Earlier today we posted Stephen Baskerville: “Warren Farrell and Men Today.”, Stephen Baskerville’s Substack piece following Paul Elam’s recent interview of Warren Farrell. I agreed with Stephen’s critique of Warren Farrell. Paul Elam subsequently posted some comments on Stephen’s piece, which I thought it worth recording here:
“I have to begin by saying that I have tremendous respect, admiration, and love for Warren. Through his writing, he mentored me at a time when there were virtually no other mentors available. His work inspired my own, and I think it’s entirely reasonable to say that without Warren Farrell, I would never have become involved in men’s issues in the way that I have. For that, I will always owe him a spiritual debt that I have no way to adequately repay. Warren didn’t just change my thinking. He changed my life.
That said, I think Stephen’s observations hold considerable weight.
Warren has always placed enormous emphasis on communication as a means of resolving human conflict, particularly between men and women. And for men in reasonably functional but troubled relationships or marriages, his work remains enormously valuable. I just finished reading his *Role Mate to Soul Mate*, and while I’ve never been particularly fond of books with pop-psychology titles, that’s a minor complaint compared to the importance of the information he presents. It’s a solid, insightful, and genuinely useful book that I would recommend to any man struggling in a relationship he wants to improve.
But there’s a fundamental distinction between helping two people repair a troubled relationship and addressing the much larger legal, political, and cultural problems confronting men.
And that’s where I think Warren’s approach runs into serious trouble and can unfortunately give the impression of tone deafness.
The suggestion that men should seek couples therapy is perfectly reasonable when the problem is a dysfunctional relationship between two people who genuinely want to make things better. But it is neither a sufficient nor particularly relevant response to young men confronting what I regard as pervasive and destructive institutional and cultural misandry. These men aren’t simply struggling to communicate with women. They’re struggling to find their footing in a society whose laws, institutions, and prevailing attitudes often treat their interests as secondary, expendable, or altogether irrelevant.
Those are not problems that can be resolved on a therapist’s couch.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that Warren is acutely aware of the full spectrum of men’s issues. His knowledge of these problems is encyclopedic, and his contributions to bringing them into public consciousness are beyond dispute. Yet some of his responses to my questions seemed to fall back on therapeutic solutions that simply don’t match the nature or scale of the problems being discussed.
That disconnect surprised me. Indeed, I found it genuinely jarring coming from someone whose work I admire so deeply.
I don’t question Warren’s understanding of men’s problems, his commitment to their welfare, or the immense value of his life’s work. I question whether the solutions he continues to emphasize are adequate to the world young men are actually living in.
There is a place for teaching men how to communicate better within relationships. But we cannot counsel men out of institutional discrimination, and we cannot expect better communication to remedy a society that systematically discounts their interests.
Those problems demand something more than therapy. They demand that we confront the institutions, laws, and cultural assumptions that produce them.”
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