By David Futrelle
So I’ve been rereading Warren Farrell lately and, as always, it’s been a bit of a surreal experience. The man singlehandedly responsible for many if not most of the bad ideas held by Men’s Rights Activists today is not what you’d call an especially lucid writer. His organization is free-associational, his writing style evasive and cluttered with incoherent metaphors, and it seems like every time I go to check the source of one of his confidently asserted facts it turns out there’s nothing real supporting it.
A while back I wrote about my attempts to find the source of one of his statistics only to discover that it came from a thoroughly unscientific survey a high school teacher friend of his had taken of her students.
A few days ago, checking the source for a claim in his book The Myth of Male Power that men pay for dinners for women ten times more often than women pay for men — and that “the more expensive the restaurant, the more often the man pays” — I discovered from his footnote that his “evidence” for this unequivocally stated “fact” was “based on my own informal discussions with waiters in restaurants around the country in cities where I speak.” In other words, dinnertime chatter reported as scientific fact.
But the weirdest factual failure I’ve yet found in Farrell’s writing comes in a strange section of that same book in which Farrell tries to contrast the supposedly pampered life of the allegedly ungrateful man-hater Jodie Foster against the sufferings of Muhammad Ali, famously prosecuted for refusing to serve in Vietnam.
Farrell starts off with an out-of-context quote from Jodie Foster, which he uses in an attempt to suggest that she is a whiny misandrist insufficiently appreciative of those who served in Vietnam.
Here’s the quote, as Farrell renders it:
Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive . . . women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.
Looking online for the quote, I found it (in this truncated form) included in various lists highlighting quotes from allegedly “misandrist” and/or “radical” feminists; on one site Foster was identified as “actress [and] homosexual.” But when I tracked down the New York Times Magazine profile of Foster that the quote originally came from, I discovered that she was actually talking about film roles — explaining that she didn’t feel comfortable playing action heroes because it didn’t feel true to her experience as a woman or the experience of women in history.
“I love life-threatening situation movies,” she told the Times.
And in terms of women in history, 95 percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive. So, if I played Wonder Woman all the time I would be betraying where I come from. Women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They’re not Rambo.
Farrell follows his truncated version of this quote with a paragraph that is so utterly and obviously wrong in its central details that it’s astounding it’s still in the latest edition of his book, republished 21 years after the original. Here it is:
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to participate in what he felt was the criminal nature of the Vietnam War forced him into prison during the height of his career and deprived him of four years that could never be recovered. At the same time Jodie Foster was safe at home, becoming wealthy and famous and cashing in on her sex appeal.
Ok, first off: While it’s appalling that Ali was prosecuted and convicted for his principled refusal to serve in a war he felt was unjust, he didn’t spend four years in prison. He appealed his conviction and remained free on bail until it was overturned by the Supreme Court. It did sideline him from boxing for several years, but not because he was behind bars.
Second of all, Jodie Foster was born in November of 1962. When Ali was convicted, she was four years old; when the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, she was eight. She definitely did not spend those years “cashing in on her sex appeal,” though she did appear in some sit-coms. (And while she grew up into an attractive woman her career has never really been about sex appeal.)
True, she didn’t face the danger of being drafted while Ali was dealing with his conviction, but generally speaking we don’t draft four-year-old boys either. The Vietnam war was still going strong when I was four, and as far as I can remember I never got a draft notice.
Farrell continues on:
What would Jodie Foster have said if a sexist law kept her in prison when she was 24, 25, 26, and 27?
Obviously Farrell’s point is that it’s unfair that young men have been jailed for draft evasion while women have been exempt from the draft. And that’s a good point. I don’t support the draft, but if there is one it should apply to all genders.
But Jodie Foster isn’t a good example of someone who benefited from a draft that applied only to men because, well, she didn’t. She was a kid during the war. The draft was abolished long before she would have been eligible for it, and, oh yeah, the US was at peace when she was in her mid-twenties. No men her age were being drafted, or jailed for refusing to serve, because there was no draft and no war to serve in, unless you count Grenada.
But Farrell continues throwing shade at Foster for no good reason, sniffing that “the Jodie Fosters … think of themselves as morally superior to men who freed them from the dirty work of war.” Never mind that this is not what she actually said or implied in the New York Times Magazine piece he selectively quotes.
He continues on, getting more and more melodramatic:
To many men, it doesn’t feel good to hear the Jodie Fosters ignore men’s victimization, then blame the victim, then claim herself to be the victim—especially a Jodie Foster who grew up in an era in which women had the fantasy of “a room of my own” while their brothers had the reality of “a body bag of my own.”
Again, she was a kid during the war; her literal brother had no “body bag of his own,” as he spent the Vietnam war years … as a child actor, like her.
It saddened men who watched women their age get a head start on their careers while they fought in a war that tore apart their souls, to return from that war to hear a woman call herself the only victim of sexism because she was being asked to make coffee at a job that no law required her to take.
Huh, and did any of these men have similar feelings about those “men their age [who got] a head start on their careers while they fought in a war that tore apart their souls?” Because Warren Farrell, born in 1943, was one of those non-serving, head-starty men. Unlike Foster, he was old enough to serve — but spent the late sixties and early seventies “getting a head start” on an academic career by going to grad school.
Which is fine, but if you were the right age to serve and you didn’t, you probably shouldn’t devote several pages of your book to yelling at Jodie Foster because she wasn’t fighting in Vietnam or sitting in prison for opposing it at the age of four — or for not serving in some hypothetical war that didn’t exist when she was old enough.
We have a joint account and I’m usually the one wielding the card, simply because I can see to punch in the PIN better than himself.
There have been instances where I’ve asked for the bill, the waitron has brought it to him, he’s handed it to me, I’ve produced the housekeeping purse and paid cash, and then the waitron has brought the change to him. The last time that happened we both burst out laughing.
But having waited tables too, I’ve found that some chaps get rather shirty if the bill is not brought to them. Most people place the bill on the table instead.
As for Vietnam, I was alive when it was on but was not conscripted. Nor were my brothers. Not only were we all under the age of 16 when it ended, we were also British, which was an absolutely terrific get-out clause.
Re: Farrell’s train wreck. I fill like it’s worth (re)linking this.
http://www.sfwa.org/2013/05/guest-post-we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative/
Also just the entire systematic tilt towards male heroism vs. female tragedy. If a male soldier dies, he’s a hero and a martyr; if a female soldier dies, it was a damn shame, she was really pretty, she shouldn’t have volunteered for a man’s job.
(Once you realize this bias exists, you will never be able to un-see it in US media.)
And likewise, how “no front-line combat roles” does not in any way mean “no getting bombed or shot at”, but people like to treat it that way.
Basically just a whole other level of failure and out-of-touchness IMO.
OT: meanwhile in Boston…
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10107181995675124&id=23327174&ref=bookmarks
White cis people keep being so shocked that I don’t trust the police. They only need to look around a bit to see why.
And when I see stuff like this, I remember reports of British police helping the Nazis round up Jews after they invaded the Channel Isles.
I thought so too. Me and husband have a joint account. Wait staff often (especially if we’re abroad) assume he’s gonna pay and then he does, but the money is from a joint account, where my salary makes a bigger contribution than his does.
I’ve seen it… It was some while ago, but as far as I recall, her character is never presented as sexy to the audience. She’s got this “boyfriend” who’s really her pimp and basically an adult, and it’s pretty clear that he’s manipulating and exploiting her. She’s run away from home and then taken advantage of. I think if the movie was made today, they’d add scenes to make it super obvious that her situation is horrible in a way they clearly didn’t feel was necessary in the 70:s – but yeah, I think even as the movie stands it should be clear that she’s not some kind of self-actualizing sex worker at age twelve but is rather being exploited by a ruthless pedophile.
I got a little more squick out of watching Bugsy Malone, where the whole gimmick is that all the adult roles are played by kids, and she’s some kind of femme fatale…
Ran across a post on incels.me in which an incel calling himself Anger says – and I quote, so trigger warning – that “p*ssy has maggots and cockroaches in it.”
It gets better. One incel by the name of Evildoer responds by saying that “Femoid would rather put them inside her, than have a sex with an incel.” Can you blame her? It’s probably better for you than dating an incel would be!
The grammar is unchanged, btw.
So I’m not entirely convinced that Warren Farrell didn’t just invest in a skinned professor suit and make a fake identity with the name Jordan Peterson. It’s interesting how similarly scattered and stream-of-consciousness their writing is, and how appealing that is to certain audiences.
They say communication is only 10% what’s said and 90% how it’s said. This is a book and not the written word, so I have to wonder if they’re writing that 10% to be as amorphous as possible, to allow the reader to fill that 90% with as much of whatever’s rattling about in their head as possible.
(Well, no, I doubt it’s intentional. More than likely it’s chance)
Farrell, must be angry! He coulda been the lobster king!
8Mr. Rattus pays when we are out because he gets points on his card and he’s saving for a tablet. He pays off the card (if his bank account is short that week) with the credit line, which I will pay into if the property tax isn’t due, which I pay in full, along with the utilities. Sad that these idiots aren’t able to work out viable financial management with their partners, but why are they spewing vitriol at those of us who can?
He’s mad that women got a head start on their careers of fetching coffee and being intellectually undervalued?
Hello Mammothteers! It has been a long, long time since anyone here at Pavlov’s House (which is usually just me anyway, but sometimes Ms. Pavlov’s House when she’s not working millions of hours saving lives) have had a chance to read and comment. In this case the old hackneyed misrepresentation of history that “oh, compulsory military service affects men and not women blah blah” that MRAs and their likes so love to blather about got my attention. Looks like some of the usually excellent commenters have already made some good points.
Here are few things that do come to mind though:
The idea that the traditional exclusion of women from combat roles in regular armed forces equates to men suffering more than women in combat from war is wrong on so many levels already but one fallacy that doesn’t get brought up enough, I think, is that thinking about war (especially twentieth-century war) as only or mainly fighting between national states using regularly-constituted armed forces severely misunderstands the history of armed conflict. Concrete example: look up estimated numbers of women combatants world-wide in partisan forces, guerrilla forces and other irregular forces from say, 1939-1945 or, even more interestingly, 1945-present.
compulsory military service and children: OK, this may not have to do with four-year-olds specifically, but go look at the demographics of combatants in various wars in West Africa ca. 1990-present. Significant numbers of children as young as 9-10 are forced to bear arms in situations that are exceptionally brutal (as if any war isn’t brutal enough already). I know that doesn’t really have to do with Farrell being wrong (he’s obviously wrong for other reasons) but since people were talking about Farrell not even knowing Foster’s age and garbling his already fallacy-ridden argument further, and since that got us into children and compulsory military service, I just thought it was interesting to point out. Very sobering and unsettling actually.
@Surplus to Requirements
Ah, yes, the Night Witches — when a “women and war” post comes up on WHTM we in the commentariat here do seem to love the Night Witches, and their experiences get cited a lot. Rightfully so….and please do not think the question I am going to pose is in any way a criticism of your bringing them up, it’s not — but I am very curious why in so many instances where Soviet women in military aviation come up, the Night Witches get cited first but much less so than Soviet women fighter pilots. It may be because the 588th simply got into the Western consciousness first? Or because the highest-scoring Soviet women fighter pilots like Litvyak and Budanova saw some of the biggest early success not in an all-women unit but in a mixed-gender unit?
Anyway, yes, the Night Witches are cool, and who can denigrate flying PO-2’s at night? Just say…it’s funny how the Night Witches often come to mind first when usually in popular memory of military aviation history *fighter pilots* usually are the ones that get more attention over bomber pilots, transport pilots, etc. Maybe it’s changing. A colleague did forward me a recent popular magazine article from the U.S on Budanova, so that’s good though.
Despite our name sake, we are an airborne household so we favor transport pilots and therefore I don’t care what else you do as pilot or what else you fly: just *get me over the drop zone*
Sorry for the digression. Nice to see everyone again,
Oh yes, Ms. Pavlov’s House pays sometimes and sometimes I do. We are thinking more about enjoying each other (because our times off all too rarely coincide) that any sense of rigid gender roles.
As a waitstaff myself, I think it would be an interesting study if it was done scientifically and not by someone who also has a creepy fixation on a four-year-old and women’s butts.
Can confirm.
Some other things good to take into account:
– Age of the diners in question
– Price point of the restaurant
– Type of restaurant (sit down, fast food, etc.) [This can correlate to price point]
– Perhaps the average purchase total?
When does the “head start” stop, exactly? Asking for a friend.
Guess what the folks at Chimpmania have been saying about the duck boat collapse in Missouri? That it was a horrible tragedy? Nope, they’re sort of glad about it because most (but not all) of those who drowned were “rock fish” (blacks). Chimpmaniacs easily give incels a run for their money, they just target different groups.
Hmmmm yeah okay, and how often are these couples eating at home vs going out? Who is doing the shopping, cooking and investing time and money for the rest of the meals they eat at home? Because if someone doesn’t know how to cook, they really don’t know how to budget at a grocery store either. If you actually did your due diligence and added all the cost and unpaid labor for prep and cleanup, who is really doing the lion’s share?
I found Taxi Driver interesting for what it said about violence. Without being too spoiler-y, it suggests that targeting people for violence can be fairly arbitrary, throwing the whole hero/villain paradigm into question. Then again, you could also say it conflates violence with mental illness, which is unfair.
I’d agree with Dvärghundspossen about Jodie Foster’s character, but I was surprised to learn she was only 12 years old when she played the part. If I were the director, I wouldn’t ask someone that young to do that role.
@Scildfreja – When I read “stream of consciousness,” my knee-jerk reaction was to EngLit-splain, but the practical angel on my shoulder said, “Don’t do that until you research the phrase.”
…It’s fascinating! Psychologist William James came up with the term to describe how the mind processes conscious thoughts as a flow rather than discrete units. Modern critics of this idea, like Susan Blackmore (who has cool streaks in her hair, btw), say that this flow of thoughts is an illusion: a lot of different things happen in a brain at once.
In literature, it means writing as if you’re recording someone’s thoughts and impressions. Here’s where I’d be “splainy” and say that it doesn’t mean the writer just writes down their own thoughts. I do this from time to time, especially for poems, but usually I need to edit a lot.
So I’d also say that “scattered”* writing shows it wasn’t well edited (not to mention the lack of fact-checking that David pointed out). I guess you’re also saying that both Farrell and Peterson are deliberately vague, so that they don’t have to bother to fact-check. They also can claim plausible deniability if someone uses their rhetoric to justify violence (“You took it OUT OF CONTEXT!”)
*”Scattered” can be a deliberate choice for a stream-of-consciousness narrative – one of my students is writing an essay about Chris Abani’s Song for Night, where the fragmented narrating style reflects a child soldier’s alienation and trauma – but it’s obviously not a good thing if you’re trying to be straightforward.
It’s like spotting someone 10 meters in the 100m dash, but then across their lane, 10 meters later, there’s this hard, transparent, shatterproof barrier. Almost like a ceiling.
But still, SO UNFAIR that they got to run into that barrier much sooner than they normally would have.
Speaking of not editing, I have one of those dangling modifier things in my second sentence. Grrr.
About the restaurant thing: the last time I was at A&W with my parents, I paid for everyone. Not a member of the couple, and a feeeemale at that…! Shocking!
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
And Trump’s. Perhaps this is something that high RWA persons have in common? I suspect a fundamental difference in thinking here, where such individuals just learn ad-hoc factoids and bits of received wisdom, while low RWA persons attempt to construct proper models of the world or at the very least prune and garden and tend to their ontologies looking for errors and contradictions.
Of course the three people in question are probably also high SDO, but I think it’s more likely that RWA correlates with that sort of lack of thinking. Without the skills to reason about the world and figure things out for oneself one would necessarily be dependent on outside authorities for information. So a lack of such reasoning skills could be the cause of most other high RWA traits, including the definitional one, seeks out an authority figure to follow and to abdicate moral responsibility to.
Which in turn points to a possible educational intervention. The more people are taught how to think well, the lower RWA the population is in a generation or two. And given Altemeyer’s observations on that Global Change Game that might ultimately make the difference between survival and collapse for our whole civilization.
It also suggests an empirical test: look for correlations between average RWA scores and features of the educational systems on a country by country basis. Particularly, which educational systems teach thinking skills? Which emphasize drilling detached facts and rote obedience? What happens if one system does both?
Agreed on the waiters thing. It happens less to me at home in Germany, where waiters also standard ask if you want to split the check and there seems to be less judgment on this point in general , but when I visit my boyfriend in the US and pay for dinner, my card is routinely being handed back to him. So even if they don’t actively shame the man for not paying, they might not even notice who the card actually belongs to or have forgotten it by the time they get back with it…
*goes back to lurking*
If we are talking about the casualties of war, someone should perhaps mention that in the history of warfare, civilian populations have generally taken the brunt of the casualties, especially if the war is being held on their soil.
As for women getting free dinners and sitting around on their mind bending asses in bon bon factories, do we really need to go over it again for this guy, that in actuality, the stereotype of woman as only a homemaker and caregiver who doesn’t work outside the home is applicable only to people of a certain class and only during a short period in history and not even to all of those people? Women have always worked hard both inside and outside the home. Usually both.
As for the formal military, haven’t women been asking for parity in this area for at least a couple of generations? And haven’t women in irregular forces and resistance movements served bravely and competently as a previous poster pointed out?
Edited to add that I hate Warren Farrell. I remember reading him some thirty years ago when I didn’t know any better and giving the biggest possible huh? If warfare is such anathema (and it is) than maybe, just maybe we should stop having them?
@AuntieMameRedux
“As for the formal military, haven’t women been asking for parity in this area for at least a couple of generations?”
Yes. Women in regularly-organized armed forces is neither a novelty nor exceptional as far as the history of twentieth-century warfare and recent warfare goes. The issue is not whether they have served (and suffered) but equitable treatment (usually by their own governments or government-like authorities) vis-a-vis men in similar roles.
And, yes, David continually finds misogynists of various flavors, often MRA types, who trot out the same old fallacies and, yes, WHTM commentators have been through it many times.
Also, nice to meet you. I’m not sure if you were commenting when I last frequented the blog. I like some of your comments in some of the older posts I’ve read.
I find his fixation on Jodie Foster, of all people, extremely creepy. John Hinckley, Jr. level creepy, even. Partly because she became famous (particularly in the sexualized context of playing a child prostitute) while still under 18, and partly because, being gay, there’s no way she’d have slept with him or any man in real life if she could help it. Maybe he’s mad at her for being gay and blowing away his fantasy about “saving” (and then sexing, and having all to himself) the child-prostitute character she played in her teens? That’s what motivated Hinckley, after all…and Farrell sure sounds nastily vengeful towards her here.
Also, he really needs to remember that for the vast majority of history, it’s been MEN sending men to war. Not women. And they weren’t fighting for women in any sense, either…they were fighting so that the rich and imperialistic could get richer and expand their empires. The men who owned everything are the ones they should get mad at, if they get mad at anyone. The fact that they choose to blame women, and feminism (which has been historically an anti-war ideology), is just proof of how irrational these dudes really are.
And furthermore: Has he even heard of draft dodgers? Those long-haired freaky peaceniks who ditched Vietnam for Canada? We took in about 25,000 of them around the time I was born, in the late 1960s. They were cool. They made our country a better place. Lord knows the place they fled was a hellhole then, and it’s even worse now, thanks again to capitalist MEN. Why the fucking fuckity FUCK won’t Farrell smarten up and direct his ire to where it actually SHOULD go, and where it might do some damn good, instead of at women who give him boners but won’t have sex with him?
Ah, yes, but why did the rich and imperialistic want to get richer? Clearly it’s because of something women something hypergamy something something. So clearly women are at fault for all wars after all! /sarcasm
@Catherine
And yet Anger is angry because no woman will allow him near her pussy.
Incel logic.
“Classic sour grapes” would be my diagnosis Kat.
@Surplus
Yes! And it’s an advanced and aggressive case of sour grapes.
Prognosis: poor.