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(30) Dr Warren Farrell Critiques President Joe Biden’s New Gender Policy Council
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Caring for men and boys. This episode focusses again on the work of Dr Warren Farrell; it’s based on the first part of a Jan Jekielek ‘Thought Leaders’ podcast interview where Farrell exposes the holes in the new Gender Policy Council established recently by President Biden. A link to this interview is in the episode notes.
An of course, there’s another ‘Good Guy of the Week’. Buckshot Smith, age 91, definitely the oldest serving police officer in Camden, New Jersey, and probably the oldest serving police officer in the United States. His story will delight you.
Dr Warren Farrell Critiques President Joe Biden’s New Gender Policy Council
This episode focusses again on the work of Dr Warren Farrell; it’s based on the first part of a Jan Jekielek interview where Farrell discusses the subject of President Biden’s New Gender Policy Council. A link to this interview is in the episode notes.
I introduced Dr Farrell fairly comprehensively in my last episode so suffice it here to say, he has been a leading light on the subject of gender issues since the 1960s.
Jekeliek is a reporter for the Epoch times; he is interviewing Dr Farrell in his ‘American Thought Leaders’ podcast series. There’s a link in the notes.
At the beginning of this interview Farrell tells Jekeliek that he is critical of President Joe Biden’s new White House Gender Policy Council, which was established by executive order and announced on National Women’s Day, March 8th 2021.
I went onto the Whitehouse.gov website to research this new initiative; I read that ‘each member of the new Council will appoint a senior member in their respective teams to execute an agency-wide plan for addressing gender equity and equality’, so far so good; I read on…then it is stated, ‘this senior person will focus on how policies disproportionately create or maintain barriers for women and girls, particularly women and girls of colour’.
Farrell points out that the Council commits itself to focus only on the problems faced by females, completely ignoring the problems faced by men and boys, and in particular, ignoring the problem of absent fatherhood; further he says, the Council neglects the entire black male population.
This is concerning he says because, if you go to any city and look at the homeless population, a very high percentage will be black males and in the prison population, a very high percentage will be black males.
Farrell says, the black male population are not committing crime because they are black, rather it is because they are fatherless; he continues, 25 percent of the black male population were raised in fatherless families and were what he calls ‘dad deprived.’ It was this proportion of the black population that was committing the crimes, selling drugs and joining gangs.
Farrell goes on to tell Jekeliek that, since the Moynihan Report came out in 1965, the percentage of Caucasian children who are raised without dad involvement has gone up from 25 percent to 32 percent, an increase of 7%; however, in the black population, fatherlessness has doubled what it was then, rising from 25 percent to 50 percent.
These two groups of people that President Biden is leaving out are clearly very significant groups indeed.
Farrell was shocked he said that this man who talks about unity, diversity, inclusion and equity, could leave out boys and men, in both the black community, the white community, the Hispanic community, and also in the LGBTQ community. It appears that, he says, if you are a black or Caucasian male, you will not be a focus for policy development by this Council, even if you are an LGBTQ black or Caucasian male.
When Farrell started the research for his book, ‘The Boy Crisis,’ he assumed the problems for men and boys were mainly in the United States. He was surprised to find out from United Nations studies that in all of the 53 largest developed nations, boys were falling behind girls in every academic subject; they were especially falling behind in reading and writing; of all the academic subjects, reading and writing performance are the two biggest predictors of success or failure.
Next, he began to look at why the boys were doing badly in school. The consequences of which he found carried on way beyond school. Farrell saw that boys were far more likely to drop out of school, and that those boys who dropped out of school were more than 20 percent more likely to be unemployed in their 20s, which is five times the normal pre-COVID unemployment rate.
Next, he looked at suicide rates; he found that when boys and girls at age 9, they commit suicide very rarely and in equal numbers; between the ages of 10 and 14, boys committed suicide twice as often as girls; between the ages of 15 and 19, they committed suicide four times as often as girls and between the ages of 20 and 25, they committed suicide five times as often as girls.
Farrell eventually found out that the single biggest predictor of suicide was being raised without a dad.
Then he looked at crime and prisons. When he ran for governor some years ago, he’d spoken with prison populations and one of the questions he would regularly ask was “how many of you were raised with an actively involved father?” Usually, about three or four percent of prisoners’ hands went up; but when he asked, “how many of you were raised with minimal or no father involvement?” a sea of hands were raised.
He would talk with the male prisoners about the positive contributions that fathers make in the parenting process, like their enforcement of boundaries that leads to the ability to postpone gratification; like roughhousing with their children that produces intimacy and empathy as well as the ability to be assertive rather than aggressive.
Hugely muscled, tattooed prisoners, with rings in their ears came up to Farrell afterwards and asked, “can I talk to you for a moment?” There would be tears in their eyes as they said things like “I thought I was always a waste. I thought I just deserved to spend my life in prison”; then they would say, “for the first time in my life, I’m feeling needed and now I feel like I really need to get out of prison, get back to my children, and help them have the skill sets so they don’t make the same mistakes as me.”
While Farrell doesn’t say this in his interview, I think those prisoners would also have received a compassionate and empathic explanation of why they had landed in prison; that they may have come to see themselves in a new light, not as an intrinsically bad person, but as a dad-deprived person, lacking the important positive input that dads provide so well.
Farrell told Jekeliek that he began to see positive benefits for a man when you tell him that he is needed. During every World War, men were told they were needed, and they came forward, but, Farrell says, we’re not telling men today that they’re needed. Instead, we’re telling them that they’re full of male privilege, they’re oppressors, they’re part of the patriarchy, and that the future is female.
I researched that phrase, ‘the future is female’ and found that it was first used in the 1970’s, on a T-shirt designed by a New York, feminist bookstore; the T-shirt was revived in 2015, when it was worn by celebrities and feminists alike; and most recently, when she addressed the MAKERs conference in 2017, Hilary Clinton told women to “dare greatly, lead boldly, break glass ceilings” and that ”the future is female.”
Farrell says, if a 14 or 15-year-old boy is told ‘the future is female’, this doesn’t make him feel inspired to be involved in the world; I would say that any male, regardless of age, may feel discouraged hearing this message; further Farrell says that if you tell him that there’s no need for fathers, that fathers are all jerks, this does not inspire him to be an involved dad.
In conclusion to this episode, by creating ‘a council for gender policy’ rather than ‘a council for women’, Farrell had thought that Biden seemed to be heeding Betty Friedan's warning in her book, ‘The Second Stage’; in her book she’d warned that ‘the liberation of women will plateau if attention to men's issues does not follow’.
I checked out Friedan’s warning; she cautioned the women’s movement against dissolving into factionalism, which is a situation where a group forms within a larger group, especially one with slightly different ideas from the main group; she also cautioned against male-bashing, and a preoccupation with sexual and identity politics rather than bottom-line political and economic inequalities; she argued that once the initial phases of identifying and working against political and economic injustices was achieved, the women’s movement should focus on working with men to create private and public arrangements that offer men, women and children the fullest lives possible.
Finally, I really welcome Farrell’s and Friedan’s ideas about the preservation and welfare of ‘the family’; while I appreciate the many different ways that a family may be constituted today, I have a sense that the traditional form of the family may not be valued as highly today as other forms. If you have time, please Google images of Parents magazine covers; I had to swipe through many covers with non-traditional families on them; then I found an issue with two dads on the cover, two gay dads. As I said, I respect all forms of the family, but I was shocked to see how the covers mirrored exactly the theme that Warren Farrell is so concerned about, that of absentee fathers.
Good Guy of the Week
LC Smith, known locally as ‘Buckshot Smith’ is a 91-year-old police officer, he’s the oldest police officer still working in Arkansas and, believes that he may be the oldest police office still working in all of America.
He was born and raised in Camden, Arkansas and has lived there all his life. He has wanted to be a police officer ever since he was a little boy.
He was too old he said, to apply at the time when minorities began to be accepted as state troopers in Arkansas, so took his first police work at Ouachita County Sheriff's Office instead.
His philosophy has always been trying to be fair with everyone and he’s taken more people home than he’s taken to jail. For example, he says, “with people who are drunk, my thing is that if you take a kid home to their parents, 90 percent of the time that will work and they will learn their lesson”.
At the beginning of his career he said, “I would do a lot of things other police officers wouldn't do so that I could keep the department rolling”; he would lead by example and wouldn't tell anybody to do anything that he wouldn't do himself.
In 2012, he retired; he spent five months in retirement, and he said those months were terrible. He doesn’t fish or hunt, so he said he didn't really have anything to do. Thankfully, the Camden Police Department said that Buckshot had too much wisdom and knowledge to retire and asked him to join them, so he did. “I just like police work” he said, “and I love to help people”.
He was 82 when he started with the Camden Police Department, and currently he’s the neighbourhood watch coordinator.
Buckshot Smith has been in law enforcement for 56 and a half years and even now, he works four or five days a week, from 7am to 3pm. He says, “the police department in Camden is full of good people and I often tell the younger police officers how to keep their job here”.
The 91 years old, soon to be 92 says, “I don't have family left, it's only me out of eight of us left. My life now is going to work, to my local church, where I'm a deacon and going to see my girlfriend, Ora. She and I have been dating for about five years, but I've known her all my life.
I tell all the young guys that a gun and a badge don't make a police officer, you've got to want to do it. I feel good about spending my life as a police officer. It's what I always wanted to do, and I'll be a police officer until the good Lord says it's time for me to go.
Jan Jekeliek and Dr Warren Farrell interview: Myth of Male Privilege
The White House Gender Policy Council: A Message from the Co-Chairs
American Thought Leaders podcast
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/american-thought-leaders/
Dr Warren Farrell, The Boy Crisis
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N4UAA8I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Good Guy of the Week, ‘Buckshot’ Smith
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/arkansas-police-officer-buckshot-smith-on-patrol-at-91-sfbjk25rf