You may remember the embarrassing spectacle a couple of months back when Warren Farrell asked the readers of A Voice for Men to help him pick out a cover picture for a new ebook version of The Myth of Male Power, the 21-year-old crackpot bestseller that more or less provided the, er, intellectual foundation for today’s Men’s Rights movement.
It wasn’t just embarrassing because AVFM is a noxious hate site that regularly calls women c*nts and whores and helps to organize informal campaigns of harassment directed at individual women. It was also embarrassing because all three of the pictures were sexualized images focusing on specific female body parts. You can guess which three, and you’d be right: tits, ass, and vagina (the latter tastefully covered in a merkin made of moss).
Well, Farrell ended up rejecting all of these images in favor of … a different picture of a woman’s butt. Yep, the screenshot above features the actual cover of the recently released ebook version of The Myth of Male Power. (You can see it in its full sized-glory over on Amazon.)
The implicit message of the cover couldn’t be clearer: men may seem to run the world, but women can control and exploit them through the power of their sexuality. Male power is undercut by … butt power.
Am I reading too much into a cover image? Farrell doesn’t really believe this nonsense, does he?
Well, in the introduction to the ebook, Farrell writes:
In case you’re wondering, “genetic celebrity” is Farrell’s term of art for any attractive woman.
But golly, you say, the fact that a dude feels “powerless” because he can’t have sex with every woman with a nice butt that happens to wander across his field of vision doesn’t actually mean that men are powerless or that male power is a myth. Well, Farrell has an answer to this as well. And by “answer” I mean, well, whatever this is:
Got that? I’m not sure there’s anything there to get; it’s nothing more than hand-waving to distract attention from the nonsensical nature of his previous statements. In case any Men’s Rights activist ever brings Warren Farrell up as an example of a respectable, “academic” MRA, you may wish to point out that almost nothing Farrell writes ever actually makes any fucking sense.
In the book itself, Farrell repeatedly suggested that male power can be undone almost completely by the sexual power of women. In one oft-quoted passage, he wrote about the effect that a “secretary’s miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power” allegedly has on their male bosses. (Myth of Male Power, p. 21)
While that statement has earned a certain notoriety for its sheer ridiculousness, Farrell went further elsewhere in the book, essentially arguing that men are as addicted to female “beauty” as drug addicts are to the drug of their choice — and as helpless.
“Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal,” Farrell wrote. “[M]any men feel ‘under the influence the moment they see a beautiful woman.” (p. 320, emphasis in original.)
This sort of temporary “intoxication,” Farrell argued, leads men into shackling themselves to these temporarily sexy tyrants for the rest of their lives — thus agreeing to support them (he suggested implicitly) even after they get old and ugly. (p. 85.)
In Farrell’s original book, this “argument,” such as it is, was merely one of many that he thought undercut the alleged “myth of male power.” Now, with the butt on the cover, he’s put it front and center. Or, more precisely, rear and center.
Warren Farrell, you’re an ass, man.
Oh, awkward segue here, I just wanted to show off the cover to the new edition of my classic book, The Myth of Human Power.
It will soon be available for one million dollars in cash in unmarked bills, upon delivery of which I will sit down and write it for you. It will probably be pretty short and not very convincing.
I feel powerless when I see a cute kitten that I can’t immediately cuddle. How dare you!
Really, Mr. Farrell? Really?? You really actually did that?
So much wrong, so little time. He’s got a real low opinion of men.
Kittybutt!
Seriously… “Feels powerful”? If you want to _feel_ powerful, see a therapist. That has nothing to do with the systems, structures and practices which actually give power.
The secretary might “feel” powerful by being sexy and unobtainable, but as long as sexual harassment, pay inequality and job discrimination are in play, that feeling doesn’t mean much.
Will you accept $1million in pictures of money? I could manage that, no problem. I’d really like to read about how kitties have the power.
All hail our fluffy overlords.
A human who was addicted to a kitten’s beauty, cuteness, and cuteness would temporarily “lose her mind”–she would make the
irrationaldecision to support said kitten for the rest of her life.I would totally buy the hell out of that book. David’s, of course, not that pile of senseless drivel that Farrell produced.
I’ve got a sudden urge to listen to Sir Mix-A-Lot.
” Men are oppressed by women’s butts…”
I don’t know why, but that cracked me up.
The cover image just confirms the reality of male power.
@David
Will Amazon pay you if I order the book from your link? I’ve been meaning to read a book about women’s asses written by an asshole.
I thought he was going to use the one with the woman cooking in her underwear? Because that proves women have the power, or something?
He’s undercutting his own argument here. Women dependent on male income, so they have to seduce men into marrying them so they can, y’know, eat and have a roof over their heads. That’s not power. It never was power. It will never will be power.
Women are (of course) not attracted to men physically. It’s all about craving to be dominated and money–not at all how men look.
I know this because I’m not attracted to men and can’t understand how anyone else could be. I call this the Dudes Are Gross Theorem.
Science!
“…a core flaw of feminism was the assumption that because a woman felt powerless, the man must feel powerful.”
Um, I’m not a feminist scholar by any means, but even I know this gets feminism wrong. The problem isn’t that women feel powerless, but that they are oppressed, and that men as a class benefit from that oppression regardless of how it makes them feel.
And dafuq is with this blabbering about how men are rendered powerless by women’s beauty, and can be easily brainwashed by women, or something? What a bunch of saps these guys think men are.
Look, Warrell; I go to the gym a lot, and I live in L.A. I’m surrounded by beautiful women all day, and I’ve never once felt out of my mind about it. Mostly, I don’t notice, because… well, because, I have a lot to do and a lot of important other stuff on my mind.
They’re just other humans, these “beautiful” women. Not some occupying class of inscrutable succubi from Earth-3 or whatever.
I have struggled with social anxiety, especially when I was younger. I was extremely anxious and dismayed about the prospect of actually having to approach people I found attractive and speak to them. It was discouraging and frustrating that social norms expected me, as a man, to make the first explicit move, because it put me in a situation I found uncomfortable.
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER did this make me think that the people I was afraid to approach were somehow responsible for my discomfort, or that they were benefitting from it. That makes no sense. It is more than a logical leap. It’s a logical getting shot out of a cannon.
As if women don’t feel the same in the presence of handsome men. Beautiful people have this effect no matter the gender. I’ve personally seen men use women to do all kind of favours for them by charming them.
But how any of this proves that male power and the patriarchy are a myth?
I love how his assessment that male power and privilege doesn’t exist is all about men’s feels. I thought men were all logical and rational and women are weak and stupid because it’s all about our feelings?
The whole idea that men are less dominant because of the social expectations that they be the pursuer in romantic relationships and face mocking and rejection is just so laughable. It reminds me of my favorite Margaret Atwood quote.
“Men are afraid women are going to laugh at them. Women are afraid men are going to kill them.”
Of course Farrell glossed right over that reality.
Here’s some unrelated sexist douche bag news.
http://jezebel.com/bad-boy-shares-brilliant-observations-about-women-on-1538818187
No, you bag of bricks in the vague shape of a human writing scribbles that sort of line up into a kind of language, “a woman” didn’t “feel” powerless, “a woman” very much, in many cases, “was” powerless – I direct you to your secretary example, where your “genetic celebrity” with her “miniskirt powers and powers of flirtation” is out of a job the moment she longer wears a miniskirt, flirts or blows the boss under the desk on casual friday, whereas the man, who is the boss gets to literally fire the pretty secretary, hire any other amount of pretty secretaries, and manage a menage a trios of notes, knackers, pens and panties.
His entire argument boils down to “Men feel, women feel, I feel”, whereas, inthusfar as I am not a scholar of great renown, I can still make a passing reference to “The Married Women Property Act of 1870” and the knowledge that, at leasat in Britian, for the most part, up until that law was passed in 1870, then any money made by a woman either through a wage, from investment, by gift, or through inheritance automatically became the property of her husband once she was married.
Coverture, Mr. Farrel. Cover your ass on that one, you covetous culrpit with your cancerous conspiracies for which I can converse with little but chagrin and contempt.
Such ignorance. Much ahistory. Much wrong.
Wow.
Oh but they are! With their powers of shapely buttocks, all of the worlds nuclear arsenals are rendered moot!
Feminists: Women are oppressed in society relative to men. A woman makes less than a man doing the same job. The majority of legislatures in most countries are men. Women’s reproductive choices are curtailed. Women are discouraged from pursuing some careers that are considered “men’s work.” Women are murdered, raped and battered; and are blamed for it, thanks to rape culture. Etc, etc, etc. In some countries it’s even worse.
Farrell: But men feel powerless because we’re attracted to women.
Ugh, and this is awful heteronormative. If women have power over men because of their attractiveness, wouldn’t that make homosexual men the most powerful of all?
You know, Warren Farrell – PhD – has inspired me to write a book. It will be called The Myth of Pothead Power, and it will be about how difficult it is to resist the temptation to eat chocolate while high. Plus an elaboration on the concept of institutionalized cacao privilege. The cover will have a picture of assorted chocolate bars in a box.
It’s basically just a wordier version of the stock standard anti social justice argument – “yeah, but I don’t feel privileged.”
Your wish is my command.
This “genetic celebrity” ridiculousness is just . . . no.