Farrell's
The Myth of Male Power (1993) stands as the seminal Men's Rights text. However, the book's statistics are now outdated. An updated edition is overdue. Unfortunately, 'Does feminism discriminate against men?', written jointly by Warren Farrell and an opponent of his views, James Sterba, is probably the closest we will get. Although Farrell's section of the book is characteristically insightful, both Sterba's section and the book's overall format are flawed.
Although styled 'a debate' in the book's subtitle, the format this 'debate' takes is so imbalanced as scarcely to warrant the description. Each author is nominally allotted a roughly equal number of pages to make their case. However, whereas Sterba's portion was written after having had the opportunity to read Farrell's contribution in advance, Farrell is denied any opportunity to respond to Sterba and expose his misleading claims.
A rejoinder to Sterba's portion of the book is sorely required. I will attempt to provide this in what remains of this review.
Perceptions of Power
Sterba begins his critique of Farrell by pointing out, "exemplars of religious power, physical power, economic power and political power are all normally men" (p135) and both sexes view men as more powerful (ibid.).
However, Farrell never denied the existence of a perception that men are more powerful. What he questions is the accuracy of the perception.
Accordingly, he quotes the aphorism, "women's strength is their façade of weakness and men's weakness is their façade of strength" (p4) and even titled his most famous work 'The Myth of Male Power'. Sterba's misreading of his opponent's thesis thus begins with the title of the latter's best-known work.
Conscription
Sterba claims that male-only conscription (compulsory enlistment for military service) actually benefits men. He bases this on two arguments:
1) The prestige accruing to those who have completed military service outweighs the hardship endured and risk of being killed, injured or maimed;
2) It is primarily men who oppose the conscription of women and therefore it must be men who benefit from it.
I will consider each of these contentions in turn.
1) Sex-Specific Stigma and the Career Impact of Consciption
Sterba claims, in Israel, "men's willingness to sacrifice their lives for their country confirms their status as good citizens" and "having served in combat is an important part of one's resume when applying for almost any job" (p139).
It is true that men who evade military service are stigmatised, frequently denied employment and face penalties ranging from imprisonment and withdrawal of the franchise to summary execution. However, women face none of these penalties and can be regarded as 'good citizens' even without undertaking military service. The stigma attached to 'draft-dodgers', 'conchies' and 'shirkers' is therefore specific to men (in other words, a 'double-standard').
Far from enjoying improved employment opportunities, ex-servicemen frequently have difficulty adjusting to civilian life, may be permanently injured or affected by conditions such as PTSD and are over-represented among the homeless (USA Today 2007). They return to find jobs taken by women who, instead of fighting, spent their time gaining qualifications and job-experience.
Therefore, any prestige accruing to ex-serviceman is insufficient to offset the hardship endured and risk of being permanently maimed or killed. If it were, there would be no need to resort to conscription in the first place!
ii) Who opposes Drafting Women and What Does this Mean?
Sterba argues that, because the primary supporters of male-only conscription are men, this proves it is men who benefit. Citing the opposition of senior figures in the military to the integration of women, Sterba claims "it cannot be that the members of the military elite are engaging in discrimination against themselves by supporting the male-only draft" (p141).
But they are not discriminating against themselves - because they are already in the military and therefore could hardly be drafted! Rather they are discriminating against other men beside themselves.
The support of the military-elite for excluding women does not prove this policy benefits men. At most it suggests only that it benefits a tiny subset of men - namely the military-elite themselves.
Moreover, it is doubtful whether the primary opponents of drafting women are male. A survey conducted by Newsweek (cited by Farrell 1993: p143) found a majority of men (61%) but only a minority of women (39%) favoured the conscription of women.
Indeed, it was women's fear of being conscripted alongside men that led to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (See Van Creveld
Men, Women & War p210-1). In contrast, the influence of the military elite counts for little (e.g. they also unsuccessfully opposed the enlistment of homosexuals).
Therefore, for all the rhetoric about 'fighting for sexual equality', it appears women do not want REAL sexual equality if it means they REALLY have to fight.
Combat Exemption
Sterba also conflates the issue of conscription with that of the exclusion of women from combat-roles. On this point, Benatar (2003: p199) acknowledges, "excluding women from combat does indeed disadvantage some women", namely the "minority of women who seek combat opportunities". However, "to present the exclusion of exclusively in terms of the negative effects it has on women is to ignore the much greater disadvantage suffered by vast numbers of men who are forced into combat against their wills".
Whereas only a small minority of women who have chosen a military career report that they would volunteer for combat (Van Creveld: p212), huge numbers of men throughout history and across the world have been conscripted against their will. The former lose a career-choice - the latter often their lives!
Healthcare
Of Laboratory Mice and Men
Sterba devotes several pages documenting how drug trials typically use only men as test subjects in clinical trials (p144-146) - yet never addresses Farrell's argument that this is evidence, not of male privilege, but male disposability.
New drugs are first tested on the least valuable members of society given the risks. No one would suggest that inmates of concentration camps were privileged to be the subjects of Mengel's experiments!
According to Farrell, "we used men for experimental research for the same reason we used rats" (p28).
Prostrate Cancer vs. Breast Cancer
Sterba claims that that the reason more money is spent on breast cancer research than on prostrate cancer research is that, although similar numbers of people die from the two conditions, women who die from breast cancer die at an earlier average age (p146).
However, if one acknowledges that the younger age at which women die from breast cancer is a legitimate reason to spend more on this condition, it follows that the fact that men in general die on average at a younger age than women is a legitimate reason to spend more money on men's health overall. In employing this argument, Sterba therefore inadvertently undercuts the entire basis for sex equality in healthcare provision.
Violence
Domestic Violence
Sterba reiterates the familiar feminist 'her-story' of how wife-beating was until recently widely approved (p148-9). Actually, "in America there have been laws against wife beating since before the revolution" (
Who Stole Feminism? by Hoff-Sommers: p204) and "vigilante parties sometimes abducted wife-beaters and whipped them" (Ibid: p205).
Wife-beating has been punished in Britain since the Anglo-Saxon age (George 2007) and the issue rediscovered in various moral panics resulting in the Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women Act of 1853 and the Wife Beaters Act of 1882 - contradicting Sterba's absurd claim (p149) that Scotland only "made wife-beating illegal" in the "early 1970s"!
Only where men were victims of spousal assault did it go unpunished - or rather the victims themselves were punished! (George 2007).
As for violence today, Fiebert (2011) records 282 studies finding that women are at least as likely to perpetrate violence against male partners as the converse. Against this body of data, Sterba protests (p151), "how jarring is the idea that women batter... as much and... as severely as men is". This is a version of the 'argument from common sense' or 'argumentum ad populum' fallacy.
He also reports higher rates of female victimization found by a crime survey (p152). However, given that twenty-three percent of women do not regard slapping men as wrong (
When She Was Bad by Patricia Pearson: p130), let alone criminal, it is doubtful that they would report it in a 'crime' survey.
Crime surveys find lower levels of reported abuse for both sexes. Yet, "battered women's advocacy groups nimbly switch back and forth between different sets of data: one to show that abuse is epidemic, another to show that nearly all the victims are women" (Young: p93). Thus, "the same study that is cited by women's advocates... for the statistic 'a woman is battered every 15 seconds', also shows that a man is battered every 14 seconds"!
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