Customer Reviews

A Man's Viewpoint: Viewing Gender Issues Through Men's Eyes

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As someone else said in a review of another book, it's symptomatic of where we are in the gender debate these days that you have to be a woman to critique feminism. A man who has the audacity to do so is immediately labeled "angry" or "bitter" or some such discount. That men even have a valid viewpoint, much less a right to have it, is hardly on the radar screen. The so-called debate is really a monologue, with women laying out to men how it's gonna be: their way or the highway. It's as if these things only affect women.

Consequently, powerful and privileged women get juicy book deals with big publishers and teams of editors and researchers, while qualified men like Rob Mazzeo are left trying to find some out-of-the-way publisher in more of a do-it-yourself effort. It wouldn't be the first time: many other books expressing a male viewpoint read as if they came out of an underground press. (Zubaty's "Surviving the Feminization of America" comes to mind.) This alone is a powerful testament to men's second class status. Heck, Jack Kammer's excellent "If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?" is only available in digital form on the I-Net.

If you can get past the effects of these things on a book (numerous typos, many commas in the wrong places, sections which need re-writing or at least serious editing, etc.) Mazzeo's book is quite good at living up to its title. It's as long on content as it is short on polish.

While some of Mazzeo's phraseology is lifted directly from Warren Farrell's work, especially "The Myth of Male Power" (sadly without attribution), and much of what's said here will be more or less familiar to anyone well-read in the men's rights genre, there is a unique angle that the author brings to bear on the topic. Plus there are tons of real-life stories from what must be a quite extensive news clippings file (20 pgs of footnotes). It's hard to think of another book which argues so strongly for the need for fairness towards men and for men's equality with women on such a wide gamut of topics.