Official Statement from Warren Farrell on Pro-incest Accusations
Scott Garman
about the accusations that you often hear in these groups against him,
that he supported incest or did research to support incest. These claims
are false, and his explanation is listed verbatim below. I have received
permission to post this message in public newsgroups and e-mail lists, so
please don't let anyone get away with these false accusations again - here
are the facts!:
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 16:11:46 -0700
From: wfar...@home.com
To: Scott Garman <sc...@mensactivism.org>
Subject: Re: Response from Warren....
Dear Scott,
Thanks for writing to me directly about Liz Kates' accusations. I
appreciate the opportunity to separate the truth from the fiction.
A few years ago I informed Liz Kates that the 1977 article in Penthouse
about incest had misquoted me - that the word "generally" had been
mistranscribed as "genitally." Nevertheless, Kates and a woman named Trish
Wilson continue to publicize the misquote. I am seeking legal action. They
have been making similar accusations of many other men's issues; their
most pointed attacks are on men working on fathers' issues ("they all just
want to molest their children").
If you'd like more detail, I'll start with some highlights.
I have never been pro-incest. (Obviously.) I did do a study about incest.
I conducted it in the '70s after Random House published my first book, The
Liberated Man, a pro-feminist book based on my years on the Board of
N.O.W. in New York City. I never published the findings on incest despite
having a contract with Bantam books to do so in book form. As a result,
the topic of incest is not the subject of any of my writing. All five of
my books -- as well as my experiential workshops -- are attempts to get
both sexes to understand the other. (The bad news is that this is not
likely to be achieved in my lifetime. The good news is I guess I'll always
be fully employed!) Their tables of contents are all available on
www.warrenfarrell.com. Incest is not a topic in any of them.
Now, some more detail...
I refrained from publishing the incest findings because I feared that what
I found would be distorted and misused. (It's a bit ironic that it still
is, even though I did not publish it!) I allowed myself the one interview
with Penthouse to get a sense of whether the message would be distorted in
print, or after print, or both. When I saw that the answer was both, I
gave up a multi-year research effort. Obviously this cost me considerably.
You may wish to know my motivation for undertaking the incest study. It
evolved from reading in Ms. and other sources in the early '70s that
incest was like terminal cancer. This attitude seemed to me to hold out no
hope for a cure. I wondered whether therapists, by seeing the most
difficult cases, were creating this conclusion in the same way we had
about homosexuality being a disease by looking largely at a patient
population that was unhappy. I felt that if a non-patient population had a
larger variety of experiences, we might have information to better help
people who were traumatized.
So I put ads in papers soliciting anonymous over-the-phone intensive
interviews from people experiencing any form of incest, from cousin-cousin
and brother-sister to father-daughter and mother-son, asking them to rank
their experience as positive, negative or mixed. I created lie detector
tests that I built into the interviews. Some of the ads I placed solicited
experiences perceived either as positive or negative; other ads solicited
only positive (since the negative ones were obviously more easily
attainable), until I attained enough people who perceived their
relationship as positive to have numbers large enough to make comparisons
to the negative.
The focus of the book was broadening the base of therapeutic options for
interventions that could reverse trauma. The Kinsey Institute ranked it as
the best and most responsible study ever done on the subject. However, in
the process of always being asked about the positive experiences, the
deeper purpose of the study often got lost. I saw this happen in the
Penthouse interview, and sometimes I contributed to the process by not
being media savvy enough. Bottom line, I felt that publishing the material
might do more harm than good, so I did not publish it.
If you have any questions, please feel free to call, fax, or email me any
time. I am at (H/O) 760-753-5000; (Fax) 760-753-2436; and
wfar...@home.com.
Sincerely,
Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
Tom Campbell
Thanks for posting that. Anyone who has read Warren Farrell's books
knows that he makes logical arguments against feminism that are backed
up with facts.
What else can the feminists do to discredit him except create libelous
falsehoods about his ideas? Certainly they won't get very far by
debating the issues with him.
--
Tom Campbell
"The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism"
-Sir William Osler
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