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.
Men are oppressed by DAT ASS…”tastefully”, of course. Bummer, man…
And in other women-hold-all-the-power bumfuckery, guess who started the riots on the Maidan?
Bina, I thought Eastern European women know their place and aren’t tainted by feminism? Oh, cognitive dissonance.
Really. I wonder how these bozos square their “traditional family values” lust for an Olga-from-the-Volga or a Natasha-from-the-Neva with…THAT pile of pucky.
Wait. If attractive women render men powerless, then what does he say about unattractive women? I mean, I assume “attractive” to him is probably stereotypically hetero-normative. So what about women who don’t look like Maxim (or whatever Lad magazine they read) models? Are they exempt from this bullshit?
I dunno. The only thing I’m taking away from this is that, according to Farrell, men can’t help but act irrationally when faced with an attractive woman, and that it’s not fair when he marries her and she turns into an ugly old hag (which according to the toads of the MRM, is around age 25) that he has to support for the rest of his life.
Can you imagine if this was the case though?
Fuck, you left your checkbook at home? Moon the cashier; if it works you get to go home with all the store credit you’ll ever want.
Need a taxi? Wriggle the left cheek and five cabs will be fighting for your business!
Want a raise? Why, by pulsating your butt twice, you will quadruple your salary, plus you spermjack all men within 5 meters of you!
THINK ABOUT THE POTENTIAL GUYS!
I like how he assumes that marriage is caused by a guy temporarily ‘losing his mind’ and not because of any other reason.
Obviously, I suppose this means that marrying someone because you like their personality and also like the benefits of only paying for one living space on joint incomes would be silly, right?
Hey WF – I know this may come as a shock to someone who is clearly not in possession of any of the POSITIVE human emotions, but not every guy who gets married does so because he was tricked into doing so by a woman’s temporary youth and beauty. There’s a thing called “love” that you might not know about. You know, that emotion that makes someone important to you even when they’re not young and beautiful anymore? Ever heard of it? No? Well, it’s a big thing for some people.
Besides, old people get married too.
@theladyzombie: I’m pretty sure that he thinks that unattractive women are misandry because they are not providing the amount of eye-candy necessary to justify their existence.
I think it’s the right place to discretly throw another clever thing I’ve read today (not) : “In female dominated cultures, men find sex easy and lose the motive to sacrifice. Put women in combat. Have wars reduce their numbers, too and scarcity will make men competitive again. It just comes down to sex. If sex is too available, men will find they barely lift a finger for it, and we know which one.”
Oh, don’t thank me. I like to share. (and it was smelling too bad). I let you combine all the logic that underly this profound thought with the ones you mentionned, relative to “the incentive to marry” and “nature’s marketing tool”. I think they’ve got something there. Or not.
I must be very tired because I simply can’t understand English sentences anymore “In contrast, the genetic celebrity does not have to initiate and therefore worry about looking like a fool by doing it inadequately” Doing what ? Initiate what ? Is it about Angelina Jolie ? Oh god I’m tired. Europe here, need to go to bed.
Lesbians would be too, right? Since they keep all the power and even boost by making couples!
Or what about a gay-lesbian alliance? That could take over the world in like, a day or so…
And kittens.There must be kittens in the Alliance.
“I have heard from many women, ‘I see nothing wrong with the status quo. I feel equal. To them I say: you can feel respected, supported and validated…but equality can be measured. Equality is not a feeling…” – Kate Kelly, Founder of Ordain Women
Kate is a Mormon feminist, and she’s speaking specifically about women in the LDS church here, but I still love this quote and think it says it all. http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/joannabrooks/7334/_equality_is_not_a_feeling_/
I just had a large chocolate sundae with extra whip cream because the last thing I want to do is to disempower some man with my butt. It’s hard making these changes in the name of social justice, but I promise to do my part.
If I didn’t know who Warren Farrell was and I saw a book with this cover and this title, I’d assume it was erotic femdom fiction.
Want a raise? Why, by pulsating your butt twice, you will quadruple your salary, plus you spermjack all men within 5 meters of you!
Hee. I feel like I should roll for initiative first…
(Also, completely off topic, but Alice, I am under the impression you may be someone known to me from a different forum full of nocturnal flying mammals and/or superheroes. If so, a bunch of said nocturnal flying mammal superheroes wanted it noted that they miss you and hope you stop by again sometime. If not, feel free to ignore this as the ramblings of a random internet person.) 🙂
Clearly the most powerful people in the world are the asexuals, who are free from the heavy shackles of uncontrollable sexual attraction that makes allosexual people mere slaves to those who make them have tingly feelings in their pants.
Farrell’s paranoia about being tricked into supporting some lazy bonbon-eating woman is particularly rich considering that his first wife–the one who left him around the time he became a proto-MRA–was and is an extremely successful tech executive and makes far more money than he does. His current wife is a businesswoman, too.
But I’m sure he feels his money is much more valuable than theirs, which makes it true.
Apparently none of these attractive women have jobs in this asshole’s universe? Not sure why he(/all of them) loves to pretend that husbands still support their wives 100% even though it has been shown that women are major breadwinners these days.
I guess I can’t expect him to keep up with facts , what with his head up his ass and all.
“Exposing the cacaocracy”.
seriously, thank you. I was having a sad evening and that just cracked me up <3
on another note… please, tell me most people in academia do not take farrell’s stuff seriously. I wanted to point out how incredibly heteronormative and “beauticentric” it is, but I was ninjaed by so many already.
Because it is so obviously flawed.
Hmm, let’s see, women began to campaign for women’s suffrage in America around the 1850s. All the campaigning stopped because of the Civil War then finally resumed in the 1860s. Then the First World War rolled around. Women didn’t gain the right to vote, officially, untill 19-freaking-20. 1920. So, what, men are pushovers for a great ass and a pretty face? Shit.
I guess the suffragists should have recruited their more comely members to go to congress and flirt a little more, huh? They would have gotten the vote sooner? Maybe it was the longs skirts they wore at the time — to much booty coverage.
Oh hey Poli! Small world, isn’t it? 😛
They might as well just name the book Gaslighting.
Where can I order your cat book?
In 1973 the laws in the state of New York finally changed so a woman could rent an apartment all by herself without having a male do it for her or at least co-sign. There’s also that whole Roe v. Wade thing that MRAs disguised as religious fuckwits are busily trying to roll back because heaven forfend a woman own her own uterus and what goes on in there.
“Oh, but hot asses give me feels!” is not a comeback to those selected examples, or to any other of the multitudes of examples available. Hot asses give many people of all genders feels, including me, but you don’t see me crying for a waaaahmbulance.
Well, it is fitting that there’s an ass on the cover, seeing how his book is probably all assfax.
If the secretary has all the power in that scenario by virtue of her gender, then why isn’t she the boss? Why accept a subordinate position with less pay, if she didn’t have to?
Don’t even get me started on the claim that women are free from violence. Disconnect from reality, he has it.