‘New Sexism’: Men Cry Foul at Male Jokes

Women may laugh at a card that reads “If men are God’s gift to women, then God must really love gag gifts,” or at notepaper that says “Men have only two faults: Everything they say and everything they do.” But men are not amused, said San Diego-area psychotherapist Warren Farrell.

In fact, he said, a growing industry of books, magazine articles, cartoons, greeting cards and advertisements that rebuke and ridicule men is top-selling evidence of a dangerous “new sexism.”

Worse than merely fostering male backlash to what many men see as the excesses of the women’s movement, Farrell charged at a press conference here last week that this surging new sexism “creates after a while a life experience” that further alienates the sexes.

To further illustrate his position, Farrell flashed a slide of a 1983 book, “No Good Men,” by Genevieve Richardson. Never mind the patently impossible notion of a book called “No Good Women,” he said, “Can you imagine a book called ‘No Good Blacks’ or ‘No Good Jews’?”

Monitoring the Male Image

He then indicated a display table at the back of the room. “Honey, breaking off a relationship is like eating Thanksgiving leftovers,” a grandmotherly type advised on one greeting card. “You’re better off when the turkey’s gone.”

Farrell was joined at the press conference by Fred Hayward, head of a Sacramento-based organization called Men’s Rights Inc., that for three years has undertaken a “media watch” to monitor the image of men.

“What we found in looking over approximately 1,000 advertisements, whenever there was a male/female relationship, if one of them was incompetent, 100% of the time it was the male,” Hayward said. In short, he said, “100% of the jerks were male.”

His research suggests that “we seem to have made a commitment as a society to view everything from the female perspective,” Hayward said. “I think that is the new sexism.”

Farrell, author of “The Liberated Male” and, most recently, of “Why Men Are the Way They Are,” goes so far as to label the trend “women’s soft pornography,” contending that the anger and vitriol he sees aimed at men actually reflect objectification of men by women that stems from disappointment and feelings of rejection. He takes particular exception to the recently published “Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress,” the last volume of Shere Hite’s trilogy about love and sexuality.

“The Hite Report”--or rather, as he often calls it, “The Hate Report”--”took the new sexism to its quintessential level,” Farrell said. No publisher, this specialist in relationships between men and women said, would consider a male counterpart to Hite’s latest book “worthy of publication.”

Hite, reached by telephone at her apartment here, refused to comment.

But social pendulums are bound to swing back and forth, said Los Angeles counseling therapist Barbara De Angelis. “I think there is a new sexism, and I think it’s a natural reaction,” De Angelis, author of “How To Make Love All the Time,” said in an interview. “There’s obviously a backlash happening. Whenever anything goes to an extreme, that’s going to happen.”

Using his own “personal odyssey” as a “metaphor” for the new sexism, Farrell drew a complicated picture that showed the contemporary woman expecting male success with the option to work in her own profession, the option to stay home with children or a combination of both. By contrast, Farrell said men today feel pressured to be financially successful before women will even look at them.

“You don’t want his clothes to be taken off unless he’s a star,” Farrell said. Sensitivity comes in the persona of what Farrell calls “the Alan Alda Syndrome”: that is, “a man can be sensitive and caring if he comes in the package of being a success first.”

His options are limited, Farrell said of the man trapped by this new sexism. “He can work full-time, he can work full-time, or he can work full-time,” he said.

‘Jerk Objects’

Angered by what they see as raging male inadequacies, women turn men into “jerk objects,” Farrell added, much as men who fear sexual rejection turn females into pornographic sex objects. Nowhere is this pattern more clear, Farrell said, than in the cornucopia of best-selling “self-improvement” books targeted at women.

His slide show mimicked, for example, the cover of a best-selling book by Stephanie Brush called “Men: An Owner’s Manual.” Farrell’s parody depicted a book cover called “Blacks: An Owner’s Manual.” Dryly, Farrell said, “Someone might even think of that as racist.”

“These books begin to become a formula,” Farrell said of a list that included such huge-selling titles as “Smart Women, Foolish Choices,” “The Peter Pan Syndrome” and “Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.”

“Fitting that formula makes the best-seller list,” Farrell said. “Always the man must have something bad about him, and the woman must have something good about her.”

That recipe riled Steven Carter, a New York writer whose most recent book, about male “commitmentphobes,” is called “Men Who Can’t Love.” As proof that he has “been on both sides,” Carter pointed out that “many years ago” he wrote a now-out-of-print book titled “What Every Man Should Know About the New Woman.”

“I personally resent being lumped in along with all these other books and saying ‘these aggravate the problem,’ ” Carter said in an interview.

“I really don’t feel that I did point a finger at men,” said Carter. “I am not creating a new problem, and I don’t think these things, these cartoons and greeting cards and such, create problems. They reflect problems that already exist.

“Let’s face it, the whole arena of interpersonal relationships has become quite impossible,” Carter said, adding “as a postscript” that “I think women really would read a book called ‘Women Who Can’t Love.’

“I certainly do understand when someone says that everything is so anti-male that it’s unfair,” he went on. “But you can’t mask the male side, and the male side can be pretty awful. There’s a lot of confusion and anger on both sides, but to say all men are getting a bad rap, I just can’t buy it. I know of so many men who deserve that rap.”

Among Farrell’s prime examples of the new sexism are cartoons and greeting cards that poke wicked fun at men. “Now there are whole card divisions, all devoted to putting down men,” he said.

Hard to Sympathize

In Chicago, cartoonist Nicole Hollander, whose drawings have also graced a successful line of greeting cards, said she found it hard to be sympathetic with the point of view of Farrell and others who complain about the new sexism.

“Oh, God, my heart is breaking for these guys,” Hollander, author most recently of “Never Take Your Cat to a Salad Bar,” said in a telephone interview. Her voice turned ironic. “You know, they’ve been good to us for so long, and this is how we repay them.”

The problem, Hollander said, is that “men have been taking themselves too seriously. They wanted women to be grateful when they called themselves feminist men, and when we weren’t eternally grateful, they became angry. Their feelings are hurt, and we’re terribly sorry.”

Besides, she said, “Women have been portrayed negatively for years in jokes and things, and I think it’s their turn for a while.

“Be patient, guys,” Hollander advised. “Just relax. Loosen up and take it lightly.”

This was roughly the same view offered by the author of “No Good Men,” a volume Farrell hails as the very personification of the new sexism. Reached at home in Venice author Genevieve Richardson turned out to be a man named Rick Detorie. The book, he said, about women’s pet peeves about men, was never intended to be taken seriously, not for a moment.

“It was something designed to give people, women especially, a laugh,” Detorie said.

Then he added, “It was a joke, Warren. It’s a joke, lighten up!”

Because the vast majority of greeting-card-style humor books are bought by women, Detorie acknowledged he quickly abandoned thoughts of a companion volume called “No Good Women.” Still, he said, women have had their share of serving as the brunt of male humor, too.

“All the old comedians, people like Henny Youngman, ‘Take my wife, please,’ ” Detorie said. “They’re always wife-bashing. And look at all the jokes about women drivers.”

Men’s Rights organizer Hayward, however, maintained that “in the last 10 years, anyway,” most humor has portrayed men as victims. Even a sad sack character like Ralph Kramden of the old television show “The Honeymooners” was little more than a boob, Hayward sugg1702065253never actually hit her,” Hayward said.

Maybe it is humor that will end the whole debate, writer/therapist De Angelis said from her home in Los Angeles. Book titles that combine the words “men” and “hate” are inflammatory, she said, often to the detriment of substance that may lurk between the covers.

“What bothers me is that women categorizing men is exactly what men have done to women, and they hate that,” she said. “The point is, if we don’t learn to work together, we’re going to have this mass culture of single people.”

So why not chuckle at the absurdity of it all, De Angelis asked. Why not borrow from the recent U.S.-Soviet summit talks and apply a little “peace consciousness” to the chasm between the sexes?

“I think we have to do this with a little bit of humor and a lot of diplomacy,” she said. “We have to sit down together and say, ‘Aren’t we silly, all of us?’ ”