Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say - destroying myths, creating love.

By Warren Farrell, Australasian edition published by Finch (2001)

While this isn't really a review, some excerpts from this book will give an indication of how useful it will be to workers committed to improving the welfare of families rather than 'destroying the patriarchy'. The book's appendix gives details and summaries of 53 major domestic violence studies that look at both sexes.

Page 8.
Without responsible, concrete information, we get stuck in the quicksand of self-fulfilling prophecies. When the society has no awareness that men are battered by women in significant numbers, we don't develop hotlines, so we don't hear men's feelings; we don't develop shelters, so we don't hear men's feelings; we don't train social workers to be sensitive to men who get hit first, so they develop a treatment programs based on what they can see. Without responsible new information neither sex nor any social workers can be asked to alter a working paradigm.

Page 21-22
Researchers find that when only one sex expresses argument-provoking feelings, it is likely to be the wife - by a ratio of almost six to one (85 percent vs 15 percent). When both sexes participate but one dominates, women are about twice as likely to dominate. Overall, women are more are willing to initiate conflict, no willing to escalate conflict, better able to handle it when it occurs, and, when they have initiated it, are quicker to get over it.

These findings come from numerous sources. They are found among couples of high, medium, and low socio-economic status. They are found using a variety of methodologies: the couples at themselves acknowledge the gap, and, much more reliably, researchers who systematically observe couples verify the couple's own assessments.

Probably the most respected researcher in the field is John Gottman at the University of Washington. He records pulse rates, heart output, skin conductance, and other indicators of stress. Then he videotapes the couples to observe facial expressions and body language. He does not ask the couples to fight, since that would be artificial. Instead, he basically works with the couple and when a major air are of disagreement naturally even though this, he asks them to discuss it and attempts to resolve it. When a fight naturally occurs, the equipment is there to record it.

Gottman found that men are more are intimidated by angry women than women are by angry men. Men are more stressed by marital arguments, while women are more comfortable with emotional confrontation and are better at it.

Even in the feminist movement, the medium is the message: feminists express anger even as the message is that women cannot express anger; men repress anger even as they are judged to be the sex that has no problem expressing it! We often hear we have a battle of the sexes when, in fact, we have a war in which only one side has shown up. (Men put their heads into the sand and hope the bullets will miss!)

Withdrawal is not the way men do battle with men. It is the way men do battle with women. Because the purpose of doing battle with men was to prepare men to protect women from conflict, not to be the source of conflict.

Page 122
Perhaps nothing makes a women feel less valued, though, than being abused by a man. And perhaps nothing makes a man feel like less of a man than hitting a women. Unfortunately, our current approach to solving the problem is often aggravating it. For all these reasons, there are fewer areas with the potential for deepening love between men and women than understanding what men are keeping secret about violence in the home.

Page 161
If we wish to help men and women to help themselves, I believe we will need to do the following:

• Train equal numbers of male and female counsellors (worldwide) to take a nonsexist approach to battering - the approach outlined in Part One.
• Establish family communication workshops to be available to everyone, without it being associated with domestic violence. A much cheaper investment than prisons.
• Require the police departments to transfer all domestic violence calls to a twenty-four hour domestic violence hotline funded adequately enough to send out a man and a woman to work with an in-crisis couple.
• The police are only used when the man or woman desires the police after the other alternative has been offered.
• If the hotline is used more than once, a user fee must be paid by the couple if they do not commit to attend the free family communication workshops.

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