No book has had more influence over the Men’s Rights movement than Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power. Published in 1993, in the heyday of the early 90s antifeminist backlash, it set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement as it’s developed over the last two decades. He’s the one who came up with the notions of “male disposability” and the “death professions.” He’s the one who got MRAs fixated on the issue of draft registration.
Indeed, so pervasive has his influence been that if you see an MRA making a dumb argument anywhere on the Internet, the chances are probably more than 50-50 that it originated in the pages of Farrell’s book. Despite its age, and its eccentricity, The Myth of Male Power is still the first book recommended to MRA newbies in the sidebar of the Men’s Rights subreddit, the most active MRA hangout online.
It’s a book that deserves a lot more attention than I have been giving it on this blog. Sure, I’ve written about Farrell’s strange and creepy notions about incest, as set forth in a notorious interview in Penthouse in the 1970s, and about his recent attempts to explain away these views. But I haven’t devoted any blog posts to his most influential work. I intend to rectify that now, with a series of posts on some of Farrell’s chief arguments and assertions.
I will start with several posts on Farrell’s views on rape, which has been the subject of much controversy of late. This part will deal with his general statements on rape and sexuality; another will explore in more detail his views on date rape (did he really describe it as “exciting?”); and still another will look at the vast assortment of things he has inappropriately compared to rape.
Pinning down what Farrell “really believes” about rape – and indeed, about almost anything– is difficult. Farrell’s arguments, such as they are, are slippery and evasive. Instead of setting forth a clear argument about rape, Farrell instead provides us with a series of jumbled metaphors and strange comparisons. Instead of trying to summarize them – many of them defy summary — let’s just go through them one by one.
Farrell supporters will likely suggest that these quotes are taken “out of context,” to which I can only say: Check his book to see for yourself. None of his troubling quotes are any less troubling, or for that matter any clearer, in context, and many don’t have much of a context. Farrell writes in a rambling, free-associational style, and many of the “arguments” he makes in the following quotes seem to come from out of the blue, and are never developed further (though some, as you will see, are referenced again in later quotes).
Page numbers given are from the 1993 hardcover edition of The Myth of Male Power.
All that out of the way, let’s jump right in:
Near the start of his book , Farrell sets the tone for what will come by suggesting that men suffer as much sexual trauma from women’s mixed signals as women do from rape:
Feminism has taught women to sue men for sexual harassment or date rape when men initiate with the wrong person or with the wrong timing; no one has taught men to sue women for sexual trauma for saying “yes,” then “no,” then “yes.” … Men [are] still expected to initiate, but now, if they [do] it badly, they could go to jail. (p. 16)
Here, he elaborates on the notion that rape is a matter of bad timing, of “tak[ing] risks too quickly.”
In the past, both sexes were anxious about sex and pregnancy. Now the pill minimizes her anxiety and condoms increase his. Now the pimple faced boy must still risk rejection while also overcoming his own fear of herpes and AIDS and reassuring her there is nothing to fear. He must still do the sexual risk-taking, but now he can be put in jail if he takes risks too quickly or be called a wimp if he doesn’t take them quickly enough . (p. 168)
Here, Farrell falls back on the old “rape is misunderstanding” canard, and somehow manages to compare sexual activity –- from kissing up to and including rape — to eating a bag of potato chips.
It is also possible for a woman to go back to a man’s room, tell him she doesn’t want to have intercourse, mean it, start kissing, have intercourse, and then wish she hadn’t in the morning. How? Kissing is like eating potato chips. Before we know it, we’ve gone further than we said we would. (p. 311)
Here, he seems to seriously suggest that juries could do a better job judging rape cases if they were sexually aroused.
The problem with every judgment of sexual behavior is that it is made by people who aren’t being stimulated as they are making the judgment. A jury that sees a woman in a sterile courtroom, asks her what she wanted, and then assumes that anything else she did was the responsibility of the man is insulting not only the woman but the power of sex. (p. 312)
And then he returns to the potato chip metaphor.
A man being sued after a woman has more sex than intended is like Lay’s being sued after someone has more potato chips than intended. In brief, date rape can be a crime, a misunderstanding, or buyer’s remorse. (p. 312)
Farrell repeatedly tries to absolve men of sexual wrongdoing by suggesting that they are literally intoxicated by female beauty.
Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal. It is exactly a woman’s greater sexual power that often makes a man so fearful of being rejected by her that he buys himself drinks to reduce his fear. In essence, her sexual power often leads to him drinking; his sexual power rarely leads to her drinking. If anything is evidence of her power over him, it is his being expected to spend his money to buy her drinks without her reciprocating. …
It is men – far more than women – whose mental capacities are diminished when they are “under the influence” of a beautiful woman. (p. 320)
But Farrell thinks it’s “sexist” – against men – to put men in jail for “selling sex” to intoxicated women:
As long as society tells men to be the salespersons of sex, it is sexist for society to put only men in jail if they sell well. We don’t put other salespersons in jail for buying clients drinks and successfully transforming a “no” into a “maybe” into a “yes.” If the client makes a choice to drink too much and the “yes” turns out to be a bad decision, it is the client who gets fired, not the salesperson. (p. 321)
We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of Warren Farrell’s equally daft and disturbing views on sex and rape. Stay tuned.
I know this was pages ago, but I wanted to respond to Catwoman. Shockingly I don’t have internet at home (ALL money goes to student loans! Joy!*).
Wait…do you think that feminists are advocating that ALL people who have drunk sex are raped? I mean, sure, you’re handwaving that rape is bad, blah blah blah, but you’re so hyper focused on this it’s overshadowing the big picture. Drunk sex doesn’t automatically equal rape – FSM knows I’ve had pleny of it with Sir Briznecko. I don’t consider those encounters rape, and I respect that you don’t consider your encounters rape. What I’m saying, as demonstrated by the NY Rape Cops, is that when a drunk woman is raped her claims are OVERWHELMINGLY DISMISSED BECAUSE SHE WAS DRUNK. Rapists take advantage of this perception and all too often get away with it. It’s the culture that belives the rapist over the drunk woman that needs to change, not your feelings about your drunken encounters.
This is where the enthusiastic consent model comes in. Before engaging in sex make sure you check-in with your partner to make sure they are enthusiastic about pants coming off. Both parties obviously and enthusiastically engaged? Fuck away my friends! Have a good time! (Usual cavat, there are places for nuance depending on how long said parteners are together, etc.)
tdlr; Big picture: we need to change cultural perceptions about women who were raped whilte drunk. Small picture: You don’t consider your drunk encounters rape. No problem! You know your experiences better than me, so if you don’t say they were rape, then they weren’t rape.
*intended for comical hyperbole
Inurashii’s right about the numbers thing though. For the sake of ease, I’ll assume that tamen meant that 1 in 5 men experienced rape in the 12 months before that study, but lifetime data is so much more accurate
(guys, 12 months doesn’t just mean like, decided to call it rape, but actual when the incident occurred…so even assuming that men are only now beginning to call being forced to penetrate rape, you’re still excluding anyone who experienced such more than a year ago. Ditto women.)
That aside, 1 in 5 women were raped in those 12 months. Which would work out to that for 100 people there where 10 female rape victims, and 10 male victims. Cept only in those 12 months. Any rape before that time frame doesn’t count. Any males raped by forced penetration didn’t count either, numbers were too small.
In any case, “every 5th case (of women being raped) is the rape of a man” is beyond illogical.
On the questions about drunk sex = rape…
Yeah, the fact is, Warren Farrell just more or less said in the OP that in any case that men had sex with a drunk woman, even if the woman said she was raped, he was calling it salesmanship, so it’s not rape at all.
That’s what the conversation is about; not whether sex-you’ve-had-while-drunk-is-technically-rape, but about whether a drunk woman is automatically unrapeable.
Muddying the waters on this only gives them more room. (that sounds harsh, sorry, but I think it’s the case)
If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
Further reading: Ozy nails it down in excruciating detail.
THIS.
Yeah, that. That I eventually relented to acts I’d never do whilst sober, between vomiting sessions, is not fucking salesmanship.
More details at 5! Or not, because that’s just a joke to lighten (my) the mood a little.
And yes, I’ve had drunk sex. Hell, I’ve had MDMA sex, only regret there was that we only did it once!
Just got linked to the essay The Not-Rape Epidemic. Although it’s a few years old, this was my first time reading it.
Kinda ties into the drunk-sex thing, while not being about it at all. I’ll just tag that as ‘more further reading.’
OT: This video on Buzzfeed reminded me of y’all. This filmmaker had his mother watch The Matrix and then retell the plot of the movie. It’s awesome.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/the-matrix-as-described-by-a-65-year-old-woman
I saw “The Maltese Falcon” recently. When reading Derick’s posts, I imagined them being spoken by Joel Cairo. When he comes back, try it yourself.
Tamen is a returning chucklefuck. They’ve been told they’re wrong before.
Just to be clear, the 2010 NISVS does count people who have been forced to penetrate as victims — it just counts them as victims of being forced to penetrate someone else. Other people the NISVS doesn’t count as victims of rape: people who were sexually coerced, underage, or unable to consent/physically unable to stop their rapists for reasons other than drugs and alcohol (mental or physical disabilities, say).
Point is, it’s an odd way of dividing up the information they got, but it doesn’t seem to be specifically anti-male as Tamen is implying.
@
Aurore
Yeah, the condom part didn’t make sense to me either. I thought he was arguing that men are anxious about condoms because women don’t want them used or because women might poke holes in them… either way it’s pretty nonsensical.
I’m not sure that the good old days of men abandoning their pregnant partners are over. From what I’ve seen the single mother faces far more stigma and economic difficulties then the absent father does.
I think the condom-worry thing is supposed to be ‘some women want them, some women don’t want them, you’re not supposed to ask,’ or some such fertility-related anxiety that isn’t really all that terrible compared to ‘hey, I might just get pregnant.’
Actually, I think someone else tagged the condom-thing earlier in the discussion. The MRA rationale* would be:
1: The rise of condom-usage has led to more women having more partners, because the risks of sexual activity have dropped.
2: This has led to more women getting infected with STIs.
3: This makes men who sleep with lots of women more vulnerable to getting STIs.
Now, of course, this requires one to have… almost zero comprehension of how both condoms and STIs work. Which would not be surprising from an MRA.
*: Note: When trying to think like an MRA, bashing your head against your desk can, in fact, help considerably.
Yay, Tamen is back to tell us about the 2011 CDC study! That’s something ze’s never done before!
I really wish people would stop citing that study.
I thought the condom thing wasn’t any more justified than WAAAH I DON’T WANNA WEAR A CONDOM.
I thinking that it’s the “she might poke holes in the condom or steal it and use the sperm to HAVE THE BABY SHE DESERVES” thing, since they seem to be aiming for an equivalency.
(They fail, obviously, but that’s what they’re going for.)
Argenthi Aertheri:
Apparently you didn’t bother to refresh your memory about the NISVS 2010 Report since you stated:
the 1 in 5 (18.3%) number of women raped are lifetime numbers (check yourself on page 18).
That mistake aside – on to another one:
I did not say: “every 5th case (of women being raped) is the rape of a man”, I said:
“Every 5th rape victim is a man raped by a woman.”
Why you “translated” rape victim to women being raped I don’t know.T
he every 5th rape victim is a man raped by a woman is based on the lifetime numbers as reported by NISVS 2010. Let me break that down for you since you find that beyond illogical:
The premise of course is that what NISVS 2010 defines as “being made to penetrate” on page 17 in fact is rape (and legally it is in several states – although not all). If anyone don’t agree with that premise please state so in any rebuttals.
Let’s look at the lifetime numbers: 18.3% of women reports rape – that nearly 1 in 5. 1.4% of men reports rape – that’s 1 in 71.
but the story doesn’t end there: 4.8% of men reports “being made to penetrate someone else” – that’s nearly 1 in 20.
I can’t just add 4.8 and 1.4 to get 6.2% of men raped as I don’t know how many, if any, men reported both – then they should be counted only once as this counts victims and not incidents. So I’ll just use the 4.8 number as stand in for male rape although I know it probably is somewhere between 4.8 and 6.2.
By these numbers we will out of a pool of 100 men and 100 women we’ll find 20 female victims and 5 male victims.
That gives that every 4th rape victim is a man (20/5=4)
98.2% of the female rape victims state that the perpetrator was a man (which probably implies that 1,8% of the perpetrators were a woman). 79.2% of the male victims of being made to penetrate someone else reports that the perpetrator was a woman (page 24). Which makes 20% of the perpetrators a man. That means that 4 out of 5 rapists of men are women. That means that in the pool of 100 men and 100 women there are 20 female victims of rape perpetrated by men, 4 male victims or rape perpetrated by women and 1 male victim of rape perpetrated by a man.
21/4 = 5.25 ≈ 5.
Which again would mean that 1 in every 5 rape victim alive is a man raped by a woman.
Bee:
So you don’t think it has any impact on resources available for victims and rape prevention programs (of the teach rapists not to rape variety) or on awareness both for men and women whether results are listed as
1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men have been raped
vs
1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men have been raped?
To quote Melissa McEwan:
Rape culture is the insistence on trying to distinguish between different kinds of rape via the use of terms like “gray rape” or “date rape.”
One would assume that “being made to penetrate” is such a term – although it’s even worse as it’s used to differentiate somethig which is rape as NOT rape. I find that problematic.
Aaliyah:
Now, why is that? What do you think of men who says that they wish people didn’t cite studies which lists rape prevalency for female rape victims?
Stuff it, Tamen. We’ve been over this before.
And… men can be raped in ways except being made to penetrate, so 4 out of 5 of the rapists who make men to penetrate are women, but it doens’t take into account everything.
I thought the condom thing was that, initially (or in the magic MRA imagined past), men didn’t have to do anything to prevent STDs and pregnancy and stuff, so they didn’t even have to think about it. Now they have to do something, which forces them to actually think about these things existing.
Maybe if you followed the link in Aaliyah’s name and read the lengthy post she had about the problems with that study you might understand why she wishes you’d stop citing it?
Asshole.
“so they didn’t even have to think about it.”
Well, except for the baby that might result.
While I agree that alcohol seriously muddies the waters and it’s perhaps best to just avoid it all together (one reason I’m a teetotaler), I find that the ultra-expanded feminist definition of “rape” in many ways devalues victims of a truly traumatic crime.
Gad, pemra, I have not known any feminist definitions of rape that include things other than rape. plz enlighten us.
/actually, don’t.
I’ve heard a lot of ridiculous and disgusting arguments that blame the victim and absolve the perpetrator, but the potato chip metaphor (God, I even hate typing that…) is absolutely baffling.
I never understood the whole “men can’t control their urges” excuse – as if we’re all still cavemen and lack any restraint whatsoever. It seems to me the problem is the person who goes around and takes any signal from a woman they find attractive as a “sign” they want to have sex, which is incredibly presumptuous. I dunno but, as a 20-something males who knows a lot of other 20-something males, guys can obviously control themselves when being around other women (who they may also be attracted to). I have several female friends I consider attractive personally – but I don’t expect them to have sex with me, either. I’m amazed people who DO think like that haven’t died of some heart-attack due to self-induced stress…
PEMRA, the stawmen in your head are acting up again.