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Nov 23. 1996

Dear Editor,

I would like to respond to Jeanne Gallyot's comments on my Sonoma County Free Press column "Gender Wars". Ms. Gallyot does not believe Warren Farrell is a misogynist. Yes, we all know he served on the National Board of Directors of NOW. What's important is his present stand on gender issues as revealed in his book "Myth of Male Power". On page 21 of the introduction to "Myth of Male Power", Farrell says, "The powerful woman doesn't feel the effect of her secretary's miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power. Men do." By those words Farrell reveals that he sees "power" in women as sexual attractiveness. The power to turn men on is evidently more important to him than a woman's other qualities such as intelligence, competence & leadership ability. He should not presume to speak for men, for most good men would disagree. Farrell makes statements falsely claiming that women always get to choose whether or not to work, while men must (and presumably do) always work and support women (page 52). He says that women get "special rights" in the workplace because they receive disability pay for inability to work during the end of pregnancy & recovery from childbirth. He thus tries to deceive the reader by blurring the difference between disability pay and workers compensation (page 239). He contends that men suffer from women's violence as much as women suffer from violence at the hands of men (pages 261-269). He creates the impression that women mostly lie about rape and that men are the real victims because they are unjustly accused of rape (pages 309-343). Every chapter in the book is full of this kind of distortion. I also stand by my assessment of Christina Hoff Sommers. In the first chapter of her book, Sommers discusses the history of women's struggle to get the right to vote. The reader with little knowledge of history would get the impression from the chapter that it was men who kindly got the right to the ballot for women and handed it to them. If the majority of men had supported the right of women to vote, it wouldn't have taken 73 years for the 19th Amendment to pass. The rest of the book is just more of the same nonsense. There is no doubt that Sommers is an ultra conservative, even though Ms.Gallyot doesn't want to believe it. Sommers shares governing responsibility of the Womens Freedom Network with such rightwing luminaries as Jeanne Kirkpatrick (we all know who Jeanne is), Edith Kurzwell, editor of "Partisan Review", Mona Charen, columnist and TV commentator, and others whose key issues are aligned with the political right. Birds of a feather flock together. My basic disagreement with such groups as Men & Women for Gender Justice and National Coalition of Free Men is that I believe men and women are inherently more alike than we are different. We have more in common than in dispute. M&WGJ and NCFM seem to see the genders as different from each other in fundamental ways. This view makes it possible for men to view women as "other" and to justify the kind of stereotyping, scapegoating and denigration of females that we have endured for centuries.

Yours Truly, Beth Grimes