LA VERITE
masculinisme.blog-city.com
masculinisme.blog-city.com
What a Man Might Say When He Hears, “It’s Men In The News, Men in Government, Men at the Top – Where are the Women?”
“Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotions. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.”
—E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent:[1]
Introduction
Caitlyn left The Bridges of Madison County feeling a bit bored with her husband – it had been a long time since a Clint Eastwood had courted and excited her; the following morning she read about a housework study saying men expect their wives to pick up after them. Now she was wandering into the bedroom; her husband’s socks were on the floor... “who did he think she was?”
Caitlyn was experiencing the influence of an attitude toward men generated first by the arts (Bridges), and, the next morning, by academia (they did the housework study), the government (they funded it) the media (they reported it) and the helping professions (they were the sources of interpretation used by the media). At times like this, Caitlyn’s husband could feel Caitlyn’s anger even is she said nothing. He responded by withdrawing. Unwittingly, the love between them was being contaminated by what I will refer to in this chapter as the “Lace Curtain”[2] – the tendency of most major institutions to interpret gender issues from only a feminist perspective or from a combination of feminist and female perspectives.
Is it true, though, that the male point of view is not being represented? In a study of more than 1200 headlines from seven high circulation Canadian newspapers, women were referred to as victims of violence thirty-five times for each one reference to men as victims.[3] Not a single article focused on men.[4] Compare this to the reality: Men are three times as likely to be victims of murder, twice as likely to be victims of non-domestic violence, and equally as likely to be victims of domestic violence, but the study found that newspapers virtually ignore the violence against men in each of these areas – no matter who the perpetrator.
More discouraging, when violence against men was reported, it was usually in statistical and raw data form; women’s was personalized.[5] That was in Canada. In the United States, neither the government nor academia nor the profession of journalism has financed a comparable study, or examined why such gaps exist between reality and perception on almost every male-female issue.
One of the most common responses I hear when I introduce some of the findings in this book, or from The Myth of Male Power, is an incredulous, “If all this is true, why hasn’t the media reported it?” Or “If the news likes what’s new, why are they ignoring new news?” And, as feminists accurately point out, far more men than women are on the front pages.[6] To many, this implies a bias in favor of men, making it hard to understand why what I discuss goes unseen or unreported – or seen and distorted. Why?
The Paradox of the Visible Invisible Man
How can it be true that men make the front pages more often, but men’s underlying issues and internal stories do not? The process of raising money and climbing leadership’s ladders that gets a man on the front pages requires a man to repress his fears, not express his fears. So a man’s external story is visible; his internal story invisible. Whether on the front page or the business pages, we rarely read of a man’s sorrow about coming home too late to read his child a bedtime story, or the emotional distance he may be feeling from his wife, or what’s worrying him when he can’t fall asleep. This is the paradox of the visible invisible man.
If, however, women make the front pages less often, does this mean women’s issues make the front pages less often? No. One of the major functions of men who make the front pages is to protect women. In general, men make the front pages either when they protect and save us – or threaten our safety. And men are especially concerned about saving and protecting women. So, when the President and Congress unanimously pass male-only draft registration and a Violence Against Women Act, it is mostly men on the front pages, even though it is women being protected. Ditto for Women, Infant and Children (WIC) programs, an Office of Research on Women’s Health, the Learned Helplessness Defense, sexual harassment legislation, the prosecution of a man for rape or date rape... mostly men on the front pages, saving mostly women.
Men are also on the front pages when they violate women’s safety, whether on the level of OJ Simpson or Clarence Thomas. We sometimes forget that those men on the front pages are also portrayed negatively much more often than women.[7]
Let’s go beyond the front page. The Life/Style/Women’s sections share women’s internal stories: her experience of divorce, depression, domestic violence, remarriage, her “juggling act,” her battles with harassment and discrimination, even her frustration with the toilet seat being left up. The coverage is legal and emotional. We see statistics and tears.
Conversely, no section shares a man’s personal feelings about losing his wife, children, and home after divorce and then being expected to pay for what he doesn’t have; we read of him coming home drunk and hitting his wife, but not the disappointed dreams that led him to disappear into a bottle; we read the drama of her depression, but only the fact of his; the dilemmas of her juggling act are not balanced by the dilemmas of his “intensifying act” and “father’s catch-22”; we don’t read long stories about his fears of remarriage, his experience of depression, his “life of quiet desperation,” why he doesn’t report domestic violence against him, his thoughts of suicide, or his personal story of what he feels like if he can’t tuck enough money away for his children’s education after the mortgage, insurance, and orthodontist bills are paid; or what he feels like wanting to make love with his wife but not wanting to be a bother.
We care about men as human doings, not as human beings. We care about him as an individual like I care about the individual parts of my car – I care about its problems only when it’s causing me problems. Or I care about prevention only when lack of prevention will cause me problems. Even when a man’s problems are affecting his ability to be a protector, we often refer to his problems from the perspective of the problems they create for a woman (he cheated on her; he got drunk and hit her). Which is why the other men who make the front pages are the villains who are causing us problems.
In brief, men’s lives count only to the degree they are heroes who perform for us or save us, or villains who disturb our peace. Women’s lives count more for their own sake…a woman’s pain is every talk show.
We so rarely inquire of a man’s grief, we forget it exists. When Princess Di had her affair, we asked her about her isolation, her depression, her husband’s aloofness; but when Prince Charles had an affair, we accused him of infidelity.... As a result, billions of women worldwide identified with Princess Di. Few men had any male fears with which to identify.
For millions of years, this attitude was necessary for survival, but it is now dysfunctional for our dads and sons having a quality life. And it is destroying love between the sexes.
Lack of compassion for men’s stories is also dysfunctional to our selection of leadership. Think of the bind Bill Clinton was in as a candidate for president. If he had acknowledged his sexual addiction before he became president, we would have denied him the presidency. We say we want honesty, but reward denial. When we force a man to choose between working on himself and his career, we encourage denial. And we serve neither him or the country. Nor do we serve women: be they Hillary, Chelsea, Monica or the millions of women who now trust men even less.
One reason men fear speaking up is that they fear they will be evaluated not by the compassion applied to Princess Di, but by the assumptions applied to Prince Charles. For example, when President Clinton had an affair, we didn’t inquire of his emotional isolation, or ask compassionately if his and Hillary’s political partnership left him emotionally and sexually starving. Maybe this was not the case, but we didn’t ask. Until we treat a man as something other than a replaceable part when we discover him as a human being, he will pose only as a human doing.
Thus far I’ve been speaking of men who make the front pages. But they are, at best, one tenth of one percent of all men. Meantime, the “invisible” man, the short order cooks, the truck drivers, the garbage collector or construction worker, the Willy Lomans and Private Ryans of everyday life, have neither their external or internal stories told.
Because of our dependency on men as saviors, when men fail, we treat them differently than women who fail. When women commit crimes, we are told of the hardships of their childhood; with men, we are told of the victims of their crime.
Are women prevented from having their external stories told? No. Today women are given scholarships and affirmative action to encourage them full time into the world of business and politics; men are given neither to encourage them full time into the world of home and family.
The Lace Curtain
Hearing women’s internal stories – without hearing men’s – made the world seem unfair to women. Ironically, because we didn’t know men’s stories were being left out, the more we heard from women the more we thought we’d been neglecting women. Soon it became politically incorrect to interrupt her flow. So women’s stories became women’s studies, not to be interrupted by men’s studies.
Graduates of women’s studies courses soon controlled gender related decisions in almost all large bureaucracies. When an issue about sexual harassment or date rape came up on a college campus, the feminists flooded the committees concerning these decisions, created the agenda, and decided who would be hired as consultants and speakers.
The problem? Women with backgrounds in women’s studies were not only uneducated about men, but often saw men as the problem and women as the solution. They had demonized men. If someone spoke up against them, they weren’t just outnumbered, they were labeled sexist. And what we will see in this chapter is how that labeling led to the end of careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s as quickly as being labeled communist ended careers in the 1950s.
The power of feminists to allow only a feminist perspective to be aired (in every field that dealt with gender issues) came to be labeled the “Lace Curtain.”
The Iron Curtain shut out opinions considered a threat to Communism. The Lace Curtain shuts out opinions considered a threat to feminism.
In an Iron Curtain country, capitalist-bashing was the norm. In a Lace Curtain country, man-bashing is the norm. The chapter on man bashing hopefully made clear the degree to which man bashing is the norm; this chapter on the lace curtain shows us how each institution, from the government to the school system, from the helping professions to the media, produces that outcome, each in its own unique way.
In an Iron Curtain country, being too critical of core Communist tenets could cost you your job. Especially if your job was in the government, media or education system. In a Lace Curtain country, being too critical of core feminist attitudes (sexual harassment, affirmative action) can cost you your job. Especially if your job is in the government, media or education system.
The Communist Party achieved this power to censor formally, by revolution and becoming the one-party system of Soviet politics. Feminism achieved this power informally, by becoming the one-party system of gender politics: creating a new area of study, defining the terms, generating the data and becoming the only acceptable source of interpretation. This chapter explains how this occurs, and why.
Communists came into power by selling the belief that workers were exploited by capitalists. Feminists came into power by selling the belief that women were exploited by men. Both communists and feminists defined an enemy and sold itself as the champion of the oppressed.
Once Communism and feminism successfully defined themselves as progressive and morally superior, censoring criticism could be rationalized as progressive and morally necessary.
How do you know if you’re part of the Lace Curtain? If you feel more comfortable telling a man-bashing joke than a joke bashing all women. How do you know if you’re in an organization that’s part of the Lace Curtain? When you tell a man-bashing joke and everyone laughs, then tell a woman-bashing joke and no one laughs.... In some organizations, the censorship starts sooner... we don’t even think of telling the woman-bashing joke!
The Lace Curtain is less a “woman thing” than a feminist thing. But feminism has made women-as-victim so credible we would sooner think of saving whales than saving males. In this respect, almost all of us contribute to the Lace Curtain.
Which institutions create the lace curtain? Universities, in all the liberal arts, especially at the top-ranked schools; the school system, especially public high schools; government, especially at the national and United Nations level; the media, especially print media and television; the helping professions, especially social work; advertising, especially on television; book publishing, especially self-help and text books; funding institutions, especially those funding health, arts, and university research. Each institution censors and distorts in its own unique way. Each reinforces the other like academics citing each other’s research.
If your son or daughter is about to enter a top university in the liberal arts, he or she will be behind the lace curtain. You’ll notice it next Christmas. It is leaving many of our daughters with a love-hate relationship toward their dads and husbands; when they become mothers of sons, their feelings about men are transmitted to their sons, leaving their sons with mixed feelings about themselves. The Lace Curtain, like the Iron Curtain, ultimately hurts even those it was intended to benefit: leaving many employers fearful of hiring women; making many of our children fearful of marriage.
Is the Lace Curtain a conspiracy? No and yes. “No” by the current meaning of the word (a covert manipulation), but “yes” by the original Latin, meaning “to breathe together” (“spire” means to breathe; “con” means together). If we think of a conspiracy as people of a similar consciousness, in essence “breathing together,” then the Lace Curtain is a conspiracy. For reasons I discuss in the chapter on man-bashing, it is a “conspiracy” common to industrialized nations.
How I Met the Lace Curtain: My Personal Journey
As I listen to the stories of authors who have tried to articulate men’s issues, I hear one experience of censorship after another. Some I will share, but many authors who are published or still have hopes of being published, are afraid to be mentioned – “I’m afraid people will assume the real reason is that my work is inferior”; “I’m afraid it will be seen as sour grapes”; “I’m afraid people will say my book didn’t sell well and that’s why I’m so angry”; “I’m afraid....”
I acknowledge all of these fears myself. But I also know that if I don’t practice what I preach – that women can’t hear what men don’t say – then I have no right to ask other men to take risks I am myself unwilling to take. I know this will leave me vulnerable, and I know some people will never read this book because they will first read some news account of some distorted version of these personal stories that will make them turn off to me before they get started. I can’t say, “so be it” because I do care – I write to be read. But every man has exactly these type of fears when he first begins to share his life experience – that his career, his reputation (his readership) will be hurt. And sometimes, when he shares, that is a price he actually pays.
I will ask you to assume that if you have a teenage son, or husband, that he has these same fears, fears that keep a part of him silent even as another part speaks. If you are able to hear him in the way of Part I above, you will give him your greatest gift. Enough. Here goes....
When I was first elected to the Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City, I was 26. I had never written for a national publication. The New York Times sought me out, did a major story on me and the men’s groups I was running, and asked me to write an op. ed. piece. I did. They published it, with hardly a word changed. They asked me to do a second. Again they published it with hardly a word changed. And a third....
As long as I was writing from a feminist perspective, The New York Times published everything I wrote. Once I began questioning the feminist perspective, The New York Times published nothing I wrote – not a single one of the more than twenty articles I have since submitted to them in the following two decades.
Back to the story...
The New York Times coverage led to the Today Show. During my years speaking from the feminist perspective, I was three times a guest on the Today Show. Once I began articulating men’s perspectives, I was never invited back. I was beginning to notice a pattern!
Phil Donahue had apparently seen me on the Today Show and in The New York Times and extended an invitation. When we met, we hit it off. He immediately invited his first wife (Marjorie) to meet me and dine together. When he and Marjorie ran into conflicts, he would call me for advice. After each show, he took me to the airport himself. On the seventh show, though, something happened. I began to add men’s perspectives. Suddenly, I was not invited back for years.
When Why Men Are The Way They Are was published, I was eventually invited for an eighth show. But articulating men’s perspectives, even in balance with women’s, led to another six year hiatus. When The Myth of Male Power came out, although it was from the male perspective, it was so much up Donahue’s line of relationships and politics that three producers were vying to be the one to produce the show. I was scheduled, with a firm date. The producers convinced my agent to book me as an exclusive on Donahue. As a result, queries to all other American talk shows were dropped. Then something happened….
The taping kept getting “postponed.” Eventually neither I nor my agents, Hilsinger and Mendelson, the most powerful in the book publicity business, could reach them. As I was trying to unravel the stonewalling, a Canadian show called. They were filled with enthusiasm. But suddenly it, too, kept getting “postponed.” This producer, though, had previously booked me; I could feel the remorse in his voice; so I pressed him for an explanation.
Finally he caved, “If you promise to never use my name I’ll tell you.” I promised. Hesitatingly, he started, “We wanted to have a balanced show, so we called a couple of feminists – big names – to be on with you. Instead of just refusing, they said in effect, ‘If you have this guy on, don’t expect us to bring our next book to you, or supply you with real-life examples to use on your show – we’ll do that just for Oprah.’ Another one used the moral appeal – something like, ‘Feminism is opposed to rape and the battering of women; so, if you have him on, you’d better take responsibility for making women even more vulnerable.’ Once the word got out that we were considering you, we got other calls, even one from a guy, sort of repeating the same mantra.
“Warren, most of us saw all this for the attempt at censorship it was, and as for me, I was excited by the controversy, but, well, it just took one of our producers who’s never met you and hasn’t read the book to freak out and, before we knew it, we were all afraid to stir up her indignation.” Well, there you have it. Or,... there I had it!
Then there was the day I first questioned in public the statement that men earned a dollar for each 70 cents earned by women. I did that on Hour Magazine, a show that was nationally televised at the time. The other guest was Gloria Steinem. I said, “Never-married women often earn more than never-married men, because....” Gloria, who had to that point (1986) viewed me as an ally, looked to host Gary Collins as if to signal “cut!” Gary Collins, who had always treated me with great respect, told me I must have gotten the sexes mixed up, and signaled for the producer to interrupt the taping.
Off air, I explained that I had meant what I said. I could see in Gary’s and Gloria’s faces that I had “turned the screw.” I could feel the segment was being redone merely so they could avoid saying directly that it would never be aired. And yes, it was never aired. My status changed from regular guest to never being invited back. As for Gloria Steinem? Well, she went from being a friend, to never returning my calls. Thinking a little humor might break the ice, I sent her a phone from Toys-R-Us with a dime taped to it. Maybe she doesn’t like Toys-R-Us.
I had naively believed that leaders as pioneering as I thought Gloria was would be delighted to hear of ways in which women were succeeding. Now I had to face a deeper fear: that some of my feminist colleagues might have an emotional investment in women’s victimhood that went so deep as to prevent any discussion that might dilute women’s victim status. Since my income came from feminist referrals, and since feminist power was solidifying the Lace Curtain, I felt, well, …scared.
I was eventually to discover that fear was well founded. My speaking engagements on college campuses were soon reduced to less than 5% – not 50%, but 5% – of what they were.
It isn’t that many women and even individual feminists were not open enough to hearing a different perspective. When I wrote The Myth of Male Power, an editor at Modern Maturity, the publication with the largest monthly circulation in the United States, had read it, loved it, felt it would be perfect for the male readers, and asked me to write two articles for Modern Maturity. I did. Both articles were loved, edited, approved, paid in full, and scheduled for publication.
I had just turned fifty, so I was to receive my own copy. I saw it in the mailbox, and quickly scanned the front cover to see if they gave it special coverage. No. Then the table of contents. Nothing. I called the editor. She apologized and said they had “changed focus” at the last minute. But something in her voice said “cover up.” I asked the editor to be honest. She was. She explained that one feminist researcher, who admittedly could find nothing wrong with the research, nevertheless protested. Loudly. The management became afraid. The editor felt as awful as I did.
One day, I received a call from Glamour magazine. They had done excerpts from Why Men Are The Way They Are when other women’s magazines had passed. So I was especially happy when both Glamour and one of my favorite editors there wanted to co-author with me a major article on “How Does Sex Really Feel to Men?” Here was the deal: I do the research; she does the writing, Glamour-style. Fine. So I did the research.
I found that many men felt sex was better with less-attractive women. In one man’s words, “The most attractive women I’ve been with have been the worst lovers....” A few had good experiences with women a little overweight. One explained, “ There’s kind of a maternal quality that I find very arousing, comforting, very erotic.”
The editor loved the material – to her it felt unique, and suggested that many different types of women could be loved. But a top Glamour editor marked these very findings with “I’d drop this.” Finally, the entire piece was canned. The excuse? “Nothing original.” The editor was shocked. She knew the real reason: Glamour isn’t selling slightly overweight, less-attractive women.
In this case, my findings were compatible with those of virtually every feminist – put less emphasis on the quasi-anorexic woman. The censorship came instead from a different portion of the Lace Curtain – the portion whose investment is not in victim power, but in “genetic celebrity” power[8]: the power of a woman’s beauty to obtain attention, “love,” dinners, dates, and diamonds without her doing anything but smile in return. The genetic celebrity power portion of the lace curtain knew that the more she had an investment in her genetic celebrity power, the more she would invest, the more the ads were worth. I was discovering that each portion of the lace curtain wanted to hear the men’s feelings that they wanted to hear.
What happens when the genetic celebrity gets married? A Ladies’ Home Journal reporter interviewed me about “What Men Fear Most.”[9] It was about the secrets men fear sharing even with their wives (e.g., fear of not earning enough money combined with a desire for a career that he enjoyed more that paid less). He sent me the draft he sent to the Journal. I was relieved. I knew it would be helpful to the marriages of Ladies’ Home Journal readers. Until we saw the published piece – with virtually every insight surgically removed. An experienced writer, he had never experienced “editing” at this level. He was shaken, and depressed.
The Myth of Male Power had just arrived at the studio of Good Morning, America. It was creating an in-studio buzz, and my publicists were informed they wanted to devote a full half hour to a debate between men and a leading feminist like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, or Susan Faludi. None of the name feminists would do a debate. Feminists who mostly agreed with me, like Camille Paglia and Nancy Friday, were willing to dialogue, but that wasn’t enough conflict for Good Morning, America. Now here’s where the lace curtain comes in: In ten years of expressing only the feminist perspective, including three times on Good Morning America, I had never been asked to debate. This time, when the big name feminists refused to debate, they cut the appearance from a possible half hour to four minutes!
Why, though, would the feminists not debate? For the same reason any one party system has no interest in debating. When you have the power you have little to gain and a lot to lose. When we speak of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, one example is the unwillingness to debate. The unwillingness to debate is part of the corruption of power.
Perhaps the most ironic story is still “in process.” For more than three years, I have been told I was too politically incorrect to be on Politically Incorrect! Stuart Pedersen, a paid consultant to the show finally wrote me, “As if you didn’t know, Politically Incorrect is clearly censoring you.... They’re afraid of you.”
If my experiences were unique I probably wouldn’t have the courage to share them here. For me, part of what I learn from women and feminists is the value of sharing what is “private,” helping each of us to determine whether our “personal” experiences are also political ones. Even with that, I may still not have the courage to share these stories had my reception not been so positive for so long when I was writing only from the feminist perspective.
In a moment I’ll share some of these other men’s perspectives, but first, there are two feminists who refer to themselves as dissident feminists – Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers – who have also met the Lace Curtain head on. Camille Paglia has not hesitated to speak publicly of being booked on shows and then hearing producers’ tales of the feminists calling to persuade them to drop her. Because she receives so many death threats, her answering machine announces that she doesn’t personally open packages sent to her.
When Christina Hoff Sommers wrote Who Stole Feminism?, CBS’s Eye to Eye was doing a special on her. When the show was aired, Connie Chung publicly announced on the show that she was surprised to receive phone calls from so many feminists, including Gloria Steinem personally, trying to pressure the producer into not having the show aired. To CBS’s credit, and in particular to the credit of reporter Bernard Goldberg, they did not cave.
Men from the US to England who have tried to express men’s perspectives on a broad range of issues have found themselves similarly censored.
A colleague of mine wrote letters-to-the editor to The Nation for years. Nothing published. Finally he signed his name “Stephanie” rather than Steve.[10] Published. American authors Asa Baber and Jack Kammer, both balanced and articulate, and British authors Neil Lyndon and David Thomas, both of whom met with success before they tried to articulate men’s perspectives, could not garner among them a single review or article in The New York Times, Newsweek, or Time.[11] As a result, Neil and David basically forfeited their expertise on men’s issues; Asa, a Playboy columnist with hundreds of thousands of readers, wrote no more books; and Jack has been unsuccessful in getting his next book published.
The British authors, unpublished in the United States, experienced a different type of lace curtain treatment in Britain. Neil Lyndon, author of No More Sex War, explains, “The reviews avoided what I said and attacked me personally, saying I must be impotent, or angry because I couldn’t get a girlfriend. I happened to be involved with a stunningly beautiful woman, but the truth was irrelevant.... And then, I was invited to speak at the Cambridge Union [the British pinnacle of intellect and debate]. It was at the time of the threats to Salmon Rushdie’s life, about which all intellectuals were outraged. When I finished speaking, the President of the Cambridge Union, a woman, said in no uncertain terms that my book should be burned. Some weeks later, a student told me her history prof said in class that I should be shot. Shot! To me it is too ironic that the same people who are outraged at the censorship of Salmon Rushdie are so quick to censor anything confronting feminism, and are blind to their own hypocrisy.”
At least Neil did not experience the death threats encountered by Camille Paglia, or the ostracism experienced by Suzanne Steinmetz, Richard Gelles, and Murray Straus when they published their findings showing women batter equally (see the chapter on domestic violence).
The Lace Curtain’s power exists even in male-dominated institutions. For example, Dr. Charles McDowell, formerly of the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, discovered that 27% of Air Force women who claimed they had been raped later admitted making false accusations of rape.[12] The admission usually came when they were asked to take a lie detector test. With these admitted false accusations he was able to develop 35 criteria distinguishing false accusations and those known to be genuine. Three independent judges then examined the remainder of the cases. Only if all three reviewers independently concluded the original rape allegations were false did they rank them as “false.” The total of false allegations became 60%.
Rather than publicize the study as an antidote to the Tailhook scandal, the study was buried. Dr. Charles McDowell was ostracized and moved– the Air Force equivalent of being sent to Siberia.
How does the lace curtain become part of such diverse institutions in such a wide variety of industrialized nations around the world? Here’s an overview, but don’t expect yourself to believe this before you read the chapter.
How the Lace Curtain Works: The Eight Step Plan
The Lace Curtain works...
• By the training of feminists in women’s studies’ programs who then become the only experts on gender in all institutions working on gender questions.
In the process, the three other major perspectives of the gender dialogue go unrepresented. The perspectives of:
• non-traditional men who feel both sexes’ traditional role needs changing, and both sexes need equal compassion in making that transition. This group sees itself as temporarily focused on men’s issues, but ultimately being part of a gender transition movement. They believe that historically neither sex was a victim, they both had roles necessary to survival. (Although this is the group with which I identify, I do not believe it should be more than one-fourth of the gender discussion.)
• traditional women – the 65 percent of women who do not consider themselves feminists (according to a CNN-Time poll[13]);
• traditional men (the equivalent of the 65 percent of women who do not consider themselves feminists). This includes Promise Keepers and men agreeing with Rush Limbaugh.
The effect? Almost every aspect of male-female relationships is studied and legislated from the feminist point of view, not the traditional female or male point of view or the perspective of the non-traditional male. Within the feminist point of view, we will see how the victim feminist perspective dominates those of empowerment feminists in the areas that apply to the lace curtain.
This bias is not stagnant. It can begin anywhere in the system and spread like the ripple begun by a pebble tossed in a pond. Feminists in the women’s bureau of the department of labor may subcontract a study to academic feminists, the results of which are promoted to a feminist media which does not question the bias, and the resulting hard news and soft news create public support for politicians to create legal changes that in turn fund more feminist academic and government studies....
This gives feminist perspectives so much value the system “buys” more feminists. How?
• By awarding feminists with honors, scholarships and careers.
We will see below the 1,700 funding sources for women and the complete lack of comparable sources for men; the way 30,000 women’s studies courses support professors who think feminist and teach feminist, while virtually no comparable men’s studies courses exist with teachers who think “masculist,” if you will; the way the Human Resource and Development divisions of most large corporations allow only a feminist approach to gender, thus creating careers for tens of thousands of additional feminists. Even some of the most prestigious awards, like Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, are given to women with feminist world-views, like Susan Faludi and Toni Morrison, but never to a man or woman who specializes in men’s issues.
With the lace curtain’s structure and funding intact, its next step is defining the issues and non-issues, the heroes and villains. It does this by...
• By defining two-sex issues from only the woman’s perspective.
Thus, we discuss domestic violence against women, not domestic violence against men; we study schools from the perspective of the neglect to our daughters, not our sons; we define health issues as women’s health, not the 34 neglected areas of men’s health outlined below; we define work-in-the-home as housework, remaining blind to the fifty areas of men’s contributions; we discuss dating from the girls’ perspective of boys coming on too strong, not boys’ perspective of fearing being rejected or their feelings about girls not sharing the risks of rejection.
Even if men (e.g., legislators) are competing to solve the problem, they are competing to solve a lace curtain definition of the problem. The men may be accused of male dominance, but they are actually working for women – dominated by women’s concerns without even knowing men’s exist.
• By creating victim data to catalyze “Victim Power.”
Female-as-victim data is publicized, male-as-victim data ignored. We saw in the chapters above how men as equal victim of domestic violence data has been kept out of the public consciousness for a quarter century. The best way to ignore data is to not ask questions to discover it to begin with. Thus we see below how the Census Bureau asks only women about child support payments. And finally, victim data is also created by falsification, as we saw with the United Nations falsification of housework data.
When the problem is worse for American men, as with suicide, or circumcision, find a country in which it is as bad for women and headline it as worse for women. Then portray this woman’s problem as caused by men or patriarchy.
The effect? Woman-as-Victim catalyzes the protector instinct in all of us, leading us to create advantages for women, from affirmative action and scholarships to special legal defenses. It creates female Victim Power. This tempts feminists to ignore data and perspectives empathetic to men for fear of destroying this female Victim Power.
Does male victim data catalyze a parallel male victim power? No. It catalyzes the “cringe response.” Why? Our fear is that a man who needs help cannot protect. Cringe.
• By making illegal the problems growing out of the traditional male role and ignoring the problems growing out of the traditional female role.
Thus deadbeat dads becomes a major issue, denial of visitation a minor issue. We expand the ability to prosecute rape and ignore false accusations of rape. Since women’s new role is working outside the home, equal rights to the workplace are a major issue, men’s equal rights to the homeplace and fathering are minor issues. Since men are the sexual initiators and more likely to be above women at work, we prioritize the problems of sexual harassment, and ignore the problems of sexual advantage – for example, the advantages Monica Lewinsky received that other interns did not, and the awarding of damages to future interns to compensate for the suspicion with which they will be viewed.
The effect? Once the man is portrayed as perpetrator, the perpetrator’s story is suspect and the media is hesitant to cross-examine the presumed “victim” – it doesn’t want to appear to be “blaming the victim,” or “not believing the victim.” Thus the media drops its investigative mandate.
• By neglecting to define men’s issues.
Other men’s issues, like the lack of a men’s birth control pill, male-only executions, male-only draft registration, men’s health, equal pay for equal dating, or false accusations of domestic violence or child molestation, especially during custody battles etc., are not defined in the public consciousness at all.
• By labeling people who disagree with victim feminism as “sexist,” and if they persist, putting their careers at risk.
While feminist thinking is honored and turned into careers, the reverse is true of non-feminist thinking. I am often approached by men when speaking to corporations about their fears of being honest about women in the workplace. I recall a man at Bell Atlantic who said, “If I suggested that at 7pm, the only people left in my department are men – and that’s why we get promoted faster – I’d be setting myself up to never be promoted again!”
• By men’s silence.
The reasons for men’s silence and the price it exacts are the theme of this book, so no explanation required here except that without it the lace curtain would not exist.
Together it has become as hard for men to have their issues heard in industrialized countries as it was for capitalists to have had their issues heard in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the advent of glasnost.
The lace curtain operates through the government, education, the media and the helping professions. The government first...
Government and Funding: Manufacturing Women-As-Victims (Main Section)
The Directory of Financial Aids for Women, 1999-2001 describes “more than 1,700 funding programs...set aside specifically for women.”[14] This represents billions of dollars in female-only financial aid.[15] Much of the funding is directly or indirectly paid for by taxpayers. There is no equivalent directory for men. But you probably knew that.
Warren Farrell
FOOTNOTES
[1]Subtitled The Political Economy of the Mass Media (NY: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 35. not rep
[2]Term coined by Nicholas Davidson, author of The Failure of Feminism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1988). not rep
[3]James W. Boyce, “Manufacturing Concern: Headline Coverage of Male and Female Victims of Violence in Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1989 to 1992,” 1994. MA Thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.
[4]Ibid., James W. Boyce, “Manufacturing Concern: Headline Coverage of Male and Female Victims of Violence in Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1989 to 1992,” 1994, see p. 13. MA Thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.
[5]Ibid. James W. Boyce, “Manufacturing Concern: Headline Coverage of Male and Female Victims of Violence in Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1989 to 1992,” 1994. MA Thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.
[6]See, for example, Laura Sydell, “How the Media Slants The Message,” On the Issues, Summer, 1992, p. 33-36. Studies documenting mostly men on front pages (about 85%) include M. Junior Bridge, “Marginalizing Women: Front-Page News Coverage of Females Declines in 1996,” a publication of Women, Men, and Media, copyright ©1996 by , Unabridged Communications. Bridge repeated below
[7]Junetta Davis, Journalism Quarterly, 1982, No. 59, pp. 456-460, as cited in Jack Kammer, “On Balance: The Journalism of Gender,” Quill, May, 1992, p. 29. Kammer rep
[8]Warren Farrell, Why Men Are The Way They Are (NY: Berkley, paper, 1994). not rep
[9]Hank Herman, “What Men Fear Most,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March, 1992, p. 82. not rep
[10]Steven Svoboda, private correspondence, January 19, 1997.
[11]I interviewed David Thomas, author of Not Guilty, on December 16, 1998, and Neil Lyndon, author of No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), on January 17, 1999.
[12]Written correspondence to me from Charles P. McDowell, Ph.D., M.P.A., M.L.S., Supervisory Special Agent of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, March 20, 1992. This is based on an Air Force study of 556 rape allegations, the methodology and details of which are explained in my The Myth of Male Power (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993 ; NY: Berkley, paper, 1994), p. 322. The Air Force investigated 556 cases of alleged rape. not rep
[13]Poll taken mid-May, 1998, and mentioned on CNN & Company.
[14]Gail Ann Schlachter, Directory of Financial Aids for Women, 1997-1999, biannual edition Directory of Financial Aids for Women, 1999-2001 (El Dorado Hills, CA: Reference Service Press, 1999).
[15]Ibid. Gail Ann Schlachter, Directory of Financial Aids for Women, 1997-1999, biannual edition Directory of Financial Aids for Women, 1999-2001 (El Dorado Hills, CA: Reference Service Press, 1999). not rep
Studies are done when studies are funded. If the area is gender, the funding is feminist.
Lace Curtain Research and the Funding It Finds
Now that men are in the minority in college (45%), and doing worse in almost all subjects except math and science in high school, and dropping out, committing suicide, and suffering learning disabilities at much higher rates, we would expect special financial aid to be available to boys – perhaps even more than to girls. Not the case.
Although women dominate the humanities, grants to study male-female issues given by the National Endowment for the Humanities are given almost exclusively to study only women, and from only a feminist perspective. For example, $27,500 for “Witchcraft Beliefs and the History of Thought in Ancient Mesopotamia.”[16] What is distinctly missing are studies relevant to both sexes knowing how to improve their lives, such as “The Impact of Stepdad vs. Biological Father Involvement in Divorced Families.”
The pattern is the same with the National Endowment for the Arts using, for example, $37,500 of our money to fund exhibits titled “A Woman’s Life Isn’t Worth Much,”[17] but virtually nothing on men’s lives.
Other studies are conducted more directly by the government, such as the Census Bureau. Let’s look....
Remember the headlines we read telling us how little men pay in child support, based on Census Bureau figures? All these Census Bureau’s figures are based on the reports of women. And only women.
Only recently did the government commission a special survey including men. The men reported paying almost 40% more than the women reported receiving (between 80% and 93% of what the court had ordered),[18] plus more payments in full and on time.[19]
Why haven’t we seen any “Men Pay 80%-93%” headlines? Because as soon as the men’s perspective was discovered to be so different, the Family Support Administration had the study discontinued – it was not released.[20] Which is another way of saying “censored.”
Another example. The National Longitudinal Survey provides the basis for thousands of articles about women every year. It is perhaps the most important study of how Americans’ lives change during our lifetimes. Well, no longer. Since 1983, men have been dropped from the study.[21] It is now the most important study about how women’s lives change.
How was the dropping of men justified? Men are harder to study. Wasn’t that was one of the reasons the medical community gave to feminists when feminists asked why women had been left out of many medical studies? The feminists rightly protested, “Go the extra mile – we have the right to know what does and doesn’t apply to us.” The feminists were right, but the men are silent. The government can’t hear what men don’t say.
The Murder of All Justice
In the chapter on domestic violence, much of the censorship I discussed emanated from the US Department of Justice. It was the Department of Justice that censored abuse by women from a 1979 poll. Finally some professors discovered the data on the original computer tape.[22] The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Murder In Families” stressed women-as-victims although its own raw data showed 55.5% male and 44.5% female victims of family murder.[23] Similarly, it issued a report on Violence Against Women,[24] but none on Violence Against Men – despite the fact that two-thirds of the violence is against men. We saw also how the FBI hides the female method of killing by contract by calling it a multiple-offender killing.[25]
I am unaware of a single government source with a focus on family or gender that does not now have a strong feminist bias. Some are bureaus of feminist bias....
Labor in The Women’s Bureau
You’ve probably read that men earn more than women for the same work. Most of us believe it. That statistic evolves from data compiled by the US Department of Labor. But the Department of Labor has only a Women’s Bureau, not a Men’s Bureau. Thus we are given raw data that tells us women earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, but no Men’s Bureau looks beyond the surface to show us what’s missing....
What’s missing? In the research for a forthcoming book (25 Ways to Higher Pay), I discovered that men behave differently toward the workplace in 25 different ways. All these ways lead to men earning more, but for very different work (more-hazardous jobs, more technical professions like engineering or brain surgery, etc.), very different behavior at work (longer hours, working night shifts, etc.), and very different efforts to obtain the work (working in much less enticing locations [Alaskan oil rigs, coal mines], commuting further, relocating more, working overseas), and so on.
The Women’s Bureau gives us breakdowns by all the categories in which men outearn women, but these 25 differences that tell us why men earn more aren’t mentioned; and areas in which women outearn men (e.g., entry-level engineers or mechanics) do not become press releases or stories in our local paper. The biases are reinforced by an American school system in which only 58% of high school students in 1999 understand even the very basics of supply and demand.[26] So it does not compute to 42% of students that when men choose labor that fewer people want to do (because of those 25 types of hardships), it means their pay will be higher because of supply and demand, not discrimination. (And higher pay is usually why the men choose that labor.)
Once this Lace Curtain bias (reinforced by a women’s bureau without a men’s bureau) is in our psyches, it creates the political justification for others: Equal Pay Day is established.[27] Vice President Gore not only says that women are paid less for the same work, but that more-competent women are deprived of jobs before less-competent men. He doesn’t mention affirmative action as the legal requirement for the opposite to be permitted. Then the Council of Economic Advisers reports women earn only 75 cents to men’s dollar.
This confluence of misinformation creates the political atmosphere which allows President Clinton to announce tripling the mechanisms to enforce penalties for discrimination against women for the fiscal 2000 budget.[28] A public service campaign will inform women of their rights. Enter a new millennium of lawsuits. For what are the lawsuits a substitute? Women knowing the other 25 ways they can receive higher pay. These would make their company need them more rather than fear them more. That’s the difference between victim feminism and empowerment feminism.
The Office of Research on Women’s Health...and the Deaths of our Sons, Husbands, and Dads
There is no misuse of the lace curtain that is killing our fathers and their sons more than its misuse in the area of men’s and women’s health. We all benefit from more research on both sexes’ health. So why have we been focusing on women’s health during the past three decades to such a degree that we have an Office of Research on Women’s Health but none on men’s health? Because we were told by government leaders and feminist activists that women’s health research received only 10% of all health research funding. We were not told men’s research receives only 5% of government funding (the other 85% is for non gender-specific research, such as cellular, blood, DNA, etc.).[29]
In certain areas women’s health research was neglected. We were led to believe that is because we didn’t care about women. The opposite was true. Men, and especially male prisoners, military men and African-American men, were the most likely to be the guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs because we cared less if men and prisoners died. That is, we used men for experimental research for the same reason we use rats for experimental research.
Two points are important here: What neglect there was of women came from protecting women too much. A core theme of this book is the “female protection paradox”: that protecting women hurts women. This is just one example. Second, the neglect was limited to certain areas of women’s health – overall women’s health research has long exceeded men’s.[30]
Notice, though, that we are not being told that we needed to pay attention to women’s and men’s health. The women’s health message has, ironically, been a competitive one: women neglected, men not. And it has been a blaming one: The male medical community cares more about men.
The result? Most of the world assumes women just “naturally” live longer than men. They are unaware that in 1920, for example, American men died only one year sooner than women; today, they die seven years sooner.[31] While dozens of studies are being done on the possible damage of silicone breast implants, the causes of men dying seven years sooner are virtually ignored. Nor are most of us aware of how quickly men’s health is deteriorating. When I wrote The Myth of Male Power in 1993, the gap between male and female suicide was 3.9 to 1; now it is 4.5 to 1 (see table). In Great Britain, there is a recent 339% increase in male suicides by hanging alone.[32]
Even as we are increasingly hearing that women die of heart disease as often as men, we are not hearing that when most women die of heart disease, men have been long dead. Here are the age-adjusted death rates for the ten leading causes of death[33]...
Male
to
Female
Ratio
1. Diseases of heart 1.8 to 1
2. Cancerous cysts 1.4 to 1
3. Cerebrovascular diseases 1.2 to 1
4. Obstructive lung disease 1.5 to 1
5. Accidents and adverse effects 2.4 to 1
6. Pneumonia and influenza 1.6 to 1
7. Diabetes Mellitus 1.2 to 1
8. AIDS (HIV) 4.3 to 1
9. Suicide 4.5 to 1
10. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 2.4 to 1
In a sense, our sons, husbands, and dads pay a “10% disposability tax” when they are born male. And more importantly, something can be done about it. Men are less likely than women to have healthcare coverage, a gap that has widened again recently.[34] And 94% of those dying from work-related injuries (e.g., on construction sites, or as truckers, roofers, cab drivers) are men,[35] yet the United States has only one job safety inspector for every six fish and game inspectors.[36]
What is the US government doing about this disposability of almost half its population? It is identifying women as the at-risk group in its draft of “Healthy People 2010,” the blueprint for legislation and funding for the first decade of the new millennium. It is treating women’s eating disorders as more important than men’s suicides, or men’s heart disease, or men’s occupational deaths, or men’s seven-year-shorter lifespan. More precisely, it is virtually ignoring the causes of men dying. Overall, it specifies 38 health objectives for women, two for men.[37]
The blindness to males at risk hurts our sons. Testicular cancer is one of the most common cancers in men age 15 to 34. When detected early, there is an 87% survival rate.[38] We educate women to examine their breasts, but few parents even know how to teach their 14-year-old son to examine his testicles. Girls’ suicide rate is decreasing and boys’ is increasing. As boys experience the pressures of the male role, their suicide rate increases 25,000%.[39] The suicide rate for men over 85 is 1350% higher than for women of the same age group.[40]
Each of these groups of men would benefit from media that ran articles educating men, or the establishment of hotlines for men contemplating suicide, along with Public Service Announcements letting men know the symptoms of suicide, or of testicular cancer....
What could “Healthy People 2010” be identifying as an agenda for men’s health? Here are 34 neglected areas, for starters. Notice the leading cause of death among men – heart disease – is not on here because that is not a neglected area (perhaps because it is also the leading cause of death among women?). And notice also how many of these areas we’ve barely heard of and, therefore, have little emotional investment in doing something about. That’s just the point – we can’t care about what we don’t hear about...
1. a men's birth control pill
2. suicide
3. PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome)
4. circumcision as a possible trauma-producing experience
5. the male mid-life crisis
6. dyslexia
7. autism
8. the causes of male violence
9. criminal recidivism
10. street homelessness among veterans (85% of street homeless are men; about 1/3rd veterans)
11. steroid abuse
12. colorblindness
13. testicular cancer
14. prostate cancer
15. BPH – benign prostatic hyperplasia
16. lifespan. Why the male-female gap increased from one to seven years; solutions.
17. hearing loss over 30
18. erectile dysfunction
19. non-specific urethritis
20. epididymitis (a disease of the tubes that transmit sperm)
21. DES sons (diethylstilbestrol, a drug women took in the 1940s and ‘50s to prevent miscarriages; the problems it created in daughters were attended to, while the sons' problems were neglected)[41]
22. hemophilia
23. ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) – alternatives to ritalin
24. workplace deaths (93% men)and injuries
25. institutions turning backs on HGH (human growth hormone) abuse among male athletes/body builders, the damage of artificial turf...
26. concussions, and the cumulative damage from multiple concussions (football)
27. male testosterone reduction between 50 and 70
28. infertility (40% of infertility is male; NIH has increased female infertility research, but has no research for male infertility)
29. depression (women cry, men deny; women check it out, men tough it out; women express, men repress). Rand Corporation finds 70% of male depression goes undetected
30. being victim of domestic violence; unwillingness to report battering
31. chlamydia as a creator of heart disease in men between ages of 30-60[42]
32. estrogen transference to men during intercourse[43]
33. Viagra’s effect on heart disease, stress, and marital communication
34. LSD (lower sexual desire) Syndrome (seen in more than half of men between 25 and 50)[44]
In some of these areas, such as sexually transmitted diseases, we think of women being more at risk. Yet men are more at risk than women for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis,[45] and are over four times as likely to die of AIDS. Other areas, such Viagra and erectile dysfunction, have been in the news a lot lately, but we’ve only begun to understand the effects of Viagra; and erectile “dysfunction,” as I explain in the chapter on helping men express feelings, is often quite functional.
The chance of a man in the U. S. dying of prostate cancer is now about 20% greater than the chance of a woman dying of breast cancer.[46] Yet the government spends almost four times as much money on breast cancer as it does on prostate cancer.[47] This has, at least, improved from the almost 7 to 1 ratio I announced in 1993 in The Myth of Male Power. Advocacy for prostate cancer has had an impact.
However, government spending creates only part of the prostate cancer/ breast cancer gap. It is impossible to get a figure on the private spending gap, but I estimate it to be approximately 20:1. And this does not include the “special efforts gap,” such as the US Post Office printing special 40-cent stamps to raise more than $25-million dollars for breast cancer research.[48] No stamp raises money for prostate cancer research.
How does this impact the life of our dads? Consider one thing [1]: In the 1920s, a new operation for an enlarged prostate replaced the old method. For 60 years, no one studied the records to determine if the new operation was as beneficial. When they did, it was found that the new operation resulted in a 45% greater chance of dying within five years of surgery. When this was discovered, it was discovered by a Canadian researcher – no US taxpayer spent a penny on it.[49] If breast cancer researchers did not have funds to check for 60 years which form of surgery killed more women, the outcry would have been ferocious, and justifiably so.
Can a Lace Curtain Government Examine Itself?
The states cross-examine their criminal justice systems by forming commissions on gender bias. These commissions invariably find the criminal justice system guilty of discrimination against women. However, these “government” commissions are not really government commissions – they are feminist commissions. That is, the government pays the feminist National Organization for Women and the mostly feminist National Association of Women Judges to choose which issues to research and which to ignore.[50] They are government commissions only in the sense that they are paid for by the government – meaning us. Even the key staff members are typically feminist activists.[51]
Here are some of the ways their conclusions are reached. Data: For the same crime, women are more likely to go free on probation; men are more likely to get prison sentences. Conclusion: Women are victims of discrimination because women receive longer periods of probation![52] Fallacy: Duh....
Data: There are fewer women’s prisons than men. Conclusion: Women are the victims of discrimination because this forces relatives to go farther to visit them. Fallacies: Women receiving probation and shorter sentences for the same crime is part of what leads to fewer women’s prisons. Second, there is rarely any need for more than one women's prison near a city because so few women are in prison; if more women than men were in prison the commissions would doubtless claim this is a result of women’s poverty and downtrodden status – discrimination in the society against women. Third, locating a prison away from a city makes it much easier to create a setting that is more like a country home, and set up open grounds for women and children to play. And yes, there is a tradeoff – as a result, there are fewer women’s prisons near cities and relatives do have to travel farther.
Similarly, the commissions were able to see how women's prisons need to pay attention to problems unique to women, but not problems more common among men, such as guards turning their backs on male-to-male rape; they focus on the overcrowding in women's prisons while barely acknowledging the more intense overcrowding in men's prisons.
When I wrote of these biases on the Commissions’ part in The Myth of Male Power, a Philadelphia TV station decided to do an expose of my book by showing how much worse the situation was for women. To their credit, they acknowledged that everything I had mentioned was true; off the air, they revealed to me that they had set out to disprove the book.
Sadly, when a Philadelphia TV station investigates, it has little impact on policy. The New York Times, with more than enough staff to investigate these conclusions and have an enormous impact on policy, instead reports these conclusions without questioning them.[53]
A feminist government commission on gender bias is the equivalent of a Republican government commission on political party bias. If a political party did this, we’d call it a scandal; when feminists do this, it’s called official. It is one more example of the way feminism has become gender politics’ one-party system.
While feminists gain credibility from the government’s labeling of feminist findings as official, the government itself adds to its credibility by giving grants for the research to be done by feminists in top universities. In turn, feminists who obtain these grants become sources of income for universities, and their publications become sources of promotion for the feminist professors. All of this is happening despite it being against the law, in the same way McCarthyism happened despite the constitutional guarantee for freedom of speech....
Because statistics can be so easily manipulated, it is necessary for them to always emanate from sources in which there are balances of power. Men do not speak up, organize or publicize, so biases against women are eliminated and biases against men remain. I would object as much if government statistics were written up only by masculist writers who felt women’s methods of killings were the only ones worth highlighting.
The government funding gender studies almost exclusively by feminists is like the Department of Agriculture funding tobacco studies almost exclusively by Marlboroists. To be a scholar is not to pre-define a perspective. Saying “feminist scholar” is like saying Republican scholar.
Education or Ms. Education?: Where the Lace Curtain is woven
Title IX theoretically prevents gender discrimination in education.[54] Yet universities openly discriminate in favor of women even though girls are now both entering and graduating from college at a rate of 55% compared to boys’ 45%.[55] If sexism against girls were the issue, African-American girls would not receive 57% of all professional degrees awarded to African-Americans.[56]
Despite this, universities have special programs that not only favor female students, but also female staff and faculty. Even in majors like education, in which men are desperately needed, we have Centers for the Education of Women, but no Centers for the Education of Men.
For example, at the University of Michigan, the Michigan Agenda for Women was designed to help only female faculty and staff be promoted and retained, and to help only female students get special assistance and scholarships.[57] This Agenda for Women is the umbrella for many men-need-not-apply programs at the University of Michigan. Some examples...
The Center for the Education of Women; for only the female faculty, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender annually offers forty research awards at $5,000 each (obviously to do research on the various ways in which women are subjected to gender discrimination!). For undergraduate women only there is a residential program called WISE (Women in Science and Education); for junior-level female faculty a program called SHARE (Senior Hiring and Recruitment Effort) permits departments to promote thirty-one junior level female faculty to the senior level; and a program on Women of Color in the Academy specializes accordingly.
There are no equivalent special programs only for men. At the University of Michigan or anywhere else. Even in fields in which our sons are in the minority, such as all the arts, humanities, social sciences, and languages.
“We Don’t Need Men’s Studies...History Is Men’s Studies, Right?”
Women’s studies courses are the seeds from which the forest of feminism has grown. They are the lace curtain’s womb.
Over 30,000 women’s studies courses are currently offered at American universities. There are about 700 majors or minors offered on American campuses.[58] If we’re looking for predictors for the next millennium, try California: The entire California State University system requires women’s studies courses as part of their curriculum. Nationwide, between a quarter and a third of the universities now require women’s studies courses for graduation.
A study of college courses at 55 major universities found that every Ivy League school, with the exception of Princeton, “now offers more courses in women’s studies than economics, even though economics majors outnumber women’s studies majors by roughly 10-to-1.”[59]
The University of Pennsylvania offers “The Feminist Critique of Christianity,” but none of the 55 universities studied offers a “Christian Critique of Feminism.”[60] Typically, universities have been critical of religion for believing they had the only answer – for maintaining believers were superior to non-believers. Ironically, feminism has become the religion it is critiquing.
The feminist objection to men’s studies sounds convincing: “history is men’s studies.” Here is why no mother should agree with that. The function of women’s studies and men’s studies is to question roles so our children have options, not channel our sons and daughters into stereotypical roles without regard for their individuality. Women’s studies’ original purpose was to do this for women, but history courses do the opposite for men. Traditional history courses are the history of both sexes’ traditional roles – roles without options.
History is not men’s studies because traditional history courses reinforce the traditional male role of performer. It is hard to find a single man in a history book who is celebrated for not being a performer. (He may have performed as a rebel, but he’s in the history book because he was ultimately a successful performer.) In contrast, women’s studies courses celebrate women for role deviance (Madame Curie, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Marion Evans [aka George Eliot]). As performers, the women were deviating from their traditional role.
History books trap men into stereotyped roles even more than they trap women because when we celebrate and appreciate someone for playing a role, we are really bribing them to keep playing that role. Appreciation keeps the slave a slave.
Men’s studies is currently needed more than women’s studies exactly because men’s role has been less-questioned. But even more important, without men’s studies, the universities are teaching our children that men have always had options, women haven’t, instead of helping them understand that none of our grandparents had options, they had obligations. Our grandma’s role was raise children; our grandpa’s role was raise money (or raise crops). Both had roles, and therefore neither had power.[61]
Women’s studies without men’s studies means there is no questioning of the process that resocializes, scholarships, and affirmative actions our daughters into enrolling in the traditional fields of both sexes while men remain psychologically closed out of women’s traditional fields of liberal arts. Why? Without men’s studies, neither our son nor our daughter is taught to question the process of our daughter “marrying up” and, thus, our sons don’t question the process of programming themselves to raise money to obtain love. Since they know the most pay comes in engineering, physics, math, medicine, business and law, they will continue to avoid the liberal arts and use the university as a vocational school.
Without men’s studies, our daughter ends up with three options (work full time; children full time; some combination of both) while our son ends up with three “slightly different options” (work full-time; work full-time; work full-time). When we have women’s studies without men’s studies, we create an Era of the Multi-Option Daughter and the No-Option Son. Which is what we have done.
The anger emanating from women’s studies has infiltrated all the top universities. For starters, more than 200 universities currently have “speech codes.” For example, at the University of Michigan, the phrase “Women just aren’t as good as men in this field” is specifically included in the speech code as an example of an offense.[62] Saying “Men just aren’t as good as women in this field” is not prohibited. Students violating the speech code might be put on probation and even sentenced to mandatory community service. And of course that can be used against them for life (especially if they should run for political office or desire a government or university position). Speech codes prohibit speech which women or minorities might consider offensive, but not speech which men might consider offensive.[63]
The students at the University of Michigan are damaged in other ways. Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, discusses six University of Michigan professors who were charged with sexual harassment for offenses that included “not greeting a student in a friendly enough manner” and “not having read a certain novel....”[64] Some of the charges were, of course, more damaging, but the fact that these were even mentioned gives us a sense of the atmosphere. And they send a message to other professors that they are hostage to female students in general and feminists in particular.
Even those who joke, leer, or stare are now subject to campus discipline for “creating a hostile environment.” And on college campuses, no less. The founders of the Free Speech Movement must be turning in their graves – or, should we say, turning on their gray hair.
The codes would be less offensive if they were a two-way street, but even that would be undermining the purpose of a university to prepare our children to create dialogue about what offends them, not lawsuits. When speech codes are a one-way street, however, they boomerang against our daughters’ preparations for the workplace. By giving women more-than-equal protection under the law, they turn women into a protected class. This overprotection infantalizes our daughters. It also turns them into a privileged class. Because they haven’t earned this privilege, they learn to feel entitled – a setup for when something goes wrong: blaming and suing rather than looking within and confronting. This undermines our daughters’ preparation to be effective employees and fair employers.
These codes are also damaging our daughters’ personal lives. Why? The less men express their feelings, the more the male-bashing seems justified. They graduate thinking of their rights, but not men’s. Thus, our daughters graduate with a college education of anger toward men, including a lack of appreciation for their dad. A woman who does not appreciate her dad does not feel loved. And that affects her ability to love her husband and raise children. In the process of stifling men’s feelings about women, but not women’s about men, the codes become divorce training. A setup for children being raised by a single mom who is overwhelmed and angry.
From the perspective of our sons in college, it looks even worse. If your son or daughter told you he’d been kicked out of a course for objecting to its anti-semitism, how would you feel? Well, I was doing a show in Seattle called Town Meeting. Also invited was Pete Schaub, a senior at the University of Washington in Seattle. Pete had enrolled in a women’s studies course. When he objected that all men were not wife beaters, child molesters, and potential rapists, he was classified as sexist. When he persisted with such challenges, he was asked to withdraw from the class. Pete was not your political protester-type, not by a long stretch, but this was too much even for him. He reminded the school that the course description advertised the course as encouraging “vigorous, open inquiry.” To him, it felt more like a vigorous inquisition. The associate dean, caught between feminism and free speech, did “the waffle”: He officially reinstated Pete, but told him it was best to not attend the class![65] (It’s the type of waffle that gives the word “administrator” a bad reputation!)
In brief, the speech codes emanating from the atmosphere created by women’s studies maketh neither a happy marriage, a good mother, an effective employee, nor a fair employer. (Otherwise, they work great!) Aside from this, such codes are blatantly unconstitutional.
These speech codes do not come out of nowhere. They are justified by a philosophy core to many of the women’s studies classes, one of Marxist feminism, in which men in industrialized nations are seen as part of the dominant class, of a capitalist patriarchy, and women are seen as being treated in this system as the subordinate class, as second class citizens, or the property of men. The theory goes that the dominant class under capitalist patriarchy must keep quiet and non-critical in order to have any hope of women making the transition from subordination to equality. In brief, the censorship of men is seen as a prerequisite to equality. Just as censorship of Soviet citizens was seen as a prerequisite to equality. Instead it created a third world nation.
Isn’t it true, though, that criticizing women, tasteless humor, and teasing create a hostile environment that inhibits women from learning? In the beginning, yes. But part of an education’s purpose is to overcome that response, to use criticism as a growth opportunity, to know how to handle people with different values and senses of humor, which includes knowing how to communicate your perspective as well as to listen to theirs. Which is why the solution is not to include man-bashing in the speech codes’ censorship. The solution is to use conflict between the sexes to teach both sexes how to listen to each other. (To practice Part I of this book.)
One positive contribution of early radical feminists was their focus on the value of the process, not just the end product...the college degree. A university is a laboratory for learning how to work through our disagreements, not for learning how to put a muzzle on the sex already less likely to complain and stir anger in the sex already most likely to complain.
What is the status of men’s studies? In its current form, men’s studies is feminist studies. It does focus more on men, but on men as the problem. It is more likely to be taught by a man, but with a few exceptions, it is taught from a feminist perspective. Men’s issues, from anything close to the perspective in which I discuss them, is a portion of about 3% of the courses.[66]
In contrast to the 700 majors and minors in women’s studies, there is but one minor in men’s studies.[67] In it, “feminist theory is the dominant interpretive discourse,”[68] yet a professor assumed that more women were enrolled because men did not want to confront men’s problems, but women did.[69]
The goal of men’s studies, though, is not men’s studies. Nor should the goal of women’s studies be women’s studies. Both should ultimately be leading to Gender Transition Studies. And both should be integrating the perspectives of more traditional men and women. Either women’s or men’s studies isolated from the other is the use of taxpayer money to subsidize mistrust between the sexes. Gender Transition Studies is the preparation of the sexes to understand each other.
This doesn’t mean we can jump right into gender transition studies. If we do, the agenda will be set by women’s studies: Domestic violence will assume men-as-oppressor; contributions to the family will measure women’s housework and neglect men’s work; discussions of dating will not challenge women to risk sexual rejection, just blame men when they do it wrong; men’s health will be neglected, the lace curtain go undetected....
The use of public institutions to subsidize sex discrimination is unconstitutional. As of the turn of the millennium, though, no college student has used Title IX to file a suit against his or her university for not having a genuine men’s studies department or for not having in its department of gender studies an equal number of courses on men’s issues from non-feminist perspectives.[70]
FOOTNOTES
[16]Phyllis Schlafly, “Feeding Their Personal Bias,” Washington Times, March 1, 1991. not rep
[17]Michael Brenson, “Of Male Desires and their Effects on Women’s Lives,” The New York Times, May 21, 1990, p. B1. Photo credit: Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times. not rep
[18]The women in this survey reported receiving between 55% and 83% of their awards, similar to the Census Bureau reports. Freya L. Sonenstein and Charles Calhoun, “The Survey of Absent Parents/Pilot Results,” July, 1988, US Department of Health & Human Services [hereinafter USDHHS], Office of the Secretary for Planning & Evaluation, p. 26.
[19]Ibid., Freya L. Sonenstein and Charles Calhoun, “The Survey of Absent Parents/Pilot Results,” July, 1988, USDHHS, Office of the Secretary for Planning & Evaluation, p. iv. not rep
[20]This is documented in a memorandum from Robert Helms (Assistant Secretary, USDHHS) to Wayne Stanton (Administrator, the Family Support Administration), October 1, 1988. The complete letter can be obtained from the National Council for Children’s Rights, 202-547-6227.
[21]Paul Wallich, “Having It All,” in “The Analytical Economist” section of Scientific American, March, 1996, p. 31. not rep
[22]The censorship is discussed in Murray A. Straus, “Physical Assaults by Wives: A Major Social Problem,” in Current Controversies on Family Violence (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), Richard Gelles and Donileen Loseke, eds., pp. 72-73. not rep
[23]US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Special Report – Murder in Families (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994), Table 2. not rep
[24]US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Special Report – Violence against Women: Estimates from the Redesigned Survey (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995), p. 4. not rep
[25]When contract killing is discovered, the Department of Justice registers it as a “multiple offender killing” – it never gets recorded as a woman killing a man. US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Crime in the United States (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1990), p. 11, table titled “Victim Offender Relationship by Race and Sex.” The notes adjoining the tables state that “Multiple Offender” killings are not broken down into gender categories. Only “Single Victim & Single Offender” crimes are broken down into gender categories. For various real-life examples of these types of killings, see my The Myth of Male Power (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993 ; NY: Berkley, paper, 1994), Chapter 12.
[26]National Council on Economic Education, 1998-’99 test of 1010 adults and 1085 high school students. not rep
[27]Announced by Al Gore on April 3, 1998. Equal Pay Day in 1999 was April 8.
[28]Associated Press, “Clinton Goes After Gender Gap in Wage,” San Diego Union-Tribune, January 31, 1996. not rep
[29] These percentages come from an interview July 14, 1992, with Vivian W. Pinn, MD, Director of the Office of Research on Women's Health, National Institutes of Health. I also asked whether heart research, if it were done only on men, would be considered non-gender-specific (heart) or gender-specific (only men). They had it categorized as part of the research on men. There is no government agency focused on health that spends as much on men's health as on women's health. not rep
[30]In a Medline computer search of over 300,000 articles on women’s and men’s health research for 1993, women’s health research exceeded men’s by 22%. See Steven L. Collins, Ph.D. of Nitro, WV: “The Amount of Biomedical Research Pertaining to Men, Women, and Both Sexes, 1985 through 1993,” dated March 25, 1994. Women’s health research exceeded men’s each year, always by at least 14%. not rep
[31]R. N. Anderson, K. D. Kochanek, S. L. Murphy, “Advance Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1995,” Monthly Vital Statistics Report (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997), Vol. 45, No. 11, Suppl. 2, p. 19. not rep
[32] Dr. David Gunnell, et. al., “Sex Differences in Suicide Trends in England and Wales,” The Lancet, No. 13, February, 1999, p. 557. Dr. Gunnell is with the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol, UK. not rep
[33]Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 47, No. 9, November 10, 1998, p. 5, Table B. not rep
[34]In 1997, 17.6% of males and 14.8% of females had no health insurance. The gap is widening. Data is from the US Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage: 1997, Table 2. “Persons Without Health Insurance for the Entire Year, by Selected Characteristics: 1997.” From their website (last revised February 3,1999) www.census.gov/hhes/hlthins/hlthin97/hi97t2.html.
[35]The latest figures available as of July, 1998 (as verified on March 26, 1999, by Cynthia Clark of CFOI) are from the website for the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1997, Table 4. “Fatal Occupational Injuries and Employment by Selected Worker Characteristics, 1997.” The BLS website is www.bls.gov/oshhome.htm. not rep
[36]US Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage: 1997, op. cit. Table 2. “Persons Without Health Insurance for the Entire Year, by Selected Characteristics: 1997.” The data from 1997 shows that 17.6% of males and 14.8% of females are without health insurance. From their website (last revised February 3,1999) www.census.gov/hhes/hlthins/hlthin97/hi97t2.html.
[37]Edward E. Bartlett, PhD, “Alert! ‘Healthy People’ May Be Hazardous to Men!” Transitions, January/February, 1999, p. 11. Dr. Bartlett is senior health advisor, Men’s Health Network, Washington, DC. Their website is www.menshealthnetwork.org. not rep
[38]See “For Men Only,” a publication of the American Cancer Society. Call 800-ACS-2345. not rep
[39]USDHHS, National Center for Health Statistics, Center for Disease Control, Statistical Resources, Vital Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1991), Vol. 2, Part A, Mortality, p. 51, Tables 1-9, “Death Rates for 72 Selected Causes by 5-Year Age Groups, Race, and Sex: US, 1988.” The 25,000% figure is derived by comparing the 0.1 suicides for boys under the age of nine to the 25.8 suicides for boys between ages 20-24. in the chart below: not rep
Suicide Rates by Age and Sex per 100,000 Population
Age Male Female
5-9 0.1 0.0
10-14 2.1 0.8
15-19 18.0 4.4
20-24 25.8 4.1
[40]USDH&HS/NCHS, Center for Disease Control, Statistical Resources, Vital Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: 1987), Vol. II, Mortality, Part A. Here is the breakdown: not rep; all races, both sexes = 22.1
Suicide Rates by Age and Sex Per 100,000 Population
Age Male Female
85+ 66.9 4.6
[41]Pamela Newkirk; “A Mother’s Nightmare: The Shocking Story of DES Sons,” McCall’s, February, 1993, pp. 93-164. See also the New England Journal of Medicine, May 25, 1995; Vol. 332, pp. 1411-1416. For a review of the long-term effects of DES, see the Annals of Internal Medicine, May 15, 1995; Vol. 122, pp. 777-788. not rep
[42]We usually think of chlamydia as a woman’s disease, but between the ages of 30 and 60, men are three times as likely as women to actually have chlamydia. Preliminary findings suggest that chlamydia may be far more responsible than cholesterol, salt, or even lack of exercise in creating heart attacks among men in this age group. Hans-Udo Eickenberg, “Androtropia: Diseases Leading to Early Death in Men,” paper presented at the 7th World Meeting on the Aging Male, February, 1998.
[43]Ibid. Hans-Udo Eickenberg, “Androtropia: Diseases Leading to Early Death in Men,” paper presented at the 7th World Meeting on the Aging Male, February, 1998.
[44]Ibid. Hans-Udo Eickenberg, “Androtropia: Diseases Leading to Early Death in Men,” paper presented at the 7th World Meeting on the Aging Male, February, 1998.
[45]USDHHS, “Healthy People 2010 Objectives: Draft for Public Comment,” September 15, 1998, pp. 25-16 to 25-17. not rep
[46] AP, “Rate of Leading Types of Cancer,” April 20, 1999, from AOL News. The incidence for prostate cancer is 135.7 per 100,000; for breast cancer, 110.7 per 100,000.
[47] Prostate and breast cancer is funded by about 20 agencies of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plus the Department of Defense (DOD). NIH data is from the National Cancer Institute’s Budget Office; DOD data is from the Medical Research Programs Office. As of April, 1999, total budget allocations (in millions of dollars) for fiscal year 1998 were:
NIH DOD Total
Breast $430.1 $135.0 $565.1
Prostate 113.6 38.0 151.6
Ratio 3.79 3.55 3.73
[48]AP, “More Cancer Stamps To Be Printed,” January 21, 1999. Two hundred eighty million special stamps at 7 cents above the normal cost are printed as of January, 1999, and will be on sale until July, 2000. The first sixty-one million raised $4.9-million. not rep
[49] See N. P. Roos, “Mortality and Recuperation After Open and Transurethral Resection of the Prostate for Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 320, No. 17, April 27, 1989, p. 1120-1124. not rep
[50]Speech by Norma Juliet Wikler, founding director of the National Judicial Education Project, on its decision to be sponsored by the NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund and the National Association of Women Judges. See Norma Juliet Wikler, "Water on Stone: A Perspective of the Movement to Eliminate Gender Bias in the Courts," keynote address, National Conference on Gender Bias in the Courts, Williamsburg, VA, May 18, 1989. not rep
[51]Most have a ratio of about three or four women to one man. They usually include no men’s activists and approximately half women’s activists. See, for example, Bruce Hight, “Male Group Says Too Many Women on Panel,” Austin American-Statesman, January 31, 1992. not rep
[52]Allan R. Gold, “Sex Bias Is Found Pervading Courts,” The New York Times, July 2, 1989. is rep
[53]Ibid. Allan R. Gold, "Sex Bias Is Found Pervading Courts," The New York Times, July 2, 1989.
[54]Title IX states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
[55]Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue, 1997, pp. 18 & p. 22. not rep
[56]National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1996 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1996), NCES 96-133. , as cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 15, Table 9. not rep
[57]Frederick R. Lynch, The Diversity Machine (NY: The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 320. not rep
[58]The numbers in this paragraph are the best estimates of San Diego State University’s Bonnie Zimmerman, President, National Women’s Studies Association, interviewed February 1l, 1999. not rep
[59]Young America Foundation,Comedy and Tragedy: College Course Descriptions and What They Tell Us About Higher Education Today, 1998-99 (Herndon, VA: YAF, 1998). See http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/feder.html. Cited inEveryman, Issue 35, Jan./Feb. 1999, p. 38.
[60]Ibid. Young America Foundation,Comedy and Tragedy: College Course Descriptions and What They Tell Us About Higher Education Today, 1998-99,(Herndon, VA: YAF,1998). See http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/feder.html. Cited inEveryman, Issue 35, Jan./Feb. 1999, p. 38.
[61]See my The Myth of Male Power (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993 ; NY: Berkley, paper, 1994), Chapter 2. , “Stage I to Stage II: How Successful Men Freed Women (But Forgot to Free Themselves).”
[62]David G. Savage, “Forbidden Words on Campus,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1991, front page.
[63]Ibid. David G. Savage, "Forbidden Words on Campus," Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1991, front page. not rep
[64]George F. Will, Washington Post Writers Group, Washington Post, October 20, 1991.not rep
[65]Asa Baber, “Feminist U,” in the “Men” column, Playboy, September, 1988.not rep
[66]Sam Femiano, a leader in feminist men’s studies, estimates 400 courses to have been taught in recent years, perhaps 100 in any given year. D. Scott Campbell finds about three to include male positive required reading. (Email at campbell@alberti.unh.edu.) Perhaps the most pioneering curriculum in the world is at Manakau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, headed by Doug Stevens, chair, Dept. of Social Sciences.
[67]At Hobart andWilliam Smith Colleges (two colleges combined on one campus ), in Geneva, New York.
[68]Email on February 10, 1999 from Rocco “Chip” Capraro (capraro@hws.edu), who teaches the overview theories of masculinity course for the men’s studies minor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY.
[69]Ben Dobbin, Associated Press, “Male Studies – Not Just a Guy Thing,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1997, pp. E1 & E4. not rep
[70]Two attorneys who have begun to look into this are Cindy McNeely in Tallahassee, Florida, and Steven Svoboda in Berkeley, California.
The Lace Curtain’s University Targets
Aside from the most prestigious universities, the lace curtain has been most apparent at previously women-only colleges that are now supposed to be equally open to men; at religious colleges and seminaries; and in the liberal arts. In all three, male attendance has been in dramatic decline.
At previously women-only colleges such as Mills and Texas Women’s University, the slogans were identical: “Better Dead than Co-Ed.”[1]
In 1980 seminaries were 20% female; by the mid-’90s they were 70% female.[2] Why? In many seminaries and religious colleges, “male-dominated religions” are seen as hierarchical oppressors of women (rather than seen as involving the sacrifice of a man like Jesus to save mostly-female churchgoers from their sins). Seminaries have increasingly been influenced by thinkers such as Mary Daly, a religious studies professor whose Beyond God the Father had a seminal impact in the 1970s. Daly advocates “the death of God the Father” because he has made “the oppression of women right and fitting.”[3]
Positive images that used to refer only to men, like God-as-He, have been changed in books as traditional as the Bible;[4] negative images, like the Devil-as-He, have not been changed. Ironically, since 85% of the street homeless are men,[5] this attitude of men as privileged does not prepare many seminarians to deal with their future constituency.
The anger released from women’s studies’ floodgates has permeated all of the liberal arts. Misandry is most potent in anthropology, literature, foreign languages, and, most ironically, in social work, psychology, and communications.
Some of our sons are growing up in female-only homes and going to schools with mostly female teachers. If they then choose the liberal arts, they are forced into a mantra of “Why can’t I be more like a woman?” How does this happen?
Suppose your son or daughter wants to take literature or languages. Prior to the dominance of feminism, she or he would have been exposed to the pros and cons of many potential approaches to literature (e.g., psychoanalytical; post structuralist; reader response critical; new historicist). But in a Modern Language Association(MLA) poll of English professors on 350 campuses, 61% said they now approached literature from a feminist perspective.[6]
Thus an atmosphere is created (“If you know on which side your bread is buttered...”). Reporters attending the MLA convention for Newsweek and US News & World Report describe the atmosphere as so anti-male that presentations of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, E. L. Doctorow, and most literary giants were quickly converted into condemnations of men, or the white-male-dominated, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy.[7]
If our sons don’t adopt the feminist version, they are labeled and ostracized – aliens in their chosen profession; if they do adopt it, they are aliens to themselves.
I have felt the impact of this misandry in the liberal arts in my own life. When I began speaking from only a feminist perspective, I was immediately invited to Yale to be a week-long, quasi-resident scholar. (Before I had a Ph.D.) When I began adding men’s perspectives, my speaking income at colleges and universities dropped by more than 90%.
I responded by agreeing to not just speak alone, but to speak with opposition. But few feminists, now high in credibility on campus, want to put it at risk. Necessity being the parent of invention, I finally found a debate partner: myself. I set up two podiums: “Dr. Warren Farrell, Masculist” and “Dr. Warren Farrell, Feminist.” I run back and forth between the two podiums, debating myself, interrupting myself (and otherwise tempting the boundaries of schizophrenia!).
The speaking censorship had its parallel in teaching censorship. Remember how Suzanne Steinmetz, after she published her findings on domestic violence, discovered years later how feminists contacted other feminists at the University at which she taught to undermine her tenure? I had a parallel, although very different, experience. When I was teaching only from the feminist perspective, it didn’t make any difference what my training was in, I was able to teach in five different disciplines within the liberal arts.[8]
Since Why Men Are The Way They Are was published, however, I have not been offered a position in a liberal arts discipline at any college or university. Yes, I have taught in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, but not in the liberal arts. Most men who enter the liberal arts cannot afford to make decisions that put their career and family at risk. Ironically, only my savings from the days of speaking from a feminist perspective have allowed to take those risks.
Elementary Schools, High Schools, and the AAUW
“But in what way has this [ant] society evolved beyond that of humans? It is far ahead in women’s liberation. Male ants are totally unimportant. When their biological usefulness is over, they are discarded and not permitted to return to the nest. The entire ant social world is female, including the soldiers, the workers, the farmers, and, of course, the queen. Male ants have wings, and they are expected to use them – to get out.”
—from Getting the Facts, a sixth-grade textbook used in New York state.[9]
For the past decade, no study has had more influence on our belief that schools shortchange only our daughters than the one commissioned and publicized by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) titled “How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education.”[10]
The report was the catalyst for tens of thousands of schools to pay teachers to be trained to address the way their schools “shortchanged” only girls, especially in four areas: math; science; teacher attention; and self esteem. Similarly, in response to this research, all-girl schools are forming throughout the United States even as all-boy schools are being protested[11]....
In Manhattan, most of the seven private girls’ schools had 10 applications for each $17,000-plus kindergarten opening for the Fall of 1999, and a public girls’ school that was formed after the AAUW study’s publicity took hold, was also deluged with applications.[12]
I applaud teacher training and the encouragement of our daughters to enter math and science. But something happened on the way to the forum…. Had the AAUW commissioned a balanced study of studies, they would have found that boys:
• have lower grades (they do worse in reading, writing, social studies, spelling, biology, art, visual arts, music, theater, languages, and every subject except math and science... );
• receive fewer honors;
• have lower class ranks;
• are more likely to repeat a grade;
• are more likely to be put in special education;
• are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia);
• are up to four times as likely to commit suicide;
• have a suicide rate that is increasing while girls’ is decreasing;
• drop out sooner;
• are much less likely to attend college;
• are much less likely to graduate from college;
• are less likely to take SATs, GREs;
• have more attention deficit disorder problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorders;
• have more discipline problems.
Without incorporating studies of those areas in which boys are the losers in school, it is impossible for the AAUW to fairly conclude that schools shortchange girls. What we do know is that no one is doing worse than African-American boys in urban areas. Yet the public school formed in Harlem after the AAUW study was for girls, not boys.[13]
What did the lace curtain of the AAUW and media keep out of the public consciousness? We heard virtually nothing about the first study of arts education by the US Department of Education in 20 years.[14] Why? Perhaps because of the findings. Girls outperformed boys in all the arts (music, visual arts, theater), and in all the modalities of execution – from creating and performing to interpreting. In music performance, girls had an average score of 40 percent; boys, 27 percent. What are we doing about it? First, it helps to know about it.
While the AAUW popularized the low self-esteem of girls, we heard little about the Harvard Medical School study asking teenage boys to write a story based on a drawing of an adult man in a shirt and tie sitting at a desk while looking with a neutral expression at a photo of a woman and children. Only 15% of the boys envisioned a contented family man. Instead, “the overwhelming majority constructed narratives about lonely husbands working overtime to support their families, divorced men missing their loved ones, and grief-stricken widowers.”[15]
The Harvard study found boys from the US, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom doing worse than girls, and concluded it was the boys who are now educationally disadvantaged.[16] Despite these findings teachers, it found, are being required to take gender equity courses that have “become especially vigilant, even obsessive, about making sure that the voices of girls” are heard, even as boys are cast as villains.[17]
For almost two decades the number of women in colleges and universities has exceeded the number of men, even though college-age men outnumber college-age women.[18] But during this period, the US Government started programs on Girl Power to encourage women in schools, but no programs on Boy Power to encourage boys in schools. The Girl Power-type government programs are based on the thinking that girls are the minority – a two-decade-old anachronism.
What our sons lost were the solutions that might have emerged from even a small amount of attention to them. Solutions such as:
• training teachers to understand what boys are missing when they go from mother-only homes to a female teacher in an almost all-female-staffed school (e.g., a male teacher being more likely to see a drug dealer as a potential entrepreneur who needs his energy rechanneled)
• affirmative action programs to recruit and give scholarships to some of the finest young men to become elementary school teachers
• a Dad in the Classroom program to pay companies to allow men to take a week leave of absence to teach, preferably in their own child’s class – thus exposing students to a variety of male role models and professional opportunities.
One reason the 1990s went without attention to our sons is that no American Association of University Men (AAUM) pointed out the gaps between the AAUW’s publicity and the actual data from the very studies they commissioned. For example, that both boys and girls agree that teachers think girls are smarter; both sexes feel that teachers like girls more; both feel teachers would prefer to be around girls more than boys; and both boys and girls feel girls receive more compliments.[19]
Nor did an AAUM explain that all four areas in which the AAUW claimed girls are allegedly shortchanged are contradicted either by their own data or by other research. Let’s start with finding that boys do better in math. Boys score only 5 points higher than girls on the nationwide achievement test scores in math (310 to 305).[20] And more girls than boys take high school classes in algebra and geometry.[21] It is in the choice of math for a profession when girls say, “No thanks – I’d prefer literature” (or foreign languages, art history, or another liberal art). Why that difference in choice?
Boys often choose math for reasons of money, not love. That is, the AAUW did not allow for the possibility that boys choose math or engineering because they know that it will earn them more money than a major in French literature. As girls are watching Princess Di marry a prince, boys are figuring out that majoring in French literature will leave them short by a castle. As girls are figuring out whether they want the option of being financially supported when the children are young, boys in college are figuring out how to do the financial supporting if his wife should want that option.
Women friends of mine who have chosen math also did it for financial reasons. Liz Brookins’ first love was history. When she speaks of history there is a sparkle in her eye. But she had dropped out of college to be married and eventually become a mom to four children. Then she got divorced. When child support did not support the children, she knew she had to return to college. But she also knew a degree in history might leave her unemployed. She didn’t have that luxury. So she asked herself a different question: “What degree will leave me best able to support my family?” The answer was math. Math it was.
It is not that Liz was bad at math; it was that it was not even close to her first love. As it turned out, she became very good at math. She became San Diego County’s math teacher of the year and now teaches at the University of California in San Diego. Now there’s a sparkle in Liz’s eye when she solves an equation!
And that’s the way it is for many men: First, they take care of the family they love; then they try to fall in love with what takes care of their family. When I ask college students what they would prefer to do if they could make equal money doing anything they wish, both sexes are more likely to choose music, art, and the liberal arts over math, engineering, or physics.
If schools and society prepare girls to have their choice more than boys, is it really the girls who are being shortchanged? Certainly girls have scholarship and admissions advantages over boys in math and science. In brief, The AAUW left out discrimination against our sons as one reason boys may be undertaking math.
Second, science. Boys outscore girls on science achievement tests by only 8 points (300 to 292).[22] Unpublicized by the AAUW, though, is the fact that boys score 15 points lower than girls in reading and 17 points lower in writing.[23] Nor is it mentioned that a higher percentage of girls take biology and chemistry classes.[24]
Third, teacher attention. The AAUW commissioned a study finding that both boys and girls were much more likely to feel that girls got called on more than boys and that teachers paid more attention to girls than they did to boys.[25]This research, though, was left out of the AAUW’s public relations report.[26] I checked this out with the two daughters of a womanfriend, Alex and Erin, since they disagree on most everything (they are 11 and 12). This time, though, they agreed: Boys get hollered at more; girls get complimented more.
Fourth, self-esteem. Recent studies of self-esteem find girls and boys to be between one and three percentage points of each other – in either direction. For example, when both boys and girls are asked, “I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal basis with others,” 90% of girls either strongly agree or agree; 89% of boys either strongly agree or agree.[27]
In 1997, Metropolitan Life examined the way boys and girls were treated and concluded that “contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school, and interactions in the classroom.”[28] You did not read about this study in the media. And it had virtually no impact on the schools.
The impact of our belief in women-as-minority? It takes The New York Times almost two decades after women are exceeding men in college to acknowledge it in a significant story.[29] When they do, they devote more space to how the gap creates problems for the female students (“There aren’t many guys to date”[30] ) and how it turns men into dominant oppressors (“[the guys] have their pick of so many women that they have a tendency to become players”).[31] In contrast, articles about men being in the majority at the Citadel, or in the armed services, never mention men as victims because they have few women to date.
When The New York Times interviewed students and educators about why the gap exists, they chose answers that justified the gap. For example, “In high school, I always felt women did better and cared more....”[32] Or comments that the men just aren’t interested, or that women tolerate boredom better, or that men feel they can make their way in the military or computer work without degrees.
Contrast this with what we give as reasons for why women used to do worse in math and science. We ask ourselves whether the institutions themselves are doing anything to discourage girls. And the answer is always “yes.” We don’t say that it’s because the women care less, or because men tolerate boredom better, or that many women feel they can make money by marrying money and, therefore, don’t need degrees. The difference in attitude leads us to offer special scholarship opportunities only to girls, and for the government to create Girl Power programs....
To the credit of The New York Times, the following week they did devote six sentences to the ways in which boys lose out to girls in schools in many ways, but then immediately justified doing so out of racial concern – that African-American boys are doing worse than any other group.[33]
The Media
“When the media discover a feminist concern, it gets less than five minutes of serious consideration; then comes a five-year attack.”
—Susan Faludi, Newsweek, Oct. 25, 1993[34]
“When it comes to gender issues, journalists generally have suspended all their usual skepticism…. We accept at face value whatever women’s groups say. Why? Because women have sold themselves to us as an oppressed group and any oppressed group gets a free ride in the press…. I don’t blame feminists for telling us half-truths and sometimes even complete fabrications. I do blame my colleagues in the press for forgetting their skepticism.”
—Bernard Goldberg, CBS News correspondent[35]
The media contain some of the world’s most talented and hard working people. The media work under deadlines that would be my nightmares. As for ratings, a prime time TV show must find an audience of 25-million; a book can make a good profit with an audience of 25-thousand, making my concern for “ratings” one-tenth of one percent of the concern of a prime-time TV show.
The most popular stories, the “biggest” stories – Anita Hill, OJ Simpson, Princess Diana, and Monica – all have one archetypal theme embedded in them: the drama of a male oppressor and a female victim. Here’s the media’s dilemma....
The popularity of this archetype creates ratings. To question this archetype is to undermine the ratings it is the very purpose of the story to create. And it is asking reporters to introspect when deadlines are demanding something commanding in writing, not a work-in-progress in the mind.
When these “big story” elements surface, newspapers, TV news, talk shows and even book publishing are all in unison, each with a unique style, but each with a similar message. So the examples in this media section often apply to more than the particular media for which I describe it.
The New York Times merits its own section below, because, among the media, it has almost Pied Piper status. First, if you read The New York Times on any given day, you will be able to predict more of what the rest of the media will be covering the rest of the week than if you attend to any other media source in the world. Second, and not coincidentally, there is no significant media source in which feminism has a greater influence on the content and direction of male-female issues than at The New York Times.
Because the media is filled with bright and ambitious people looking for “scoops,” we can get a sense of the power of the instinct to protect women and demonize men when it has left virtually untouched for a quarter century the data on domestic violence against men and particularly the thousands of heart wrenching stories of domestic violence against elderly men, whose real-life stories are in every community. The same can be said for stories of dads fighting to love their children who are told to be wallets first, visitors second; or men who are victims of false accusations, especially during custody battles; or a boy who dies of testicular cancer, or who drops out of school, or a veteran who becomes homeless and dysfunctional....
The instinct to protect women is powerful enough to keep the media from “scoops” like questioning the belief women are workers and men are shirkers; or the myth of the deadbeat dad. The instinct has directed its focus on the racism of executions and away from the sexism of all-male executions; on sensitivity to dumb blonde jokes more than Bobbitt castration humor ; on making female circumcision in Africa more of an issue than male circumcision in America; on how Hillary and Princess Diana felt, but not how Bill Clinton or Prince Charles felt; to look at the female tragedies in sex and dating, but not the male’s; and on and on and on.....
Of the four gender perspectives outlined above (feminist; non traditional men; traditional men; traditional women), I would estimate that between 90-95% of the reporters by whom I have been interviewed in the past twenty-five years leaned toward the feminist perspective. About 80% of those feminists are women, so not only is gender politics covered by people from only one gender political party, but by people whose gender reinforces their political ideology. A bit like 90-95% of the reporters covering the Republican and Democratic political conventions doing it from the point of view of the Republicans – or Democrats.
On top of this political and personal bias, the media relies not only on government and academic circles to feed it information, but on opinion polls....
FOOTNOTES
[1]Larry Gordon, “Mills College Will Begin Admitting Men,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1990, p. A-3. not rep
[2]Richard Driscoll, Ph.D., The Stronger Sex (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1998), p. 283. Driscoll received figures for Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian seminaries. not rep
[3]Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 13. op cit below
[4]The most-widely used Bible is the New Revised Standard Version. See John Dart, “Revised Bible Tones Down References to ‘Man’,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1989, p. 8J. ; also Ari L. Goldman, “In New Hymnal, Methodists Find, God is Usually He, Sometimes She,” New York Times, June 20, 1989, P. A18. not rep
[5]In San Francisco, 96% of the adult homeless are men; in other cities, there are fewer – a median of 85% men. Richard H. Ropers, “The Rise of the New Urban Homeless,” Public Affairs Report (Berkeley: University of California/Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985), October/December, 1985, Vol. 26, Nos. 5 & 6, p. 4, Table 1. “Comparisons of Homeless Samples from Select Cities.” not rep
[6]Adam Bromberg, “Data In: Multiculturalism Gaining Ground,” Campus, Spring, 1992, p. 9.not rep
[7]John Leo, “The Professors of Dogmatism,” On Society page, US News & World Report, January 18, 1993, p. 25; and George F. Will, “‘The Tempest’? It’s ‘Really’ About Imperialism. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry? Masturbation,” Literary Politics column, Newsweek, April 22, 1991, p. 72. not rep
[8]At Brooklyn College’s Department of Sociology; in psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology; at Rutgers University in political science; at American University in public administration, and then in the Department of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University.
[9]This quote is taken from “Unit 10 – The Most ‘Human’ Insects.” See Chronicles, May, 1992, p. 28. Chronicles is a magazine of the Rockford Institute, 928 N. Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103. not rep
[10]American Association of University Women, How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education,(Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation, The Wellesley College Center for Research on Women; 1992). The updated study is American Association of University Women, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children, (Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation, The Wellesley College Center for Research on Women; 1998). not rep
[11]See, for example, Julie N. Lynem, “Bay Area Academies Stress Learning and Self-Esteem,”San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 1998, front page. not rep
[12]Tamar Lewin, “Amid Equity Concerns, Girls’ Schools Thrive,” The New York Times, Sunday, April 11, 1999, p. 1. rep
[13]It is the Young Women’s Leadership School. See ibid. Tamar Lewin, “Amid Equity Concerns, Girls’ Schools Thrive,” The New York Times, Sunday, April 11, 1999, p. 1. not rep
[14]Study released on November 10, 1998. See Linda Perlstein, “Kids Draw a Blank on Arts Test,” Washington Post, November, 11, 1998, p. D1.
[15]Test was administered by William Pollack, Harvard Medical School psychologist, to 150 teenaged boys. See Donna Laframboise, “Why Boys are in Trouble,” National Post (Canada), January 5, 1999.
[16]Ibid. Test was administered by William Pollack, Harvard Medical School psychologist, to 150 teenaged boys. See Donna Laframboise, “Why Boys are in Trouble,” National Post (Canada), January 5, 1999.
[17]Ibid. Test was administered by William Pollack, Harvard Medical School psychologist, to 150 teenaged boys. See Donna Laframboise, “Why Boys are in Trouble,” National Post (Canada),January 5, 1999.
[18]Tamar Lewin, “American Colleges Begin to Ask, Where Have All the Men Gone?” The New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1998, pp. 1-28. rep
[19]Adapted from AAUW/Greenberg-Lake, Expectations and Aspirations: Gender Roles and Self-Esteem (Washington, DC: Greenberg-Lake, 1990), Data Report and Banners, p. 18, as cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 29, Table 16. op cit below; different page and table
[20]National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1997 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1997), NCES 97-338, Tables 107, 113, 118, and 126. Cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, ibid., “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 9, Table 4. repeated below
[21]Adapted from J. Sanders, J. Koch, and J. Urso, Gender Equity Right from the Start (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), p. 12, and based on US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 1996 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1996), p. 100. Cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, ibid., “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 13, Table 7. Sanders and Kleinfeld repeated; Condition of Education not repeated
[22]National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1997, op. cit. (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1997), NCES 97-338, Tables 107, 113, 118, and 126. Cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 9, Table 4.
[23]Ibid. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1997 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1997), NCES 97-338, Tables 107, 113, 118, and 126. Cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 9, Table 4.
[24]Adapted from J. Sanders, et. al., op. cit. J. Koch, and J. Urso, Gender Equity Right from the Start (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), p. 12, and based on US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education, 1996, op. cit. (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1996), p. 100. Cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, ibid., , “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 13, Table 7.
[25]The study is AAUW/Greenberg-Lake, Expectations and Aspirations,” op. cit., Gender Roles and Self-Esteem (Washington, DC: Greenberg-Lake, 1990), Data Report and Banners, p. 18, as cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 25, Table 14. “Boys and Girls Believe Teachers Give More Attention to Girls.”
[26]Judith S. Kleinfeld, op. cit., “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 24. Paragraph two describes the difficulties she, as well Christina Hoff Sommers (author, Who Stole Feminism?), had in obtaining the full data reports.
[27]Cathy Schoen, Karen Davis, Karen Scott Collins, Linda Greenberg, Catherine DesRoches, and Melinda Abrams, The Commonwealth Fund Survey of the Health of Adolescent Girls (NY: The Commonwealth Fund, 1997). Data tabulations, as cited in Judith S. Kleinfeld, ibid., “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception,” a Women’s Freedom Network Executive Report, 1998, p. 28, Table 15. not rep
[28]L. Harris, The Metropolitan Life Survey of the American Teacher, 1997: Examining Gender Issues in Public Schools (NY: Louis Harris and Associates, 1997). The Met-Life report is a stand-alone report issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. not rep
[29]Tamar Lewin, “American Colleges Begin to Ask,” op. cit. Where Have All the Men Gone?” The New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1998, pp. 1-28.
[30]Ibid. Tamar Lewin, “American Colleges Begin to Ask, Where Have All the Men Gone?” The New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1998, pp. 1-28.
[31]Ibid. Tamar Lewin, “American Colleges Begin to Ask, Where Have All the Men Gone?” The New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1998, pp. 1-28.
[32]Ibid. Tamar Lewin, “American Colleges Begin to Ask, Where Have All the Men Gone?” The New York Times, Sunday, December 6, 1998, pp. 1-28.
[33]Tamar Lewin, “How Boys Lost Out to Girl Power,” The New York Times, December 13, 1998. not rep
[34]Susan Faludi,”Whose Hype?” Newsweek, October 25, 1993, p. 61. Faludi is the feminist author of Backlash. This is an article by F