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The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness

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The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001. 234 pages. No stated price. ....

Oakland University Business Professor Howard S. Schwartz has published an understated yet powerful book which formulates the modern-day onslaught of political correctness (PC) as a "revolt of the primitive." Schwartz seamlessly blends psychological and political analysis of some of the principal horrors brought upon our cultural by the depredations of political correctness and feminism. And he shows us that a subconscious desire to reunite with a primordial mother may underlie society's pervasive misandry.

Schwartz proposes in well-reasoned prose that men work in order to engage an indifferent world and transform it in a way that enhances the maternal world and brings them back into close contact with the feminine. "It is precisely the instability of the male sex role that has driven the achievement for which men have been responsible in the sphere of work." Since men depend on women's validation and appreciation, male psychology is in a bit of a bind, implicitly giving the female power. "The feeling of [women's inherent superiority] arises from a fantasy, and a fantasy that men and women collude to preserve." Traditionally, women gladly gave that power back in a mutual flow of generosity and praise. Today, increasingly, women are instead exploiting this superiority toward their own self-preoccupied ends.

Psychologically, Schwartz starts his analysis by noting that females may feel a primordial connection with their mother that males can never enjoy. In order to maintain the maternal bond, a vision of mother as perfectly good is helpful. But in order for this
statement to have meaning, who is to balance the equation by being "not good"? Obviously, man, the "other," who in his fatherly role "acts both as the agent of the external world and as our agent in helping us learn how to live in the world." Man is the perfect fall guy, as it were. "His achievements were bad, and his failures were bad. His presence was bad, and his absence was bad. What he did was bad, and what he didn't do was bad¼. The idea of evil must be created if the idea of perfect goodness is to be preserved¼"

Moreover, as some feminist authors have explicitly spelled out, male sexuality acts, on a symbolic if not literal level, to separate women from their identification with the primordial mother. PC thus derives its peculiar power in part from the roots of our own psyches. And we come to understand "how political practices that would, to anyone with a foothold in reality, seem foolish and absurd, look to [PC advocates] to be practical and righteous."

Schwartz does a good job periodically incorporating analysis of the differences in modern society that have led to these sea changes. One contributing factor is our current distance from reality in industrial society. At one point the author adroitly comments on how women's traditional role is less crucial today primarily due to all the modern conveniences we now enjoy. As a result, women can consider other options that were unthinkable back in the days when if they didn't arise before dawn to renew the fire, the family (including the breadwinning father) couldn't get comfortably dressed.

However many times we may have heard fragments of the stories, one cannot help being chilled to witness Schwartz' penetrating eyes surveying the horrors which
PC has brought upon our universities and our military. Schwartz provides a number
of little-publicized examples regarding the virtual formal annexation of universities by PC forces-political student newspaper censorship at Wellesley, a lack of appropriate response to a racial discrimination hoax in Kalamazoo, Michigan, totalitarian and probably unconstitutional employee diversity indoctrination at the University of Cincinnati, the PC-motivated devastation of the counseling psychology department at Minnesota's Saint Cloud State University, a Wesleyan class entitled "Pornogaphy: Writing of Prostitutes."

In order to sustain itself, Schwartz shows, PC generates a "drive to the extreme," where
ever more desperate searching for examples of racism and sexism is required in order
to justify the PC machinery's continued existence. The "moralization of the issue of race and its ideological cognates" has been one of the key forces depriving certain groups [white males] of the capacity to assert their own claim to the distribution of resources and to defend themselves from attack. PC thereby requires one to rule impermissible portions of one's own psyche out of bounds, a process which is greatly facilitated by projecting these elements onto others who can then be hated and despised in place of oneself. White males are the recipient of choice for these projections.

Intriguingly, Schwartz points out that real racism, in which another race is hated and despised, most commonly for unwanted traits the racist person has in themselves, it itself thus a form of projective identification. How effective, he asks, can PC then be in the ostensible combat against racism? Schwartz demolishes PC's absurd suggestion that only whites can be racists and demonstrates with a few well-chosen examples the very real power minorities and women do hold in today's PC society. Perhaps most devastatingly, Schwartz shows that PC has not served its purported beneficiaries very well, "prevent[ing] robust discussion of serious problems within the lower classes of the African-American community and¼ guarantee[ing] that their very real problems would remain and even worsen."

Only Schwartz could have gotten away with such an extensive analysis of the already overexposed Tailhook scandal. The author concludes that the accused officers' gravest crime was their male sexuality. They were guilty of taking pride in their sex, of their unapologetic maleness, which is subconsciously perceived as an attack because it threatens the completeness of female sexuality. Such attitudes cannot be permitted if the revolt of the primitive is to be sustained.

Very little fault can be found in this fine book. Occasionally, Schwartz seems to get bogged down in his extensive research, devoting more space than really seems justified to analyzing one particularly absurd feminist article. At times, the author's Freudian emphasis also seemed a bit overdone to me. And yet much of his reasoning retains its validity regardless of which psychological modalities are applied.

Schwartz concludes with some trenchant analysis of the wrong-headed drive for women to serve in combat roles, which the author depressingly and brilliantly shows, cannot help but undermine the military's mission. It will "create a fault line not at the nation's boundaries, but within the military itself." Schwartz shreds William Pollack's goddess-worshipping claims about boy's violence, noting that the Littleton, Colorado killers had plenty of room for self-expression but needed some firm boundaries to be set on their behavior. Finally, Schwartz writes that far worse than the PC-produced decay of many of our most critical social structures is the undermining of self-criticism. We have lost our ability for critical introspection and if we don't wake up soon, we may lose much, much more.

As usual, this book will be least read by those who need it most. But don't let that keep you away from Howard Schwartz' truly exceptional achievement in "Revolt of the Primitive."

I have been waiting for this book. (Actually, I have been wanting to write something similar to this book.) In The Revolt of the Primitive, Howard S. Schwartz, Professor of Organizational Behaviour in the School of Business Administration at Oakland University in Rochester, Michegan, has given us the first serious investigation into why feminism is so powerful. How can it be that the idealogues of political correctness, under a banner of powerless victimhood, are able to overturn and subvert the social structures of generations? Many authors have described the distortions of our institutions and our society that have been wrought by the modern forces of political correctness, but none that I am aware of has developed a serious, detailed thesis to explain how and why these irrational ideas have been able to trump both rationality and tradition.

Schwartz’s thesis is built on Freudian foundations. He argues that the image of the primordial mother, the infant’s fantasy of the ideal mother who makes the child the centre of her world, is the primitive, archetypal motivation behind political correctness, and explains its psychic power. Rather than deal with the mature trade-offs that male/female relationships require, proponents of ideological victimhood have found that they can compel society to attempt to take on this role of primordial mother, and men, including powerful men, dependent on women for psychic validation and admiration of their accomplishments in the world, are reduced to infantile dependence, doing what ‘Mom’ says, and thus unable to oppose the irrationality.

I think that Schwartz is on to something. I am not a fan or follower of Freudian psychology, but Schwartz makes a solid and detailed case for his conclusions, and demonstrates an extraordinarily good fit with the facts. He supports his argument with extensive analysis and examples from the feminist ideological takeover of the universities and the military. Ironically, it is men’s very success in dealing with the real world, in conquering major issues of daily survival through technology and social organization, that has prepared the ground for this problem. For, as he says in his conclusion,
“I referred earlier to the tremendous wealth and power that postwar civilization has developed. These have seemed to make the very idea of reality obsolete, but it is not obsolete, it is only distant. … How did we get to this? How did it happen that Western civilization, at the height of its greatest achievements, would give its best minds over to the task of taking itself apart? The answer, of course, is an old one. … this turns out to be the classic material of tragedy. It is hubris. We pushed reality back so far that its existence became only a rumour. Then we suppressed the rumour. We said it was politically incorrect. It interfered with our grandiosity, and we chose our grandiosity.” [p.212-213]

The Revolt of the Primitive is not an easy read. It is written in an academic style that at times I found too difficult to follow. For instance, Schwartz’s detailed explanation of Freud’s and Chasseguet-Smirgel’s psychoanalytic theories of childhood had me skipping pages — despite the fact that I am passionately interested in the subject of this book and probably more academically inclined than most. This is not a book that an average reader will take in at one reading. Yet, the depth of analysis and extraordinary originality of this work is worth the effort. Schwartz may have given us, and I say this with awareness of the extent of the claim, the first foundation stone in our desperate need to understand what is happening to us today, and which threatens to bring our society to its knees.

Reviewer David Shackleton is a thinker and writer on gender, and editor and publisher of Everyman: A Men's Journal. (...)

This book finally says what most intelligent heterosexual males have for some time either suspected or tacitly believed, and it says it seminally. Dr. Schwartz, a professor of organizational behavior, shows that feminism has gone suspiciously beyond mere demands for gender equality, and has become essentially a special interest ideology, inculcating into society that male psyches are fundamentally flawed, and attacking masculinity in order to elevate a female ethos of fiscal and social power. This is accomplished by using "equality" as a camoflage for engaging in attempting, by way of political correctness, to criminilize masculinity. This has been successfuly done by inventing and successfully obtaining public censure for "attitudinal crimes and conflating them with behavioral crimes."
Wow, how true! Somebody finally cast off the shackles of tired and stale political correctness and is speaking naked truth. How fresh -- how welcome! And all one needs for a proof of this is to examine feminist response to the Clinton sexual harassment scandal: NOW (Patricia Ireland; Betty Friedan, et al backed Clinton! They really do not primarily care about sexual harrassment as a phenominon in itself -- they care about it as a means to achieving some advancement at the expense of the male. Unless, of course, the male supports their achieving the advancement at the expense of the male. Then they can conveniently discard the precept (and the alleged victim) as secondary to their "agenda", which is based upon destruction of the male psyche, not upon victim based concerns.
Dr. Schwarz uses as his primary examples the horrifying string of outstanding military men, some of them bona fide heroes (one of them, Stanley Arthur, had won 11 Distinguished Flying Crosses serving his country), whose careers have been derailed by accusations of, essentially, "overmanliness".
Some may find difficult to take seriously the role of women in combat military service, yet, they're winning in the trenches of gender politics, all right. The list of allegations made against the male officers (one "threatened" a female subordinate by wearing a sleeveless shirt and gym shorts on the base -- he had been running; another female found the requisite Army 3-mile run "demeaning to women", and was given a bye, etc., etc.)
This is an important book. Society needs to get back to reality: logic and reason need to be given their proper precedence over emoting and "feeling", as basis of decision making. And men need to reconquer their own country, the U.S.A., which is becoming increasingly intolerant towards perfectly natural male behavior, often for reasons, says Dr. Schwartz, having nothing to do with anything other than resentment, or a desire to damage the male psyche for purposes of feminist (or gay) self-interest. ...

The Primordial Female, primitive, enigmatic, and always ready to provide succor when the outside world turns against us, is the stuff of our sub-conscious desire. Freud saw her as the primitive mother, with whom we all want to be reunited. Judy Chicago paints her as a goddess, "...her center dark and molten; all her energy emanates from her bloody womb and core...a sacred vessel." Lao Tzu calls her "the Great Female...gossamer and seemingly insubstantial" who represents the gate between heaven and earth. She is a dark, warm, soft, pink velvet envelope, inviting us to cast off the sharp edges of life and climb inside for a soothing nap. She loves us soft and long. She wants us to forget about conflict, and surrender into her peaceful calm. However, she is a fantasy; and if we take her to be real, we are prevented from working through the challenges encountered in the outside world-where we require the male principle to inform and direct our journeys. From this comes the need for balance, reconciliation and compromise in our lives-not always an easy journey!

In the newest, paperback edition of "Revolt of the Primitive", Howard S. Schwartz takes us on a journey into the world of the "Politically Correct"-a land not so much intended to punish some because of their gender, sexual preference, race or ethnicity-as the domain of the primitive mother, where all who have not been loved in the past will be loved more to compensate, and where those who have been loved in the past will be hated for having stolen that love. An outgrowth of the 1960's and 1970's "socio-cultural revolution" taught by and intended for middle-class, college-educated people, the United States of America now twists in the winds generated by the Cyclops-like child of this experiment. Like a modern-day Odysseus, Schwartz warns us of the shrill song of feminist sirens, identifying with the Primordial Female and luring us to our destruction on the rocks of insanity. We come to see, as if through-a-mirror-darkly, what lies behind women having their legs shaved by inebriated Navy pilots at Tailhook, teenagers in Littleton engaging in a one-way running gun battle in the school halls, and educated administrators in academe suffocating in their corseted rules and by-laws as they write "gender-less" rules for the arcane--like a modern-day Scarlet O'Hara who-"...will just think about it, tomorrow." Schwartz wants us to think about it today, before the rocks destroy the fragile vessel of our nation's democracy.

The new edition-looking less like a Chemistry text and more like a good read on an airline flight-contains a very beautiful postcard of the author's journey into the social revolution nirvana in the 60's and 70's. Post 9/11 Schwartz warns us that the soft recesses of the primitive, primordial mother-goddess will not shield us from the destruction of bin Ladens-who live in the world of sharp swords, jet-fueled 727 missiles and a liking for all things yang-male. Until the Primordial Goddess envelopes Osama and his bad-boys, somebody in the nation will have to wake up, crawl out of the envelope, and find whatever yang is still available to strike at least one plane with a sharp edge-to remind us that sometimes, even revolutions need to find a mid-point on an axis.

This book is worth the time and money. It moves fast and is easy to follow becasue it is so interesting all the time, so it would make good reading for students. The case is nicely laid out. Women and feminism are the objects and sources of impossible moralities, impossible burdens and impossible logic. That has been observed before, and many have noted that feminism is ever the more central to all things today, especially political correctness. However, I know of no other sustained discussion of these and related ideas. Schwartz's final chapter on feminism is a page turner. His implication that all hope now rides with woman, along with his diagnosis of political correctness as infantile narcissistic attachment to the mother are exceptionally worth thinking about these days. Schwartz uses very interesting examples at times, especially in his analysis of the attempt to feminize and PC-ise the workplace, also in his analysis of the controversy over women in combat--a study of the irrational that is based on statements from our highest level military and state officials. One has a lot to chew on after seeing how PC logic, which is the logic of the ad hominem argument, is winning the day on this issue. ...

To me, the riddle of feminism poses only half of a conundrum.

Why are women feminists? Why do they bash men so readily? Well, why do wolves have sharp teeth? The better to eat you with, of course.

Conversely, why do women untruthfully DENY that they are feminists or male-bashers? For the same reason that the wolf doesn't show his teeth. It might frighten away one's quarry.

There's just no mystery about female motivation for the war on men and surely no need for an explanatory book.

But why do many MEN become feminists and self-bashers? What makes men, large numbers of them, adopt a philosophy of shame and self-hate? Why do men follow the women in their lives to that evolutionary blind alley?

That is TRULY a mystery which I hoped that Howard Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" would answer.

Schwartz's analysis, as others have noted, is primarily a Freudian one, to which he adds his own flourish.

He postulates that men go into the outside world and seek to tame it in order to impress women and concurrently as a means of making it more closely resemble the world of the primordial mother that they long for (and that girls and women are more easily linked to).

He further suggests that as women enter the work force and other institutions outside the home in large numbers, they see these differently from the men who understand the hardship and seeks to gain the respect of the women by engaging in it for their sake.

Women see these institutions from the point of view of the primordial mother herself, who unrealistically expects the world of work to resemble her own primarily maternal sphere, a sphere "where the expression of her nurturing power could be given its freest expression".

As Schwartz explains, women treat the revelation that the outside world isn't truly like that, not with a concession to reality, but with hostility towards the men who inhabit it, rejecting any notion of gratitude for the sacrifices made by men within that world. Rather, women blame men for the world's flaws.

And here we come to what Schwartz would view as the answer to the riddle of male feminism. Men respond to the rejection of women not with remonstrations for their ingratitude but with fearful acquiescence to the female view. To do otherwise would be to incur the wrath of the primordial mother.

As Schwartz describes, "He must therefore...follow her lead, not move from her project, never question her claim that were it not for the father, her life...would have been perfect. In all of this, he relinquishes any possibility he has of an emotional life as a competent male adult, substituting instead the idea that male adulthood is the root of his problem."

The male feminist as the eternally childlike naif - I like it. This is the triumph of the revolt of the primitive - the conquest of the primordial mother.

Schwartz specifically looks at several issues through the prism of this analysis: martial dissolutions and domestic violence (in both of them, actual male guilt is routinely overstated and female guilt understated), workplace conditions (the myths of the "pay gap" and the "glass ceiling"), political correctness on campus, and women in combat.

Schwartz is on the right track when he talks about the dictatorial reign of political correctness on campus. The substitution of feelings and group-think for rigorous academic critique does indeed smack of a triumph of the feminine (the primordial mother, if you will) over the masculine, even as female students pile up a super-numerical advantages on campus.

And the feminist assault on the military taking place under the Tailhook banner - of course, it's a thinly-veiled assault on male sexuality. To recognize that, one would not even need to be familiar with the specific examples that Schwartz provides.

But Schwartz's analysis isn't quite complete. Male self-hatred today is toxic, absolutely toxic. Anyone who surfs Usenet can see that men have not only accepted as true the charge that they are oppressors (which ready acceptance might be accounted for by Schwartz's analysis) but also, as true, the charge that they are actually inferior to women.

Men have, by and large, accepted all of the ugly descriptions that feminazi junk science imposes on them: weak-kneed sissies incapable of giving birth and therefore incapable of dealing with pain and stress (though, as Schwartz shows, it's WOMEN who refuse to accept the world as it is), Y-chromosome mutants who are subject to genetic disease and early death. The "weaker sex". And so on.

Schwartz's "revolt of the primitive" might explain a certain measure of weary male passivity and acquiescence in the face of the female onslaught. But it seems horribly inadequate as an explanation for sexual suicide and for intense and widespread male self-hatred.

Then too, Schwartz's description of the world would have us believe that with the triumph of the primordial mother, the feminine is in ascendance and the masculine is in retreat.

But the masculine ISN'T in retreat, not at all. Our popular culture is littered with karate-kicking, groin-stomping men inhabiting the bodies of women such as Jennifer Lopez. Snarling, tight-lipped, soccer playing "role models" Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain preach "fierceness" as a standard for little girls to emulate. Hairy-lipped small-breasted women put on their gym pants and actually run marathons and triathlons, but only when they're not practicing their boxing moves.

The masculine isn't in retreat but the purveyors of culture honor it ONLY when it finds expression in the actions of WOMEN.

It's really not the feminine that's in ascendance, of course; it's androgyny. Our cultural gurus are busy turning men into women and women into men and it's ANDROGYNY, no less than the primordial mother, which represents the real horror. I find nothing in Schwartz's book to account for this development.

Your patient is dying, doctor. You need to recognize ALL of the symptoms before your diagnosis can be completed.

This is a very valuable book. At a time when many authors hesitate in front of political correctness, Schwartz goes on for a direct assault. He offers persuasive arguments that PC represents a loss of rationality to the primitive forces of narcissistic fantasy. One need not agree with all the arguments but Schwartz demands to be heard.

I recall buying Revolt of the Primitive when it first came out in 2001, and, to put it mildly, it was not what I expected. Certainly it was full of excellent quotes and vignettes, but I found the psychoanalytic theory daunting. Indeed, Schwartz's point of view is not one which will gain much admiration from the public at large, yet it is extremely enlightening. This book explains many of the paradoxes endemic to political correctness, and will give aid to those of us who long for its racist, sexist, heterophobic death. Before cracking the cover, I had never heard such an excellent explanation for why good men cowered before feminists. Although many of Dr. Schwartz's proofs are abstract in nature, they are highly convincing. We all wish for scientific studies to be conducted and irrefutable evidence presented concerning most of the things in which we fervently believe, but, many times, truth can be found outside the experimental setting. We get far more Veritas in Revolt of the Primitive than we would from many months of study within a university afflicted with cultural Marxism. Dr. Schwartz should be proud. This is an outstanding book.

Two things I wish I had know about this book up front were that the pricing is genuinely inexplicable and that it is a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to analyzing the subject of feminism.

Feminism is but one branch of modern "political correctness", a deceptively bland term that refers to a way of thinking which follows inevitably if one assumes humans are mechanically and accidentally derived automatons (as compared to Christianity, which recognizes humans as being spiritually designed in the image of God, thus of intrinsic worth despite choosing to sin).

The actual roots of P.C. feminism are thus faith in the presupposition of naturalism, not the Freudian fictions the author claims. P.C. people see right and wrong as being defined only by human power; subordination to God is anathema, the idea offending their prideful natures. They prefer the instrinsically unprovable (and contradictory) assumption there are only undirected, natural things, disregarding the evidence of life and history, that God that created men and women with definite natures and roles.

Because the book's approach is Freudian, it can't really get at the root it claims to. Interestingly, it often uses religious wordings like "sin" and "holy war", but strips the ideas of content, guaranteeing an inadequate analysis. Perhaps the author also starts by assuming naturalism is true.

While descriptions of the feminization of the military and other concrete events is good, better understanding can be had in Veith's "Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview", which traces the development of fascism over the centuries into modern institutions such as Political Correctness, feminism and post-modernism.

Feminist thinking shares much with classical, pre-Christian paganism (thus the frequent links with witchcraft, goddess and nature worship), so the author's recognition of it as a form of primitivism is at least close to the mark. Feminists think about women using the same pattern of reasoning that fascists do with the nation-state. Men (or Jews) are toxic while women (The Motherland) are benevolent and loving, yet oppressed. Institutions (human power) must remade to halt oppression of women (i.e. different results). A utopian vision is built around what is imagined would happen if women (Aryan super-race) could properly run things, as they are obviously better suited to do. The actual result is a society dedicated to shaming boys for displaying any behavior that leads to different outcomes.

For example, flip on one of the news networks and you will quickly see stories about, say, how women suffer from cervical cancer more than they need to because they are so busy taking care of others they have no time for their own health. That they suffer more from breast cancer than they need to because they don't want to appear vulnerable in their "male-dominated" workplace. That is, they suffer from one form of cancer BECAUSE they are so good; they suffer another form of cancer BECAUSE men are so bad.

After permeating culture with such negative biases, one ends up with millions of young boys being medicated daily with Ritalin because they are boys and the deck becoming so stacked against them that male college attendance is dropping rapidly; 8.4 million women to 6.7 million men in 1996 and projected at 9.2/6.2 ratio by 2007. Apparently, sitting quietly and passively in chairs is not just how women learn, but the universal method boys must accept too, even if they need to be drugged to do so.

While I don't recommend it, the book's accounts of specific events is fascinating (but perhaps instead see "The Myth of Male Power"); to a large extent, the reshaping of institutions by feminists occurs behind the scenes since if people knew how bizzare the intentions, it would never fly.

Reading the book did improve my focus on the white-collar phenomenon of women who are hired out of college and given high visibility jobs managing others more experienced, then rapidly promoted. Within a couple years, a local newspaper inevitably does the full page story revolving around the fact they are women a traditionally male field. Then invitations to the White House for ceremonies, and membership on a board that advises upper-level management on women's issues, functioning behind the scenes, almost like a self-reinforcing Trotskyite cell. Meanwhile, the males are often left trying to figure out what the woman actually did to obtain such attention. Not a good situation. Elevation of women simply because they are women while denigrating and medicating men for being energetic, then discarding them to prisons if that fails will eventually erode away the foundations of civilized societies.

In November 2003, I was first sent a review copy of a book by Oakland University professor of organizational behavior, Howard S. Schwartz. This review is adapted from my first review, contained on my professional website. In the interests of full disclosure, I have worked with Howie on some issues related to FOIA of U-Michigan diversity research and our mutual support of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

Dr. Schwartz was one of the speakers on July 8, 2003, when Ward Connerly kicked off the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative to end race preferences by ballot question following the ruling in the now infamous University of Michigan admissions cases. Schwartz is also known for a book examining narcissistic behavior in organizations using the Challenger explosion and General Motors as cases studies.

The book is primarily a Freudian analysis of why men and women buy into the modern day notions of feminism and how maleness is under attack at multiple levels. Through a multitude of examples, Schwartz argues that the "politically correct" movement and feminism have wrought upon young males a psychological inferiority complex that ultimately takes advantage of an instinct to be subordinate to the primordial mother. Feminism has elevated the value of the psychological traits of women at the expense of those traits we traditionally see as male. Feminism's modern gains have been made by portraying the male as inherently violent, warlike, under-sexed, and evil. And more importantly, Schwartz argues, males are buying into this paradigm, creating higher suicide and mortality rates, and leading to a host of socialization problems.

The implied argument and value system feminism forces upon society and the family is exactly the opposite though of what research shows is good for children. Feminism's implication that the male is the source of all problems however, is refuted by the fact that the empirical research has "found that the absence of the father is associated with the problem." If maleness were truly the cause of violence, we would expect to find less violence in single-mother families; an empirical result that would be exactly the opposite of the current science.

I strongly recommend this book and think it makes an important contribution, although it is not for the casual reader and is quite involved in its use of Freudian and other psychoanalytic technique.

It should be noted that although the book doesn't make a commentary on the proper role of feminism, that I believe that feminism took its wrong turn after the Suffrage movement and during the Prohibitionist movement of the twenties (women attempting "temperance" of male "badness"). Clearly, the empowering nature of the right to vote was something that men never had a moral right to deny to women, and political and individual equality of the sexes is a right that should and must be guaranteed to all. I believe that balance between the sexes must be attained, and that the positive aspects and beneficial differences in each sex should be highlighted and the weaknesses of each should be discouraged (for example, I have no use for deadbeat dads or wife-beaters, but see these weaknesses arising from a lack of masculine responsibility and character, not as "part of the nature" of manhood -- for lack of a better way of saying it, "real men," who learn from their positive male role models, have never done these types of things).