Warren Farrell

Warren Farrell was born June 26, 1943 and is an American author of seven books on men and women's issues. His books cover twelve fields: history, law, sociology and politics  (The Myth of Male Power); couples communication (Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say); economic and career issues (Why Men Earn More); child psychology and child custody (Father and Child Reunion); and teenage to adult psychology  and socialization, (Why Men Are the Way they Are and The Liberated Man). All of his books are related to women and men studies; consistent to his books since the early 90's has been a call for a gender transition movement.

By the early 90's, Farrell was writing that he felt the misunderstandings about men had deepened and become dangerous to the survival of families and love. He had spent five years re-examining everything he thought he knew about the sexes. The result was The Myth of Male Power.

In The Myth of Male Power, Farrell offered his first in-depth outline of the thesis he would weave through his subsequent books: that for men and women to make an evolutionary shift from a focus on survival to a focus on a balance between survival and fulfillment, that what was ultimately necessary was neither a women's movement nor a men's movement, but a "gender transition movement." He defined a gender transition movement as one that fosters a transition from the rigid roles of our past to more flexible roles for the future.

As the book's title implied, The Myth of Male Power challenged the belief that men had the power in part by challenging the definition of power. Farrell defined power as "control over one's life." He wrote that, "In the past, neither sex had power; both sexes has roles: women's role was raise children; men's role was raise money."

Farrell documented how, cross-culturally, men's experience of powerlessness involved being socialized, even as boys, to become "the disposable sex." He argued that virtually every society that survived did so by training a cadre of its sons to be disposable in war, and in work. The paradox of masculinity, he proposed, is that the very training for traditional masculinity that created a healthy society created unhealthy boys and men.

The Myth of Male Power is most ardently challenged by some academic feminists, whose critique is that men earn more money, and that money is power. Farrell concurs that men earn more money, and is one form of power, but adds that "men often feel obligated to earn money someone else spends while they die sooner--and feeling obligated is not power." This perspective was to be more fully developed in Farrell's Why Men Earn More.

Farrell says heterosexual men learn to earn money to earn their way to female love. And that this in turn leads to psychological problems for both sexes: that "men's weakness is their facade of strength; women's strength is their facade of weakness."

Perhaps Farrell's most controversial contribution to gender politics is The Myth of Male Power's confrontation of the belief that patriarchal societies make rules to benefit men at the expense of women. Farrell feels this misses many realities such as the registration of only our 18-year-old boys for the draft, or men constituting 93% of workplace deaths.

Analyses such as these led The Myth of Male Power to become both his most-praised and most-controversial book. In the discipline of men's studies, it is considered to be a classic.