# Warren Farrell Warren Farrell (b. June 1943) is the **intellectual godfather of the modern men's rights movement** — the academically credentialed (PhD political science, NYU 1974) former feminist whose break from the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the mid-1970s and whose subsequent book *The Myth of Male Power* (1993) established the framework that the MRM operates within. He is structurally important because his pre-MRM career as a NOW board member gives the movement a credibility claim — "this isn't anti-feminism from people who never engaged with feminism, this is post-feminism from someone who was inside the movement and concluded it was wrong." That biographical narrative is load-bearing for the second-wave MRM's self-presentation. ## Background Born June 1943, New Jersey. PhD in political science from NYU in 1974, dissertation on gender roles. Active in **second-wave feminism** in the late 1960s and early 1970s; served on the NYC board of NOW; wrote *The Liberated Man* (1974), an early-second-wave book exploring how traditional gender roles constrained both men and women. His "role-reversal workshops" in the 1970s and early 1980s gave him mainstream-media attention as a voice in the male-side conversation feminism had partly opened up. ## The mid-1970s break with NOW The pivot point in Farrell's career was the **mid-1970s NOW decision to oppose presumptive joint custody** in divorce cases. Farrell — who had grown more focused on father-custody and male-parenting issues — broke with the organization over this position. He has cited this break repeatedly as the moment he concluded that mainstream feminism had become structurally biased against male family interests. From there, Farrell shifted his focus to men's-issues research, writing, and advocacy. The transition was not immediate — through the late 1970s and 1980s he continued to write across both sides of the gender-politics conversation — but by the early 1990s the orientation was clearly anti-feminist (or, as Farrell prefers, post-feminist). ## *The Myth of Male Power* (1993) The 1993 book is Farrell's central work and the foundational text of the modern MRM. It argues: - Men are not the privileged sex; the appearance of male institutional power masks structural male disadvantages (workplace fatality, military draft, custody bias, suicide rates, shorter lifespans) - Both sexes are shaped by gender roles; feminism has correctly addressed female-side constraints but largely ignored male-side ones - The "patriarchy" framework is empirically misleading because it treats power as undifferentiated rather than as the responsibility-loaded "powerlessness" of the breadwinner role The book has sold in the hundreds of thousands and is required-reading-tier in MRA circles. Mainstream feminist scholars have largely critiqued it as misreading aggregate male-side outcomes as evidence of structural male disadvantage rather than as side effects of patriarchal role assignment — but the text functions in the MRM as the canonical statement of the movement's case. ## Mentorship of Paul Elam and the second wave Farrell's connection to the **second-wave MRM** runs through his relationship with [[Paul Elam]], who has cited Farrell's writing as foundational. Farrell was the keynote speaker at the **2014 Detroit International Conference on Men's Issues** organized by Elam's [[A Voice for Men]] — the public coming-out moment for the modern MRM. That endorsement gave the second wave its most academically credentialed face. ## Later work Farrell co-authored *The Boy Crisis* (2018) with John Gray, focused on outcomes for boys in education, mental health, and family-structure. The book was less polemical than *Myth* and intentionally pitched to a more mainstream audience; it was reviewed across the political spectrum and remains in print. ## Function in the ecosystem Farrell's role in the [[Manosphere Ecosystem]] map is **the academic-credibility anchor** for the men's rights wing. He is rarely cited by the commercial-wave manosphere ([[Andrew Tate]], [[Myron Gaines]], etc.) — that audience prefers the more hyperbolic [[Red Pill]] canon — but he is foundational to the MRA wing that survived the commercial-wave consolidation, and his work continues to be the citation MRA-friendly journalists and academics reach for when they want a respectable face for the movement. ## See Also - [[Manosphere Ecosystem]] — ecosystem map (Ring 1b: Men's Rights Activism) - [[Paul Elam]] — second-wave MRM organizer; Farrell's protégé - [[Antifeminism]] — the political ideology Farrell's later work supports - [[A Voice for Men]] — second-wave MRM organizational center