„Männer als das entsorgbare Geschlecht“

Eine Theorie von Warren Farrell in „Myth of Male Power“ (Mythos Männermacht) ist, dass Männer dazu sozialisiert werden, zur Not entsorgbar zu sein.

Er fragt sich, wie die Gesellschaften Männer dazu bringen teilweise um die gefährlichsten Aufgaben zu konkurrieren, etwa im Krieg und bei gefährlichen Arbeiten. Dabei sieht er als Mittel zu dieser Sozialisierung die „Bestechung durch Anerkennung“. Darunter fallen die Bezeichnung als „Held“ oder aber eine Beförderung, Orden oder die Liebe einer Frau als Belohnung.

Dies führt nach Warren Farrell zu einem „Paradox des Männlichen“, indem gesunde Gesellschaften auf diesem Weg ungesunde Männer produzieren.

Er widerspricht damit der feministischen These, dass wir in einem Patriarchat leben, das Regeln schafft, mit denen Männern zu Lasten von Frauen bevorzugt werden.

Als Beleg führt er die Wehrpflicht nur für Männer, den Umstand, dass bei 93% der Todesfälle im Beruf Männer betroffen sind, dass Männer den aktiven Part beim Flirten übernehmen müssen und damit auch mehr Zurückweisung riskieren, das sie häufig auf Dates zahlen müssen und auch sonst häufig von ihnen teuere Geschenke, zB Diamanten erwartet werden. Bei einer Scheidung würden nach Farrell die von Männern gemachten Regeln dafür sorgen, dass die Männer sowohl ihr Haus als auch ihre Kinder verlieren. Er verweist auch darauf, dass man gerade an der Lebenserwartung und den Suizidraten deutlich sehen kann, dass Männer Nachteile haben.

Bei Warren Farrell selbst findet sich eine Kurzzusammenfassung der wesentlichen Argumente:

Chapter 3

Are „Power,“ „Patriarchy,“ „Dominance,“ and „Sexism“ Actually Code Words for Male Disposability? P.67

• Patriarchy: „the universal political structure which privileges men at the expense of women.“ P.67

• If power is defined as control over one’s life, then myths, legends, and bible stories were often ways of getting both sexes to forfeit power. P.67

• „Hero“ comes from the Greek „ser-ow,“ from which comes our words servant, slave and protector. P.68

• Men’s focus on winning was, historically, a focus on protection–even at the expense of themselves. P.69

• Women asking males to protect them with their strength risks having that strength protect them in one instance and used against them in another. P71

• The deeper purpose of violence against men was to prevent violence against women. P.75

• When men were not needed to kill, women were less likely to select men who killed and men were less likely to kill. P.76

• Partnership models developed not because the societies were patriarchal or matriarchal, but because they were unthreatened and self-sufficient. P.77

• Male gods were the primary gods when protection was the primary need. P.77

• Whether or not the leaders were female or male, almost 100% of the troops they sacrificed in battle were male. P.78

• Men civilized women by taking care of the killing for women. P.79

• The male tragedy: Showing our love by providing takes us away from showing our love by connecting. P.82

• In Stage I, homosexuality meant sexual pleasure w/o the cost of feeding offspring, thus endangering societal continuity. P.87

• Polygyny, was a system by which the rich man, prevented a woman from being stuck with a poor man. P.88

• Christian sanctioning of polygyny takes the form of nuns actually „marrying“ Christ. P.88

• Christ’s wives would not have been celibate if polygyny’s primary purpose was the satisfaction of male sexual desires. P.89

• Historically, when women could live independently of men without starving, divorce was made legal and considered moral. P.89

• Marriage-as-sacrament was the female’s „divine right“ as long as women needed it to prevent starvation. P.90

• If boys were needed for war, the society sometimes disposed of the girls as infants and disposed of the boys in war. P.93

• In the future, with nuclear technology, choosing the killer male leads to the potential destruction of everyone. P.99

Chapter 4

The Death Professions: „My Body, Not My Choice“

• The three male-only drafts: military; unpaid bodyguard; hazardous jobs P.106

• When not legally drafted, men feel psychologically drafted. P.106

• „Glass ceiling“: the invisible barrier keeping women out of jobs with the most pay. „Glass cellar“: the invisible barrier keeping men in jobs with the most hazards. P.107

• Young men are 24 times as likely to be killed in farm labor as are young women. P.110

• When a field worker is radicalized, he is taught to see the classism but remains blind to the sexism. P.111

• We call women who are nurses „helping professionals“ but not police „saving professionals.“ P.116

• While 24 out of the 25 worst jobs are male jobs many of the lowest-paid jobs are predominantly occupied by women. P.117

• The United States has only one job safety inspector for every six fish and game inspectors. P.106

• When women complained they were being sexually harassed, the government radically expanded its protection of women by expanding its prosecution of men. P.121

• Men were left unprotected from premature death while women were protected from premature flirtation. P.121

• The over-protection of women and the under-protection of men leads to discrimination against hiring women. P.122

Chapter 5: Hero or War Slave?: The Armed Prostitute

• Understanding men requires understanding men’s relationship to the Three Ws: Women, Work, and War. P.123

• Before men can vote, they have the obligation to protect that right; women receive the right to vote without the obligation to protect that right. P.123

• The psychological draft of boys begins before, and continues after, the legal draft of boys. P.123

• Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher: when women led, it was still men left dead; equality was at the top–not at the bottom. P.125

• Wars will not end via female leaders but when men’s lives are no more disposable than women’s. p.126

• Increasing women’s military combat options will be hailed as an advance in equality, but a true advance would require women to enter combat just as men are. P.127

• Equality involves equal options and equal obligations. P.127

• In Panama and Operation Desert Storm combined, men’s risk of dying was three times greater than women’s. P.130

• Women constitute 11.7% of the total military, but 12.6% of the officers. P.139

• Both sexes in the Persian Gulf received $110 per month extra combat pay— equal pay despite unequal risks. P.130

• If a fetus has a „right to life,“ but eighteen years later has an „obligation to death,“ which sex is it? P.130

• Harassment and hazing are prerequisites to combat training in the „men’s army“; but in the „women’s army,“ they can be protested. P.132

• The Pregnant Navy Syndrome: When women on Navy ships become pregnant during work-up for deployment. P.132

• Different standards for women allows them to see themselves as more innocent and moral than men. P.135

• Depriving fathers and sons of their right to live because of their sex is the greatest possible violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. P.136

• The measure of a country’s emancipation: the degree to which it frees men from the obligation to protect women and socializes women to equally protect men. P.136

• When a country goes to war, all the citizens of that country are equally innocent and equally guilty. P.142

• Men will not love themselves nor will women love men as long as the killer-protector role is disproportionately the role of the male. P.144

• War stories“ are what men tell to reframe their fear. P.144

• More Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the war ended than were killed in the Vietnam War itself. P145

• The adults of the 1990s are a generation of men criticized for what they were obligated to do by a generation of women privileged enough to escape the obligation. P.155

Chapter 6 The Suicide Sex:

If Men Have the Power, Why Do They Commit Suicide More? P.164

• Boys commit more suicide as their sex roles become apparent. P.165

• Perform, pursue and pay: what boys learn they must do to earn equality with girls‘ love. P.166

• The teenage female has less demand to perform and more resources to attract love. Her body and mind are more genetic gifts. P.166

• A teenage boy’s socialization is the demand to perform without the resources to perform. P.167

• Boys see no alternative to performing; each ritual highlights his inadequacy amid his search for identity; without permission to speak with his peers of his fears, his isolation and self-doubt become his suicide. P.167

• The world increasingly allows girls to be whoever they wish to be– homemaker, mother, secretary, executive. P.167

• It’s the loss of love that devastates men. P.169

• We care for grieving women and isolate grieving men, reinforcing the atmosphere for male suicide. P.170

• Men commit suicide more often when they are unemployed or lose their life savings, so by killing himself, he is „killing the burden,“ making his suicide an act of love. P.171

• Women attempt suicide more often because they want to become the priority of those they love rather than always prioritizing them. P.171

• Unemployment to a man is the psychological equivalent of rape to a woman. P. 172

• Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being „given up for a younger woman“ is for a woman. P.174

• Women do not experience more depression, they report more depression. P.176

• The more successful the man is in the workplace, the more his depression must be repressed, not expressed. P.178

• We need to hear when men communicate rather than deny they are communicating because they do it imperfectly, and then deny they suffer because they don’t communicate. P.179

 Chapter 7 Why Do Women Live Longer? P.180

• Since stress has become a key factor, men have died so much sooner than women. P.182

• It was an almost all-female club that took the first bus from the Industrial Revolution to the Fulfillment Revolution. P.183

• Industrialization made performing away from home the male role. P.183

• Options allow a woman to tailor her role to her personality, but if a man expects to provide well, he expects to wear a suit, not to wear what suits him. P.183

• Industrialization has broadened women’s options and deepened men’s mold. P.184

• The Put-Down Trade is our adolescent son’s rehearsal for taking criticism as an adult. P.183

• When demands to perform outpace the resources to perform, men become the disposable sex. P.187

• No group of men is more a victim of the demands to perform without the resources to perform than the black boy and his dad. P.187

• While the black male lives nine fewer years than the black female, we hear more about the double jeopardy of racism and sexism encountered by the black female. P.187

• There is no governmental agency focusing on health which spends as much on men’s health as on women’s health. P.189

• 85% of the NIH research budget is spent on non-gender-specific health issues (or basic science); 10% on women’s health; 5% on men’s health. P.189

• We do more research on men in prison, in the military, and in general than on women for the same reasons we do more research on rats than we do on humans. P.189

• Almost three-quarters of women who die of heart attacks are 75 or older; by this time, the average man has been dead for three years. P.191

• Breast cancer receives over 600% more funding than prostate cancer despite men being almost as likely to die from prostate cancer. P193

• We keep ourselves open to new ways of understanding (and helping) women, but fail to use the same mindset to better understand (and help) men. P.197

Chapter 8: The Insanity Track

• 87% of wives of vice-presidents and above work inside, not outside the home. P.199

• Conversely, almost all the husbands of female executives work full time outside the home. P.199

• The married male executive has a wife who is a financial burden. A married female executive has a husband who is a financial buffer. P.199

• His profession is more an obligation while hers is more an opportunity. P.199

• Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women. P.206

• When homeless men lost their ability to protect, they also lost everyone they loved and joined an almost all-male club on the street. P.209

• The entrance of females, flexible work hours, and less training made „career track“ compatible with „sanity track.“P.212

Chapter 9. Violence Against Whom?… P.214

• Forcible rape constitutes less than 6% of all violent crimes; violent crimes of which men are the primary victims constitute the remaining 94%. P.214

• Wives report that they were more likely to assault their husbands than their husbands were to assault them. P.214

• Blacks are six times more likely than whites to be victims of homicides. P214

• We see this last „Item“ as a reflection of black powerlessness; but not men’s greater likelihood of being victims of violence as a reflection of male powerlessness. P215

• Blacks do not commit proportionately more crimes than whites because blacks have more power. P.215

• Most of us would think of girl children as the victim of sexual abuse about nine out of ten times. Reality: it is one boy to 1.7 girls. P.217

• We overlook men who need help because historically woman-as-victim attracts men; man-as-victim repulses women. P.217

• When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision. P.221

• Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant’s stress and prevents infection and blood clots. P.221

• The average American child watches over 40,000 people killed on TV prior to high school graduation… 97% are men. P.223

• We don’t call the westerns or war movies „violence against men“–we call them „entertainment.“ P.223

• Women-in-jeopardy movies are modern-day training films teaching women to select the best protectors while weeding out the rest. P.225

• And we call the woman „victim“ and the man „powerful.“ P.226

• Movies in the 90’s left us feeling that the only man worth preserving is the man who emerges as he is dying. P.227

• The sexist perception that violence by anyone against only women is anti-woman while violence by a woman against only men is just generic violence creates a political demand for laws that are even more protective of women. P.228

Chapter 10

If We Cared As Much About Saving Males As Saving Whales, Then…. p.229

• Men are not only women’s unpaid bodyguards, they actually pay to be a woman’s bodyguard. P. 230

• Women will risk their lives to protect children, but rarely risk their lives to protect an adult man. P.230

• One grand fallacy of the women’s movement: Expecting work to mean „power“ and „self-fulfillment.“ P.232

• Men know employers pay to use their body during work in exchange for freeing their body after work. P.232

• Most men don’t even think about the freedom to look within until after their families are economically secure. P.233

• If he’s been able to satisfy his family enough to look within, he fears discovering the prostitute he has become in the process of providing for others. P.233

• Conservatives justify the protection of women and the disposability of men by calling it sex roles. P.234

• Liberals call it sexism if it hurts women, but blame men if it hurts men. P.234

• The underlying justification is the unquestioned assumption of woman-as-victim. P.234

Ich finde an dem Buch interessant, dass es die Betrachtung gegen über der feministischen Sichtweise um 180 Grad dreht. Zwar würde auch der Feminismus in Teilen anführen, dass der Mann sich im Patriarchat selbst schadet, er unterschlägt aber die Betrachtung, nach der viele Regeln eben gerade zum Nutzen der Frau angelegt sind, und nicht zu deren Unterdrückung. Das finde ich eine sehr interessante Betrachtungsweise.

Warren Farrells Betrachtung ist allerdings ebenfalls sehr soziologisch. Der Wunsch nach Status und Ruhm, nach Ansehen in der Gesellschaft, nach Messung der eigenen Fähigkeiten im Wettbewerb, dürfte auch aus biologischen Gründen in vielen Männern stark ausgeprägt gewesen sein. Ebenso wie viele Frauen Status aus biologischen Gründen attraktiv finden werden. Das Grundproblem dürfte also schwieriger zu beseitigen sein als man denkt.