Rating: 
Summary: the aftermath of Farrell's breakup with feminism
Review: When a love affair comes to an end, it's a natural temptation to trash the former object of affection to anyone who will listen. The volume of your mental space labeled with your beloved's name has to be filled with something, and bile is the easy option.Given that principle, it isn't surprising that Cammile Paglia supports Warren Farrell. Both of them set up a "straw woman" they call Feminism, invest it with all of their personal disappointments and disagreements with feminism, and tear it to shreds, all the while claiming the insider's knowledge and right to criticize. The bulk of WMATWTA is Farrell's reading of the articles and advertisements of women's magazines like Cosmopolitan. These magazines have been criticized by feminist writers for decades, not least for appropriating language and jargon from feminist thought to add a liberated edge to a reactionary gender message. So, Farrell parrots what has already been said about the content, but argues that this is what women really want. Farrell's other project is about the economic relation of the two genders. The way he paints it, men slave away all day, often at dangerous jobs, while women remain safe and sound at home, pocketing the paychecks and complaining that their worn-out husbands don't talk to them. Farrell looks at the military draft of men only, the statistics of workplace injury and illness and the flow of money in the household, and concludes that women really don't want to change society because they benefit from a system that regards men as expendable. What Farrell has stumbled across, but refuses to recognize, is class divisions in society (and race, to a lesser extent). Sure, it's men who get their body parts blown off in foreign jungles or exposed to toxic chemicals, but it is not for the benefit of women as a gender. Rather, it's poor men (and women) who work themselves into an early grave for the benefit of rich men (and women). Remember, "patriarchy" means rule by fathers, not rule by men. (Race adds a further dimension of complexity that Farrel doesn't touch on at all.) To accurately explain the hierarchies of our society, you need to place interactions in the context of race, class and gender. Farrell makes the mistake of trying to shoehorn everything into gender terms, and ignoring the intricacies of the interaction between the three. To be fair, Farrell is right that there are a lot of gender double standards floating around. However, instead of interpreting these as signs that the cultural change is still in progress, he sees it as an indication of women's irresponsibility, selfishness and manipulative nature. If you view yourself as a helper of women, but women don't do what you want them to do, you conclude that they don't want to be helped. The affair ends, and to salve your broken heart you trash your former significant other all over town. BTW, I know whereof I speak when I write about affairs ending badly. For a brief period in my early 20s, I was a big believer in Farrell's message. Fortunately, the infatuation passed, but I still want to trash the guy.
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