The Myth Of Male Power, by Warren Farrell

I suppose it my own fault that I was curious about reading this book in the first place.  I saw this book on my roommate’s bookshelf and was a bit puzzled as to what was meant by its curious and enigmatic title.  Was the book making some sort of feminist critique of male power and dominance as is common in these days?  Not really.  This book was certainly a critique of marriage law and godly morality, but it was written from the point of view of showing men as the victims of changed sexual politics, left with no options while women have replaced them with government as a substitute husband and with various means of abortion and birth control and child support and so on to gain control over children and the pocketbook of their estranged partners.  Certainly dealing with questions of divorce are far from unusual in my own reading and writing [1].  What was it about this book that simply left me unable to finish it, an extremely rare fate among books that I pick up and read on a regular basis.  I finish hundreds of books a year–why could I not finish this one?

As it happens, the reason why I was unable to finish this particular book was because it made me feel intensely angry whenever I picked it up.  This is not a good reaction to a book.  Fairly frequently I read books that I am frustrated or irritated with, but this book mate my blood boil.  Considering that I read most of my books in the break room at work or in public in restaurants, it was simply not safe for me to pick up this book.  Even reading a single chapter of fifteen or twenty pages was enough to make me feel an intense rage that I found it difficult and unpleasant to control.  So rather than read the book little by little and feel angry while doing so, I thought it would be best to set the book aside and just note that its contents were simply not something I could deal with.  Perhaps you will be able to read it without feeling upset about it.  Perhaps you will be bored by it or mildly irritated, but it really struck a nerve with me, and as a result this was one book that I was not willing to read because that sort of rage is not a place where I like to be under any circumstances, and especially not reading a book.

For those who are curious about the book’s contents, this book is more than 350 pages and contains four parts.  The first part looks at the myth of male power by asking the question if such power is really a myth and then giving a phony and pseudoscientific division of marriage development from stage I to stage II.  The second part of the book looks at the “glass cellars” of the so-called disposable sex, and about the lack of choice men have had as dominant figures in the death professions, why women live longer, and why men commit suicide more.  The third part looks at government as a substitute husband in looking at how the system protects women unjustly, how women have more defenses against murder than men do, and the politics of sex, rape, and welfare/child support.  After this the fourth part of the book gives a conclusion and notes and bibliography.  From this listing it is perhaps possible to see how this book may be pretty infuriating to many readers, regardless of what extent, if any, the reader agrees with what the author has to say.

[1] See, for example:

On The Applicability Of Divorce Law To The Recognition Of New Sovereign States

Oh, The Divorces!

Esperanto And The EU’s Unusual Revenge

And She Shall Be His Wife Because He Has Humbled Her

If Such Is The Case Of The Man With His Wife, It Is Better Not To Marry

I Wish That I Could Get My Things And Just Let Go