption "things men do to annoy women" (81). Farrell wishes to claim that this cartoon is misandric and offers analogies: things Jews do to annoy Christians; things black do to annoy whites (82). The argument goes that we will not tolerate the latter so why the former? In short, Farrell's only talent is his continuing ability to point out instances of times when men are victimized as rebuttals to the supposed feminist ownership of victimization as a discourse. Who wants victimization in the first place? Victimization is no trophy. Moreover, in so doing Farrell ignores the heart of the issue: historical, institutionalized, systemic and legalized. All of these criteria still apply to the discrimination of women and the minorities Farrell cites by analogy. Yet, such criteria are very real given the ongoing the project to narrow (and eventually to eradicate) women's rights to choose and the evidence of voter tampering in the last two US presidential elections. While Farrell plays "so there," these very real and government-sanctioned projects are underway. Here, I should remind Farrell that North America's largest media conglomerates, the imagined distributors and disseminators of the man-hating, are controlled by patriarchal males who are anything but feminists. In the instances of the Fox and CanWest/Global organizations, editorial voice and control are entirely centralized with the ruling patriarchs!
<4> The misandry Farrell claims simply does not exist. [1] I would know. I researched the topic thoroughly and wrote the entry for it in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinity. If misandry exists at all, it is a racialized misandry directed against African-American, Jewish and Muslim men. Again, the key distinction is historical, institutionalized, systemic and legalized. I would remind Farrell that in Canada, the legal definition of rape was only expanded to its present scope in 1988 and so the trail of jurisprudence is still relatively fresh and the reformation of attitudes along with that legislation is still lagging behind. In emphasizing the end result - and suggesting that legislative changes such as rape shield laws are discriminatory against men is one of Farrell's favourites - as the be all and end all, Farrell is not arguing for gender diversity but is instead reinscribing a hallmark of hegemonic masculinity. I would also remind Farrell that his own country lags behind mine in terms of its legislation in this regard, both for men and for women. This brings me to a final point regarding Farrell's ownership of an infantile, "so there." The goal and the effect of such a ploy is to foreclose discourse, not to open one. The rhetorical effect (and the intent) is to end conversations, not start them. By shutting down discussion we miss the fact that the traditional definition of rape, for example, includes only women of "chaste character" and so it is no surprise that more than thirty US states fail to include male victims of sexual assaults in their legislation. In short, Farrell has it backwards. Men's freedom from gender oppression needs the feminist critique of the gender order and benefits from it.
<5> What concerns me more than Farrell's book is the audience for it. I received my copy from my Oxford rep along with an article from the National Post. My first reaction was to ask aloud why they had not asked someone capable of obliterating Farrell to be the respondent, but the obvious answer is that it would not be much of a debate. I am willing to give Oxford the benefit of the doubt in that they wanted an even fight. I will give Sterba the benefit of the doubt in that he attempted to give a collegial response to Farrell. Besides, piling on Sterba would make me little better than Farrell. That said, even if Oxford were to pick someone who is more than a match - even a lightweight like me could do it - for the next go around with Farrell - and there will be one, undoubtedly, since he has a cockroach-like ability to endure - I still wonder about the ultimate effect. In the article from the National Post, Barbara Kay takes the occasion of Remembrance Day (Veterans Day in the US) to celebrate "the traditional male virtues of honour, gallantry, steadfastness, stoicism, brotherhood and chivalry." She then goes on to say that our soldiers represent the best of our country has to offer but
As Remembrance Day annually reminds us, war is the least attractive method for resolving group hostilities. If a truce between the sexes is to be achieved, the public's sympathy must be engaged bilaterally. The media must recognize its culpability here, and reform their demonstrable ideological partisanship, which encourages misandry amongst women and social tension in general.
Through the journalistic magic of transductive reasoning and a rhetorical leap that Johnny Cochrane might envy, Kay concludes that our soldiers are risking their lives for our traditions overseas but at home the rest of us are waging war against traditional men like them. For this insight, Kay confides, we have Warren Farrell to thank.
<6> It is precisely this sort of cheap, quick, jingoistic journalism that frightens me. The National Post has one of the top three circulations in Canada and it is part of an intertextual web which includes TV and internet in addition to traditional print journalism. In its daily contacts, it has far more reach and impact than the sort of academic debate I am engaging in right now. Who is my audience? Moreover, what will my audience do about it? When I forwarded the article and additional information to the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) email listserv the posting received absolutely no replies. This is despite the fact that the National Post had just weeks earlier raised the ire of CACS members by running a piece which questioned the funding of the Humanities. That post received dozens of replies and the call for the immediate addition of a panel at the next CACS conference. Of course, the conference is months distant and the panel affords the same circle the opportunity to reassure themselves that they are righteous in their indignation. When the purse strings were under attack, the academics responded with outrage. Yet, this valuation, which at its heart privileges economic concerns over all other concerns, itself is a masculine economy. When the actual material existences of "the masses" might be at stake, the response was largely silence. [2] I am not willing to discount the power of the press in shaping popular opinion given an atmosphere in which North America's ruling conservative regimes regularly inoculate audiences through leaks to the press a la Judith Miller. I know that in my own country the roughly contemporaneous closing of offices of the Women's Directorate did not attract nearly as much attention as did the questioning of Humanities' funding. Are academics really that disconnected from popular audiences? Is activism no longer a requirement for doing Cultural Studies? If feminism oppresses Warren Farrell, I want to join.
Works Cited
CBC News. "DNA pioneer's lecture cancelled after comments on race." 18 Oct. 2007. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/10/18/science-watson-controversy.html.
Kay, Barbara. "An Embattled Champion Of Male Values." National Post. 7 Nov. 2007. Available nationalpost.ca.
Notes
[1] It is worth noting that in his section Farrell claims to have testified on behalf of men during divorce trials. Child custody hearings are allegedly among the most misandric practices. If Farrell's testimony is given credence, then the threat posed by his project increases since it could become de facto legislation. This would be a complete reversal of the cause-effect chain or more simply, a definition by exclusion. In other words, where the historical, legislated, systemic and institutionalized discrimination against men does not exist and therefore cannot provide a basis for claims of misandry, if accepted Farrell's testimony that misandry exists could become the basis for judicial decisions against it. [^]
[2] A similar silence met my forwarding of articles pertaining to Dr. James Watson, of Crick and Watson fame, and his lecture at London's Science Museum in October, 2007, regarding the human genome project's likely discovery that non-whites are inferior intellectually: "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really" (qtd in CBC). Watson, one-half of the team that cracked the DNA molecule, assured his audience that such a discovery is inevitable in the next ten years. I forwarded the news to my colleagues to see if their reaction to the Remembrance Day piece was an aberration. It was not. I was not surprised. When one of the more vicious anti-choice groups has visited my own university in the last three years, the Women's Studies students have looked to me - a dissident, disaffected untenured hetero male - for their source of faculty support in mounting a response. Again, efforts to inform colleagues about the ongoing threat to women's right to choose - which on our campus includes an unstated policy which means the Women's Studies Student Society cannot have a pro-choice mandate - have been met with silence and inaction.
The pattern continues to repeat. A March 2008 decision to not grant tenure to an American academic led to calls on the CACS listserv for letter and email campaigns and petitions. Several parties, including me, attempted to broaden the debate beyond the usual treatment of symptoms and into a discussion of the general erosion of academic positions of any kind. The current two-tiered system means that retirements, resignations, etc. are being replaced with non-tenure positions. We can't debate tenure decisions if tenure heads towards extinction. Almost predictably, this discussion had two effects: one, it was misread as an argument against tenure or, two, the idea of a larger problem requiring palpable action was completely lost.[^]
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