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Warren Farrell, whose 1993 book The Myth of Male Power essentially set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement we know (and don’t love) today, did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit yesterday.
Most of the questions he chose to answer were pretty much softballs, and his answers largely reiterated things he’s said before many times. But he was also asked some pointed questions about his views on incest which he chose to answer. Well, sort of. Instead of clearing up the issue, he dug his hole a little deeper.
[TRIGGER WARNING for incest/child abuse apologia.]
Some backstory: As longtime readers of this blog know, Farrell spent several years in the 1970s researching a book about incest, which ultimately never appeared. In 1977, Farrell gave an interview to, of all things, Penthouse magazine, in which he tried to explain his “findings” and his views on the topic generally. The interview revealed that Farrell at the time had some exceedingly creepy views on incest and child sexual abuse.
If you haven’t read my post on the subject, going through the interview in detail, I suggest you take a few moments to read it now. (Here’s a transcript of the entire Penthouse article; in my post you can find links to high-quality scans of the original magazine pages – in case anyone still doubts he said what he indeed said.)
In short, Farrell believed there were “positive” aspects to incest that weren’t being talked about because society deemed the topic “taboo.” Indeed, the working title of Farrell’s book was The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest.
In the past, Farrell has been, to say the least, a bit evasive when it comes to clarifying what he meant by some of the most troubling comments in the Penthouse interview, and would seem to prefer that all evidence of his interest in the issue of incest vanish down Orwell’s famous memory hole.
On Reddit, Farrell was presented with a perfect opportunity to set the record straight, both on his views on incest and child sexual abuse generally as well as on a number of specific quotes. (Note: as you’ll see, most of the first quote listed is the Penthouse author’s paraphrase, but the rest are all directly from Farrell.)
In his response, Farrell addresses none of the quotes directly, and his comments raise more questions than they answer.
“Excellent questions,” he says, before going on to answer none of them. Let’s break down his non-answer.
bottom-line, i did this research when my research skills as a new Ph.D. were in the foreground and my raising two daughters was in the future. had i and my wife helped raise two daughters first, the intellectual interest would have evaporated. life teaches; children teach you more. 🙂
He starts off by mentioning his Ph.D., though he doesn’t mention that it was in political science and not psychology. Moreover, his discussions of his research in the Penthouse interview suggest that his methodology was anything but scientific.
His reference to his daughters seems to suggest that if he had had children he would have realized that there really was no “positive” aspect to incest. One might have assumed he would have picked up on this when the overwhelming majority of the women he interviewed “admitted to having negative attitudes toward their incest,” as the Penthouse article delicately puts it.
Farrell ends this paragraph with a smiley, as if the years he spent trying to find examples of “positive” incest were all just a harmless misunderstanding.
now, for some depth. i haven’t published anything on this research because i saw from the article from which you are quoting how easy it was to have the things i said about the way the people i interviewed felt be confused with what i felt.
This is completely disingenuous. It’s not uncommon to find sexual abusers who’ve convinced themselves that the abuse they inflicted upon children was a good thing for their victims, and most people who write about the subject have no problem distinguishing their views from the abusers and abuse apologists they report on.
No, the really disturbing things about Farrell’s interview are the statements in which he expresses his own opinions on the subject. For example, this quote (referenced in the questions on Reddit), in which he describes some of what he evidently sees as the negative aspects of the incest “taboo.”
[M]illions of people … are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really a part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves. Maybe this needs repressing, and maybe it doesn’t. My book should at least begin the exploration.
You can see that whole quote in context in the original article here. Farrell now claims that he didn’t say “genitally” but “generally,” though if you replace that one word in that quote it’s scarcely any better.
The Penthouse article also contains this astounding quote from him:
“When I get my most glowing positive cases, 6 out of 200,” says Farrell, “the incest is part of the family’s open, sensual style of life, wherein sex is an outgrowth of warmth and affection. It is more likely that the father has good sex with his wife, and his wife is likely to know and approve — and in one or two cases to join in.”
And this:
“Incest is like a magnifying glass,” he summarizes. “In some circumstances it magnifies the beauty of a relationship, and in others it magnifies the trauma.”
In some circumstances it magnifies the beauty. Farrell gives absolutely no indication here that he is explaining someone else’s views; it seems to be what he himself believes. And until and unless he specifically addresses this quote it is hard to read it any other way.
Let’s go back to Farrell’s “answer.”
i have always been opposed to incest, and still am … .
That’s true, at least to an extent. In the Penthouse article, even though he seems to agree with many of the abusers’ rationalizations for their abuse, he does state specifically that he’s
not recommending incest between parent and child, and especially not between father and daughter.
But then he goes on to say this:
The great majority of fathers can grasp the dynamics of positive incest ‘intellectually’. But in a society that encourages looking at women in almost purely sexual terms, I don’t believe they can translate this understanding into practice.
As far as I can figure it, he’s saying that he’s opposed to father-daughter incest because in today’s sexist society it’s … hard for fathers to do incest properly? If that can be seen as being “opposed to incest” I guess he is opposed. I would love some clarification from Farrell on this point.
Back to Farrell’s answers on Reddit. After sort of, kind of, suggesting maybe his research was a bad idea (in that part above about his daughters) he returns to defending it:
but i was trying to be a good researcher and ask people about their experience without the bias of assuming it was negative or positive.
Really? Seeing abuse as abuse is “bias?” Would you consider it reasonable to study, say, murder, or violent assault, or even someone falling to their death off a mountain “without the bias of assuming it was negative or positive?” Or is it just sexual abuse of young girls and boys that merits such “objectivity?”
And yes, though Farrell now portrays himself as an advocate for both men and boys, he told the Penthouse interviewer that “boys don’t seem to suffer” from sexual abuse — sorry, incest. (That quote is a paraphrase of Farrell’s views from the Penthouse author.)
And then comes this amazing bit, in which he suggests that his interest in challenging the “taboo” of incest was in some ways inspired by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s – because on some level the sexual abuse of children is roughly similar to gay sex between consenting adults?
i had learned this from the misinformation we had gotten about gay people by working from the starting assumption of its dysfunction.
Amazing, just amazing.
You might think that Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers would be appalled by Farrell’s creepy non-answer. Nope. Most of them seem to think he addressed all possible concerns with the issue, with one poster getting dozens of upvotes for suggesting that MRAs bookmark “Dr Farrell’s response to the incest (mis)quote … for easy reference!”
It wasn’t a misquote, and his “response” was worse than no response at all.
The apologies for Farrell’s non-answer aren’t surprising. Other MRAs who are familiar with the interview have also gone to great lengths to explain it away; indeed, one of Farrell’s fans went as far as suggesting that “Penthouse was not always “pornographic” and to characterise it as that is just to demonise and imply that the article as being far more overtly sexual that it was.”
I will repeat what I said last time I wrote about Farrell: if he disagrees with any of my conclusions here, or feels he wishes to clarify or explicitly repudiate anything or everything in the Penthouse article, I’m offering him a chance to explain himself here in a post on this blog — in his own words, unedited.
Looks like a. Emma follows this blog and b. Kittehs rather upset her. It’s always funny when people are both really critical of others and hypersensitive themselves.
@ cloudiah
I will bet you pretend money that if you put that up in the Jobs section on craigslist you’d get responses thinking it was a real job that you were actually hiring for.
Cloudiah wins today’s internet. How would like it gift-wrapped?
Emma has hurt feelings? Aw, my heart just bleeds for her.
Aw… emma has hurt fee-fees? She trolls her readers, supports GGG and says she deserves a medal for fucking, and expects us to be gentle to her?
She, who has said any number of intentionally mean things to/about us?
Imagine my horror and my shame.
Actually I think the job duties are wrong. Too hamster-friendly, not enough negging. 😉
I might in theory support the awarding of a medal for fucking in the sense of “is really good at fucking”. Not so much in the sense of “fucked people who I wanted to fuck anyway, expected praise for doing so”.
Also, does the hamster have its own hamster which it uses to justify not running on the wheel when it’s feeling lazy? And, to keep this analogy MRA-friendly, is the hamster’s hamster a tiny woman in a miniskirt and heels?
Ok, I’ve tried to analyze words of Dworkin on incest to try to understand where does this call for non sexist soft incest comes from and people accused me to do it in the only purpose of harming feminists (which would have been very unfair, we could accuse feminists of many things but pro-pedophilia stuff is at least one thing feminists have never been globally involved in).
If no one wants (or is able) to discuss seriously about this subject, I will just add my part in the game which consists of accusing people of horrible things.
Did Farrell could have been inspired “by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s”? The subject of pedophilia apologia and gay movements of this area is mainly unknown nowadays.
The most disturbing pedophilia apologia I’ve seen is an interview of Tony Duvert by Guy Hocquenghem published in the newspaper “Libération” (a well known leftist French journal) in 1979. It would deserve a complete translation in English. And – Hey! – It could interest Manboobz, there’s some good piece of misogyny in it :
“We must prevent women from having an exclusive right on children […] I know a child and if the woman is opposed to the relationship I have with him, it’s absolutely not because of the sex, it’s because I “take” him from her. It’s a power issue. To say it in other words, they take a doll and they keep it.”
http://www.bafweb.com/Lib19790410.html
That kind of stuff is unknown, even in France. No one knows that a pedophile writer have been interviewed by a gay activist in a well-known left newspaper to say of much he loves 8-years-old boys and how much he hates those mothers who try to forbid him to bang their sons. No one remembers, no one feel the need to confront all these people who said and enabled other people to say really wicked things.
I suppose it’s because it would be homophobic to do that.
Sorry, hamster does not speak French. Hamster eats people pretending to be French, because it had a traumatic experience during the Bush administration. Run for your life.
Cassandra: I have certainly wanted to award one to people who were great in the sack. As you say, that’s not the same as saying, “everyone said he was awful, and he told me if he had a fuck-buddy he’d be not horrible, and I wanted to fuck him, and now he’s not horrible to me, lavish me with praise”.
But she also says things like this:
And expects people to say this isn’t misogynistic, not at all. Saying a man has female qualities=having a twisted moral compass means the word is dead neutral.
I see a moral compass which is out of whack, and I don’t think it’s mine.
If no one wants (or is able) to discuss seriously about this subject,
We did, you bullshitted, we called it a day.
@ pecunium
My friends from my college/clubbing in London years used to distribute imaginary Bedroom Olympics medals. I’m sure that was probably misandrist of us (just don’t tell me we have to fuck one of Emma’s pet incels as punishment, because it ain’t happening).
Yeah, Cassandra, I saw that earlier today when I decided to take a page from you book and actually read through her site. You’d think she’d have a thicker skin, what with her finding sterotypes and generalizations so humorous.
Brz, you still here and pretending to be French?
I read your bullshit and I can’t decide which is more disgustingly disengenuous: 1) your weasel-worded conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia or 2) your accusatory insinuation that a failure to call out the writings of a person I/we may never have even heard of is somehow tacit support of their beliefs and/or positions.
Like Pecunium said, you’re full of shit.
Nobiyamu: Thre is also that, if one reads the article, one sees the elision in the quotation he translated, completely changes the meaning.
What? I am shocked, shocked I tell you. Brz is such a paragon of authenticity and “truthiness.”
To be fair, his not speaking French is part of the problem.
Still in the interview of Tony Duvert :
“Guy Hocquenghem : There is something striking in “Jonathan”. It’s this mother which I see as the prototype itself of the modern mother. Like in “the Atlantic island”, there is a certain aloofness of the fathers; we have the clear impression that the true cause of the familial repression, it’s the mother
Tony Duvert: Absolutely, I will say something very unpleasant : it’s not even the mother, it’s really the “woman” I aim at. The woman as a schoolteacher, as a person who have an exclusive right on little children, in the nurseries, in the infant schools and in a general way in all primary schools (there’s a huge majory of schoolmistresses, there’s almost no guys). We can say that a child until 12-13 years-old sees only women, live in the women. There’s a kind of matriarcat which dominate the prepuberal. And from this point of view, this book, “the Atlantic island”, is a book against women. Not at all an antifeminist book, on the contrary : a book against women’s social roles. The social roles with the child, with the familly in general.
I don’t want that we call mysoginist the war against female little cops and against female kapos, there’s no link”
Look, these gay activits were Mras!
Cassandra, you’ve clicked around Emma Emo’s blog, did you ever look around judgybitch’s? And, if so, whose did you find more head-shakingly pathetic?
“one sees the elision in the quotation he translated, completely changes the meaning.”
No, the elision don’t change the meaning.
@ Nobinayamu
Never checked out judgybitch’s blog. Is it as pointless and annoying as she is when she comments here?
Oh, has Emma had a whinge about me being a mean meanie? She who wants women to hate themselves?. I thought half the point of being an emo was that you were chronically miserable, misunderstood and put-upon. She should be grateful!
😀
*scrolls back up*
*reads exceprt closely*
*reads longer excerpt closely*
So, you claim you understand that words have meaning?
Honestly, on a certain level, I do sort of feel bad for self-dubbed “incels” because, yeah, I remember being in my early 20’s and terribad at any kind of romantical endeavor and thinking that because I’d finished college and had to move back in with my parents at least 100+ miles away from all my friends because I was pretty broke meant that I would NEVER meet anyone EVER and I was pathetic for being a virgin still and blah blah blah my life was horrible, etc. I remember feeling lonely and desperate and utterly wretched. I admit, I was pretty damn whiny and honestly, probably lost a few friends due to my incessant need to engage in my self-pitying downward spirals (and in retrospect, I don’t really blame them, I wasn’t terribly fun to hang around like that).
But I also remember NOT having an entitled sense of being owed help finding a boyfriend, NOT writing to my government with vague threats of violence if they didn’t provide me with an adequate romance, NOT coercing anyone into sex via blackmail, NOT attacking my parents for not setting me up with guys and NOT nursing a hatred for my preferred gender. Which is not to say that I am somehow super awesome, those are like basic qualities necessary for claiming human decency, just, I think demonstrative of how someone yes, CAN be extremely lonely and still not turn totally into a fully loathsome person. I also remember a lot of very smart people who I wish I’d listened to way sooner, telling me “you are YOUNG, there is plenty of time for that stuff when you get older if you want” or “so what if you wind up being single all your life? Lots of single people do lots of awesome things”. No, there’s no guarantee that had I heeded that advice sooner that I’d have found my beau any sooner or found the kind of relationship I have with my beau any sooner, but when I focused on other shit I at least wasn’t miserable, which was a HUGE step up and got me a lot closer to learning to be happy. Focusing on the problem nonstop was what made it eighty bajillion times worse. I kind of hold Emma in particular contempt for being someone who ENCOURAGES that kind of misery in people so that way she can feel like she’s their rescuer. It’s extremely fucked up.
On the main topic – agreed with others, incest isn’t necessarily something I’m opposed to at base, but I feel that generally, even if it IS between adults, unless they didn’t grow up together, the relationship can be naturally coercive because of the way power structures in families sometimes play out. I’m generally hard pressed to believe that it’s common for many cases of incest to be totally coercion free. Not impossible, just rare, I think.
Also, Brz, if you’re looking for English tutors, I have a very hard time believing there aren’t any in, where was it you said you were currently? Cambridge, MA? That’s a college town, post adverts in the English department at your university. Of course, you’ll probably have to pay them and they probably won’t want to be negged about Dworkin, but they’d probably be much more effective. I’m also very hard pressed to believe that there aren’t English for non-native speakers courses at the university. The university I work at doesn’t have any, but from what I understand, we’re something of a rarity among more prominent institutions. If nothing else, libraries in a lot of bigger cities tend to have language classes as well. Of course, seeking out a real English tutor won’t give you an excuse to troll, so there is that disadvantage as well.
LOL I just read Emma’s whine about what we said. Looks like reading for comprehension isn’t her strong point, either. Maybe she should sign up to a remedial English class along with all the other trolls.
Hey dumbass kid, if you’re reading this: it wasn’t your sexual preferences I said you shoud STFU about, it was lumping people into the nonexistent Greek system and telling women to hate themselves. Oh, and hypergamy, which doesn’t exist either.
Hating women is pathetic and she’s just playing to the MRM audience and pretending to be so cool doing it. Not exactly the rebel, is she?
I’m not a student, I do go to an “English for non-native speakers course” one time per week, though, just for pretending that I’m doing something here.
Anyway, I prefer to learn English by chatting with pleasant people (you) on the Internet because I just can’t stand earing an American mouth uttering any sound : first, because the way they speak is really ugly, especially women, secondly, because they’re particularly stupid, even the “educated” ones and thirdly because they seem to do not understand neither sarcasm, neither humor, neither everything that can have a relation with ideas.
I prefer to read your crap in a written form, I can remove your accent in my head and keep a comfortable distant from your stupidity.