Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Until I began contemplating this review, I had never considered warning my readers about the content of my work despite my specialization and frequent engagement with gender, sex and sexuality. Indeed, I have been an anti-censorship advocate and I have written many times in defence of books that school boards were considering removing. Yet, I cannot cover Warren Farrell's "debate" with Daniel Sterba adequately without revealing the depth of the reductive, offensive and juvenile approach offered in the section written by Farrell and which claims to demonstrate the ways in which feminism discriminates against men. Simply put, how do I present it without presenting it? I feel the need to do more than point out that as is his norm, Farrell never mentions which (version of) feminism discriminates against men. As well, I cannot honestly treat the book without making several admissions of my own positioning. First, people who write as Farrell does make my job almost impossible, and I am certain, have cost me the opportunity for serious consideration when I have applied for tenure stream jobs in Gender Studies. Understandably, the first reaction to any male applicant has to be one of suspicion given the fraught histories of Gender Studies and of Warren Farrell. I do recall that at the first conference I attended which was devoted entirely to masculinities, the final session was on things men might appropriate from feminism and use against feminism. Even so, I believe that my effort to distance myself from "masculists" has in the end made me a better scholar; although the end hardly justifies the means and should not really be the metric within a field so dedicated to the eradication of such measures. I do fear that in the current milieu, there is actually greater acceptance for positions which suggest that feminism does discriminate against men and there is a willingness to tolerate and possibly to take seriously the kind of patently offensive material published in the first half of the Oxford UP title I am reviewing here (I also should admit that of the book reps with whom I have dealt, I probably liked my Oxford rep the best, which is too bad, because I am going to consider seriously my future dealings with them).
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc. "On Warren Farrell and James P. Sterba's Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/37