Warren Farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages.

They include Do Award winning international best sellers, Why Men Are the Way They Are, Plus the Myth of Male Power.

Warren is being chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.

He is currently the chair of the commission to create a White House counsel on boys and men.

He's the only man in the U.

S to have Bean elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women Now in New York City.

Dr.

Ferrell has appeared repeatedly on Oprah Today and Good Morning America and has been the subject of features on 2020 in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, People Parade and The New York Times.

His co author of his newest book is Dr John Grey, the author of Men Are From Mars.

Women Are From Venus.

Once Again, this is the book We're gonna talk not only about the book today, the new one the boy crisis, but also about Dr Farrell's career and his goals and his aims and all of that.

And so I'd like to introduce everyone to Dr Warren Farrell and ask him to tell us what he's up to and why.

Well, I guess what I'm up to.

It sort of the evolution of maybe all that time since 1969 when the women's movement surfaced.

I was very interested in it and felt that women really needed to be able to be equally respected and enter the workplace and have options open.

And I was upset that women were not playing sports to the degree that I felt that was creating the benefits to them of sports.

And so I started articulating this and started talking to my doctoral dissertation advisers about doing this in their first reaction was or in the woman's movement is just a fad.

And I said, I don't think so.

I think this is the beginning of the change of of gender roles from both men and for women, and so I we'll talk with him about that eventually convinced them that I could change my dissertation, and that led me to being ah, seen by and now as someone who was a man who was receptive at a time that the feminist movement was getting a lot of accusations of being man haters.

And so I think I served.

The purpose of here is who here is a man of heels by flesh man who advocates.

But we're advocating here.

Get up and say what we're saying.

It's gonna be harder to call you a man hater.

And so the I started doing that and then ended up speaking all around the world on women's issues and the value of of women being secure enough and competent enough to I'll be able to share the bread winning burdens that men handle on DDE.

That was my focus for until the mid seventies.

In the mid seventies, I began to see that the feminist movement had made a great deal of progress and was, everyone was sort of getting on board who was in at least in the sort of middle class, above and educated.

And so that was.

But it was also a huge number of divorces occurring.

And so I began to say it's important for the Children to have both parents after divorce and Betty for Dad and Gloria Steinem and a woman named Karen to Crow agreed with me.

But oh, now the board and I was on the board of now at that time had gotten elected as a result of my advocacy to the board of now.

And my fellow, um, and female co workers on the board of now said we were in a dilemma here.

And the dilemma is that women are writing us, saying they're gonna withdraw from now if they don't have the option to determine what happens with the Children after divorce and wait.

We don't want to lose now membership because it's not only important for family purposes, but for all the other agendas we have.

And so I said, Well, the important thing is not women, his rights or men's rights.

The important thing is knowing what's best for the Children.

And they said Yes, Warren, Great theory.

But we really need to focus on empowering women of a broad spectrum.

And so they ended up all voting in terms of giving women the option to be fully involved with the Children or not, depending on under the guise that women know the best know the Children the best in there for they know what's best for the Children.

And so now when I began to have a significant amount of tension over that point, and many for Dan and Glorious Item didn't weigh in.

They they weren't on the board of now and then all the other boards of nows around the country began to go the same way that the New York City now it and thats so that led to my disengagement.

Onda.

Also, I started forming hundreds of men's groups, one of which, I think, you know, it was joined by John Lennon, and that was that had a big impact on both the people in the groups that I began to see what men's pain waas.

And so I began to articulate men's pain in as well as women's pain in my my presentations and when I was Onley articulating women's pain and women's challenges, I would, oh able almost always get standing ovations and maybe a knave ridge of three invitations for a new speaking engagement, and that was helping me live financially very well.

But then when I started to integrate the perspectives and feelings of men from the men's groups, there was a lot of I N C list innovations.

Why not?

Why not?

What's right is for new speaking engagements went from 3 to 2 to one and then eventually to zero.

Well, it seems, it seems self evident in some sense that if you're articulating truthfully and carefully, what would be good for either sex.

In some sense, you have to be articulating what would be good for both.

And unless you view the battle of unless you view reality as a battleground between the sexes and and as a zero sum game, we can't have an intelligent conversation about what's good for women or what's good for men.

We have to have a conversation about what's good for men and men and women and women and men and women.

And so why do you think?

What was your sense of why it was when you started to raise these other issues that you were that you were emitting immediately unpopular?

Two questions.

Why do you think that made you unpopular?

And why is it that you so early cottoned onto the fact that there was something going on that wasn't exactly kosher?

In relationship to now is push for for for a particular kind of family structure on a particular view of women's rights?

Yes, I think what happened for me was I Just when I started focusing on what was best for Children and then I began to, we only have minimal amount of research up for that at that point in time.

This is your early seventies, and but we had enough to for me to make a case to the board.

And when I saw the resistance, the degree to which, um, there's there's two things happening.

One is we We don't want to lose our power base.

We don't ever want to have a woman say whatever options she wants should be closed to her.

And so I began to see that the woman's movement was carrying more about women than they were caring about the Children.

That was the first disillusionment that I had.

Okay, so your first your first ethical point in some sense is that when you're speaking about families and you have to balance the rights and responsibilities of men, women and Children, that it makes sense to you to put Children's well being first and foremost, and then do too place men and women as individuals say, ERM, it, perhaps even as a couple blow that out Yes, exactly what I was saying was that freedom of choice is wonderful.

But when you make the freedom of choice to have a child, you then start prioritizing the needs of the child you made.

But you knew that those needs We're going to be the child's needs first when you made that free choice, it wasn't like you were coerced into the into or pressured into making that choice.

You made the free choice to have a child that incorporates the need to put the child's perspectives before yours as part of your free choice, right?

So it's basically the freedom there is the freedom to take on a certain kind of relatively permanent responsibility and then to abide by that come hell or high water essentially into the future that the Children should not respect.

The parents need because part of what I talk about in the boy crisis is that nobody happy that everybody has to be happy in a family, and that and that part of choosing a child to be responsible is to choosing the child, not just to have its needs met, but to also care about what, whether what their moms or dads needs are being met as well, and that has to be very primary and primal and introduced early.

But that the and then Secondly, I also felt that and Betty for Dan felt this way.

Also, that the the women's movement would never go as far as it could go unless the unless men were equally involved and proud of being involved in the father ring roll.

Because a woman who has to take on the entire response a woman who wants to break glass ceilings and go as far as she can but also wants Children had do that.

All of the man is working full time, and she's working full time.

Either the Children get neglected or you know, or something something has to go.

And so women will often say to May, you know, I want to be a habit.

Old woman.

I say you can be a heaven all woman Revere.

Find a man who wants to be home full time with the Children unless reshape society.

So we're saying that that men are not only worrier warriors that we that we praise and call heroes when they go to war and they die for us.

But they're also warriors if they choose.

If you if you choose a man who wants to be fully involved with the child honor him and respect him because we know that the social bribes that we gave men to die allowed men to be willing to sacrifice their lives in exchange for being called hero.

Well, if we if we read frame being a father as being a different type of hero men will follow because men basically go wherever the praise goes.

Okay, Okay, so in the 70.

So you started to put forward the case for Children and to some degree as well simultaneously the case for fathers and you received a fair bit of resistance as a consequence of that.

And it sounds like the way you're setting up the argument.

Is that the conflict?

What was the conflict?

That was it that the women who were being appealed to by now wanted untraveled freedom of choice for them under all circumstances.

Because the reason I'm asking is because if you have Children, obviously half the Children you have are female, and you'd assume that if it was a matter of of women's opening up what would be best for women in any kind of medium to long term manner that the concerns about daughters would be.

Perhaps even if it isn't concerns about sons.

That would be concerns about daughters that would emerge is paramount even over the concerns of the mother.

So So what is it that was?

I still don't exactly get why it was that you weren't being successful because it doesn't make sense because the price was two things happening simultaneously.

One was such a strong emphasis on freedom and the freedom manifested in two areas.

One is in the area of divorce and divorced.

The women were often saying, I don't like my husband.

I want to start a new life.

I want to be able to move out of state if I wish to get the job that I want or my new husband, My new husband or boyfriend has a has, ah wants to move out of state.

And so I want to be able to take my Children or child with me because and I know what's best for my child, which would be like that.

You have medical community saying we don't want women to be participating in the medical community because we know it's best for the patient and not not.

Not that women might have a separate contribution to make.

On the other hand, there was the there was women who wanted to have the freedom to be able to have Children without being married on DSo.

53% of women under 30 today who have Children in the United States have Children without being married.

And the belief was again that women knew what was best for the Children so we could They could take this on if they wanted to.

And they couldn't find a man that they really wanted, that they could raise the child by themselves with the Children themselves.

Okay, so so part of it was actually driven by questioning the necessity of the nuclear family as the smallest viable unit, and part of that was a that's correct.

And being the feminist community started when when I would go to feminist rallies and so on.

There would be many books about Lenin and the nuclear family being that the patriarchal that were oppressing women and so there.

So I think the feminists of the feminist movement grew out of two huge generations.

One was the civil rights movement when there was an oppressor and oppressed.

Then there was the the of the movement of not just civil rights but, uh, after the feminine.

If the civil rights movement came, the the Marxism and the belief that there were oppressors and oppressed in among Marxist and a lot of the feminist movement, the early feminist movement was very We had groups like red Stockings and many other groups like that that were socialist Workers Party take 10 minutes.

That very much believes in Marxism and they had the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed.

So when it came to men men, because we earned more because our biological not our biological bar socializing, biological responsibility was to earn the money and do that.

That type of nature of providing the feminist movement looked at the fact that we earned more money once we had Children.

And so therefore we must be the oppressor like those, like the bourgeoisie of Marxism and women must be the A press.

So you have two things happening simultaneously.

This belief that the oppressors are wanting to be equally involved with the Children and then secondly, men having no idea why they have value third men who the very few men that did study the value of being a father and how important it was to Children.

I didn't speak up about it.

And women can hear what men don't say.

So we have this world then, where women were sharing the burden of bread winning.

But no one was even interested in asking the question about whether men could share the burden from women of of earning of, ah, providing equally for the family.

And and women weren't even interested in that because they were so focused on their feet.

Um, and sold men is the oppressor.

And so there was no space to articulate the value of fathers and then in the okay, so well, you know, your terminology is interesting, too, because you're attributing the the desire of the women who were pushing against what you were saying.

Say, yeah, you're attributing that to a desire to freedom.

But it seems to me that you could easily use irresponsibility as a terminology there because freed free, well, freedom without concern for the medium to long term consequences of your actions especially when you're bringing in when you're dealing with minors, when you're dealing with Children, that's not freedom.

That's your responsibility.

That is absolutely irresponsibility.

And that is where we as a society, have failed to come in and say no.

First of all, whenever either sex winds that is a woman wins custody, for example, whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose.

And it's worse than that.