Editor's note:- This is one hell of a long article written in the form of a letter to Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the "Myth Of Male Power" and "Why Men Are the Way They Are". Around 35,000 words. We'll be putting this up in installments and it would probably be the main feature of our "Features" page for some time. One of it's suggested names was the "Ranting and raving of a middle-aged hetero male fed up with all the bullshit." It's extremely aggressive, and except for people who actually have read some of the writer's work, one might even claim it's misogynistic. But it's not. It very definitely is not. And though it tends to ramble on and some of us at MACHO International may disagree here and there, it is very much worth reading. The author is John Galt, one of the more eloquent mens' rights writers on the web. Visit his personal website, here.

Copyright � 1998 by John Galt and "eye of the mind" creative services

2/12/98

Dear Dr. Farrell,

I want to begin by thanking you for your 2 fine books on men's issues: Why Men Are the Way They Are, and Myth of Male Power. Why Men... was one of the first books I encountered which broke from the unrelenting anti-male viewpoint which had driven the gender diatribe up till then. Book, after book, after book has come out, all with essentially the same message - "what's wrong with men". And it always boiled down to "They aren't women." Your books were a type of counter-message - "what's NOT wrong with men" - one which has long been sorely needed if this social revolution is not to deteriorate into the "gender based war" that some claim.

I am preparing to teach a community based course called "Escape from the Dating Trap: the single man's guide to not dating" which draws heavily on your work. I picked up Myth... to check some citations and reread your introduction. While I agree about 99.999% with everything you say, there is that elusive .001% where the ideas you present do not match my experience. I decided to take you at your word when you published your address (still current, I hope) and write. I have, for some time, been trying to contact you by email to simply say "thank you" for your work, but all the email addresses for you on the web have been kicked back on me.

Please do not construe anything I say as an attack on you personally, or even on your ideas. Unlike you, I am staunchly anti-feminist. I believe that I have some very sound reasons for that viewpoint which cannot be dismissed by shrieks of "patriarchy, misogyny, gets violent when threatened by loss of power, etc. �" I agree with you that there are patriarchal systems and matriarchal systems, and that in the end nobody has that great a deal. My challenge is to find a way to communicate the 99.999% that we agree on, in order to focus on that remaining .001% that we can learn from each other's perspective and refine our understanding of the issues. The only way I know to do this is to lay out my entire perspective, bearing in mind that much of it comes from your own work. Should you find any of it interesting, useful, or worthy of dialogue, I assume I will hear from you. If you don't, I ask that you at least acknowledge its receipt so I am not left with the "I shot an arrow into the air, it came to earth I know not where" feeling.

In retrospect, it is impossible for me to determine how much of my thinking today is simply long held beliefs which are in agreement with your work and how much was shaped by it. I do know that your books have been instrumental in my overcoming deep senses of shame and inadequacy which resulted from the degree to which I believed the myth of male power. However, I have never believed it as strongly as most women and many men. I have always contended, since I first heard about feminism in the 60s, that social conditions of today were the result of centuries of development in which millions of people, women as well as men, participated and from which they benefited. If those social structures no longer were adaptive and beneficial to the majority of people, then by all means let's change them. But changing them means REALLY CHANGING them, not just dressing them up in new clothes.

In the 30 years since, I have watched things go from not-great-but-what-choice-do-we-really-have to worse. I swim in a sea of man-hatred. Every conversation with women to which I am party contains some sneer at men. How stupid we are. How we think with our penises. How small our penises are and how much they would like to "bobbitize" us and cut them off. How we are like children. How helpless we are. None of it true, but almost de rigueur for a woman to prove how "strong" and superior she is by bashing men. Masking the reality of what is happening is an immense body of social myth and illusion. In one respect this is what Myth... was about, but with the focus on men's powerlessness instead of the ways in which some women deliberately abuse their power, and the reasons underlying that abuse. Misandry is an accepted cultural value. Unless men begin to fight it as women have misogyny, it will continue to kill them, and unless they start caring about themselves and other men, no one else will.

Not long ago I was part of an interaction that provoked a flash of insight. I was listening to a woman relate an incident regarding her male (platonic) roommate. He has many medical problems, including hepatitis 'C', and has been very sick for the past couple of years. She had purchased one of those pieces of mass market furniture of veneer over particle board which are incredibly dense and heavy. She and a couple of friends were attempting to wrestle this incredibly heavy object up a couple of flights of stairs. He got up off the couch to open the door and placed a hand on an unsupported corner to help steady it. I was totally taken aback when she concluded her story with a disdainful sneer and said "Being a MAN, he couldn't just lie there and watch someone else work. He HAD to get up and help". The contempt she showed was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. I have long battled this tendency among women to bash men, often habitually and without thinking as a friend of mine did until I repeatedly confronted her and finally told her I would not tolerate it in my presence. What took me by surprise about this particular incident was that, while the bashing is usually about some quality of men which is stereotyped and overstated but still has some basis in the reality of some men's behavior, in this instance she was bashing him for a trait that I consider admirable.

It was then that I began to understand the true values conflict underlying the gender war, and realize how deep it runs. Men are contemptible for their generosity and willingness to help people out, even when it means getting off their asses and forgoing a bit of momentary comfort. John Gray was right, we are from 2 different planets. Like so many men are, I was too stunned to react immediately but later got a severe case of the "I shoulda saids". I finally got hold of the elusive thing which I had seen at work for years but which had been too slippery to grasp. I understood that there is a certain subgroup of women who WANT to hate us and who LOVE hating us more than they love anything else. If they cannot find anything despicable about us to hate, if we manage to resist being categorized as homogeneous rapists, seducers, abandoners, molesters, incompetents, and so on ad nauseum, then they will find a way to hate us for the very qualities we value most in ourselves and in others: such as generosity and self-sacrifice. And they eschew such values for themselves, without realizing that it is precisely those values on which society is built because they are necessary to allow people to exist in close proximity and high concentrations without going to war over whose needs get met at the expense of the other. Without those values, people turn on each other rather than to each other. Which is precisely what we see growing in our society today.

It is rather tragic that the only works of Freud that the feminists seem to have latched onto were his ill-conceived comments about "clitoral versus vaginal orgasms" and about "penis envy", which some women have zealously set out to disprove with a wave of "penis hatred". Lorena Bobbit's elevation to female folk hero would have seemed to be a wave of mental illness to most earlier peoples who understood that fertility was the key to all life and that destroying part of the foundation of fertility was akin to death worship. The depth and intensity of the sexual hatred in this culture does indeed seem to indicate that, as a culture, we have indeed come to worship death over life.

Some of Freud's other works could be of so much value in providing a understanding of human dynamics which would help us shape our society with more intent in more positive directions. Insights from "Civilization and Its Discontents" points to the way in which conflicts between the social good and individual libido get worked out in the culture as a whole. His psychoanalytic theories are models of social and cultural behavior on a mass scale as well as models for the individual. In psychoanalytic terms, it seems that culturally and socially we no longer have a superego, and that the ego has been reassigned from its job of mediating conflicts between it and the infantile, selfish, and totally self-centered Id, to being the servant and method of the Id's unrestrained pursuit of immediate gratification. Our culture has certainly become neurotic as a result, if not completely psychotic.

In Myth..., you mentioned Galileo, which I believe is a particularly apt analogy for the risks of speaking out on contemporary gender issues, and one which I shall use many times in laying out some theories of human behavior and gender issues which are radically different than the prevailing ones. I usually get attacked whenever I attempt to explain these theories, invariably with the modern day version of the all inclusive indictment used by the Inquisitors to intimidate dissenting voices into silence. Every totalitarian power movement has had a term which they used to make opposition of the dogma into a crime, allowing the suppression of dissent by making dissenters into political prisoners, or executing them if they valued their beliefs and integrity more than their lives. The Inquisition used "Heretic" as the Leninists used "Counter-revolutionary" and the McCarthyists used "Communist Sympathizer" and the feminazis use "Misogynist". All these power movements fervently suppressed dissent to prevent the majority of the populace from having the freedom to choose from a marketplace of ideas. Only by keeping the majority in ignorance, can the few at the top maintain their power position which depends on the populace voluntarily accepting their rule. Noam Chomsky calls this "Keeping the Rabble in Line".

Dissident ideas are certainly dangerous to those in power: because once the natural rights and prerogatives of those in power to be in power and remain in power begin to be questioned, they usually do not remain so for very long. Whoever the power elite is at the moment, it is essential that they convince the majority of the populace that it is the "heretics" who represent the threat to them and the existing power structure that is their allies. And by far the best way to do this is to obscure the fact that those who hold the power do so, by convincing the public that it is someone else who really has it. The Inquisition used the witches, the Bolsheviks used "the bourgeoisie", the Nazis used the Jews, McCarthy used the communists, and those in power now are using men. They have duped women into believing that it is men who hold the power and have manipulated their complicity in holding the vast majority of men in that peculiar form of house arrest called marriage. An elite cadre of highly trained assassins called feminists chase down those men who manage to escape and see that they are put in prison.

I deliberately use the vague "those in power" because the power itself is diffuse and hidden. If I had to put a name to the power group it would be the nearly as vague "those in charge of the multi-national corporations." While conspiracy theories have become the favorite form of fairy tale in the 20th century; with the worldwide and history long conspiracy of men against women called "The Patriarchy" being the current favorite, replacing the "Yellow Peril", the "Jewish Threat (or "Problem"); and the "Communist Menace"; there is no conspiracy. Instead the better metaphor is that of white-water canoeing: with those on top seeking to stay there by instantly reacting to a rapidly and constantly changing set of forces and pressures.

Shoring up the whole house of cards is a complex set of false beliefs that are comforting as they are destructive. Attacking some of those beliefs not only threatens the power structure but the comfort of those who live under it as well. I seriously doubt that a book called "The Myth of Jewish Power" would have forestalled the Nazis rise to power, because that was only one of the tools which they were exploiting. After the war, the most brutal and extreme of the "Aryan Inquisitors" were brought up on charges of "War Crimes." Their defense of "only following orders" was dismissed as being behavior that was uncharacteristic of human beings on the whole, as abnormal, and that they were in full charge of their faculties when they made the decision. A couple of decades later, Stanley Milgram would prove this belief to be erroneous when he found that a majority of people are quite willing to turn their moral authority over to someone else and administer electric shocks believed to be at levels which are lethal when they are instructed to do so by someone in authority.

It is precisely this human tendency or willingness to turn their moral authority over to someone else that I think is at the root of all the terrible distress that seems to be afflicting the majority of people today. In one respect I am a conservative and traditionalist, which makes me easy to dismiss. However, when I persist long enough and assertively enough to actually be heard, people invariably realize that it is not the "traditional" values of the 1950s that I am suggesting, but the pre-enclosure values of more than 500 years ago. The task is certainly insurmountable, and may be futile, but I find tilting at windmills far more gratifying, even without results, than selling junk bonds or any other of literally thousands of useless and destructive products.

My first step is to carry to men the message that what they have been taught was power is not; and, in fact, is entrapment. The second is to try to help them remember the secret of their true power and help them understand how to use it. An essential key is to understand that the fact someone has contempt for them or one of their characteristics does not mean that they or that characteristic are contemptible. I believe that it is essential for men to reclaim their own moral authority in order to reclaim their own real power, and give away their false power, in order to be able to address the challenges facing the human race today. There are a great many so-called female or feminine (or feminist) values which are destructive and anti-life. Without their power and integrity intact, men will have no chance against the dark feminine, which many women today seem to have embraced completely.

I have begun to jokingly refer to the beginning of the 3rd millennium, CE, as the "Middle-age of Aquarius." The boomer generation has been suffering from whiplash as it has reversed itself in its rejection of the values of its parents and has spun around to embrace those values even more fervently than our parents did. And we have fallen into precisely the same traps. Conspicuous consumption has changed from a national religion to a national Jihad, a holy war against each other to see who wins the right to consume the most in the most unneeded manner. The generation right behind us has so far resisted, as much due to their lack of points of entry as any other reason, and we have berated them and called them "X" for it. You say men are becoming the suicide sex. They are killing themselves over their failure to do that which 30 years ago they thought was a bad idea. Obviously they have fallen into a trap. I do not believe it is inescapable, though there will undoubtedly be some short term discomfort involved in getting out.

First the nature of the trap must be understood. The dilemma facing so many men has been analogous to someone being told that the sun comes up in the north and that it is green in color. One does not have to have studied astrophysics to know this is plainly false, but should that person be absolutely certain in that point of view and fanatical in the need to force it upon you, detailed astrophysics is the only tool to refute the false claim. The reason that men have largely ignored the gender power debate was that they knew that the sun came up in the east and that it was yellow orange in color. Most figured that when women spent enough time out in the hot sun of "careers" they would realize that most men didn't have careers, they had JOBS: stupid, meaningless, demeaning, boring, humiliating, JOBS! And that one day women would "get it" and realize that men had, for the most part, been engaging in self-sacrifice to fulfill their roles as protector/provider and begin to cut them some slack. Men have been saying for years that "business will change women more than women will change business."

I think "Backlash", was the wake-up call for many men. "Backlash" meant that some women, the ones who believed in "Backlash", weren't going to figure it out. "Backlash" meant that there were some women having so much fun hating and blaming men that when they ran out of reasons with any legitimacy at all, they would start inventing some. "Backlash" told men that the sexual revolution was over, and that it had been lost. Time and Newsweek had been saying this for years, but there was no place for the boat-people of the sexual Vietnam to go to as refugees. There were only their own homes and families, but that is where much of the now so-called "gender war" is being fought. Still, someone needs to tell men that they don't HAVE TO keep re-enlisting at the end of every hitch. They don't have to keep jumping right back into the trap, even when the jailers push them out to make room for new political prisoners. Time and circumstances keep pushing them out, and instead of committing suicide because they are no longer in their nice comfortable trap, or spending immense time and energy finding their way back in, men need to learn how to savor their freedom and put it to good use.

The use that I am suggesting to men, and to any women who care to join them, is that they dedicate their time and energy to combating the forces driving the species to breed and consume itself to the brink of extinction. The next 100 years will be the most crucial in the story of the human race and the actions we, as a species, take will determine whether we survive or become yet one more footnote in the fossil record. During the American Revolution it was stated that a "House divided against itself" will fall. We have become an entire species divided against itself. The human race is fragmented into competing power groups and all of them are competing against all other forms of life. Our "house" will fall if it does not stop. The human race has been fruitful and multiplied and covered the earth and subdued it. Now what?

"When you are up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp." The principle now being taught in management theory of the "Boiled Frog" does much to explain how we got here. Frogs, being cold blooded creatures have no internal regulatory mechanisms for temperature: their body temperature is the same as their environment. If you put a from into hot water, it will sense the abrupt change and will jump out. However, if you put it in water at current body temperature then slowly raise the temperature, it will sit there and blissfully boil to death. Most people are being boiled to death with the pressures of meeting all the expectations of 20th century consumer lifestyle. But few are jumping out.

Men are trapped by the protector/provider role and by enclosure into working ever longer hours in an attempt to "provide" the money to purchase the consumer goods which are hawked at us every waking moment as the keys to happiness, and to "protect" their loved ones from the painful feeling of being deprived of such goods. Women are trapped by having their natural biological proclivities co-opted by the fiction of romantic love into believing that it is those goods which provide happiness, so they blame their unhappiness on not having enough which is directly due to men's failure to provide enough. Both are trapped into competing with each other for the jobs and high pay which will allow them to buy more, thinking that when they reach a certain point they will have bought enough and will suddenly become "happy". But it is like any addiction, there is never "enough", there is only "more" or "less". No one is willing to settle for "less", so everyone is trapped in the pursuit of "more".

I cannot get through to women, because my "heresy" is always dismissed by shrieks of "misogyny". There are few men who want to hear, but a few do, so I spend my time speaking to them. Once they understand their own biological needs and how they have been co-opted to fuel mass consumption they have some of the tools to avoid being boiled alive. Once they understand the way that man-hatred rigs the game so they will never get what they want and need by pursuing it in the way they have been pursuing it, they understand why they have repeatedly found themselves in such hot water. And once they change their strategies, they still might not get what they want and need but at least they can stay out of hot water.

For the past few years I have been becoming increasingly radicalized on gender issues. My confrontational style is reminiscent of the in-your-face approach of 60s radicals (including the early feminists) to whom I owe a significant ideological debt. People in my social circle have learned that speaking without thinking will usually result in a challenge to their smug presumptions. I am a living counter-example to your statement in Myth� that women cannot hear what men do not say. Women, in the vast majority of cases WILL not hear what I DO say. While I agree that more men need to speak out, and that it takes great courage to confront ( I have the scars to prove it ), I have learned that speaking out is not enough.