Warren Farrell - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Warren Farrell’s books, published in sixteen languages, tend to make both international news and be the subject of both praise and criticism from the political right and left, and from feminists and anti-feminists.

Early critiques in the New York Times Book Review by Larry McMurtry and John Leonard included disdain for Farrell’s use of gender neutral language in The Liberated Man. More recently, conservative and antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly labels Farrell a “feminist apologist,” though praises his research for Father and Child Reunion.

Academic feminists tend to criticize The Myth of Male Power’s thesis that, historically, societies that survived did so by persuading their sons to be disposable (Farrell gives war and work as examples). Farrell and feminists concur that men have more institutional power, but many academic feminists disagree with Farrell’s thesis that real power includes “control over one’s life” and that today women in industrialized nations have as much or more of that type of power. Others are critical of Farrell’s meta-analysis of 50 domestic violence studies in Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say that finds that male-female domestic violence is about equal.

In 2012, a new international academic journal, New Male Studies, highlighted The Myth of Male Power by making it the lead feature in two of its first issues, positioning it as a classic to the field of men’s studies.

Farrell's recent collaborations with Ken Wilber, John Gray, and Richard Bolles, have introduced his messages to more diverse and receptive audiences. Farrell's claims on gender relations have attracted the interest of English academic Rory Ridley-Duff, who has integrated Farrell's perspectives into curriculum materials, academic papers and a book and developed Attraction Theory to capture the gendering dynamics implicit in Farrell's work.