Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care | 
 enlarge | Author: Kathleen Parker
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 4835
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 1.4 x 0.2
ISBN: 1400065798
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.8742
EAN: 9781400065790
ASIN: 1400065798
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
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Product Description
Tell a woman we need to save the males and she’ll give you the name of her shrink. But cultural provocateur Kathleen Parker, who was raised by her father and who mothered a pack of boys, makes a humorous case for rescuing the allegedly stronger sex from trends that portend man’s cultural demise.
Save the Males is a shrewd, amusing, and sure-to-be-controversial look at how men, maleness, and fatherhood have been under siege in American culture for decades. Kathleen Parker argues that the feminist movement veered off course from it’s original aim of helping women achieve equality and ended up making enemies of men. With piercing wit, this nationally syndicated columnist shows us how the pendulum has swung from the reasonable middle to a place where men have been ridiculed in the public square and the importance of fatherhood has been diminished–all to the detriment of women, who ultimately suffer most.
The real losers, should we continue on our present course, are not just grown men and women but our children. Young people involuntarily drafted into the squabbles of their parents’ generation and raised in a climate of sexual hostility–also known as the “hookup culture”–may be fluent in porn, but their vocabulary is painfully limited when it comes to relationships.
While Parker gleefully skewers the silly side of the human experiment–like men in dresses and sperm shopping–she offers sobering statistics on the impact of the anti-male culture on the institution of the family and on relationships.
Exploring our burgeoning “slut culture” and the vividly narcissistic prevalence of vagina worship, Save the Males softens no edges. Parker tackles some of the more taboo subjects in today’s sexual politics and culture wars with perceptive analysis and a stinging sense of humor that will have America talking–and chuckling–about saving the males.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Shuold Care July 22, 2008
As a reader from Spain, this book is a good warning on what is coming from the politically correct USA . Our "progressive" socialist government is importing all the failed policies inspired by radical feminist in the States. The result will be the same inequalities, with a Spanish accent, but happy brainwashed voters.
Men Must Save Themselves July 16, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
One at a time. Women could help, and for their own good--and Kathleen Parker makes this abundantly clear--they should. But, in the end, if you're raised by a man-hating mother or you are a man in an environment deeply antagonistic to masculinity, it's still your job to be a man.
A great deal of this type of literature--Dr. Laura's The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, for example--understand the motivations of men and the negative influence a highly feminized culture can have on them, but often stop short of the ultimate truth: a man has to be a man. Much like happiness, manliness is an inside job. Wives and girlfriends and teachers don't emasculate men; men allow themselves to be emasculated. While modern feminized, anti-male culture will inevitably slow down the achievement of mature masculinity, at some point it is the adult male's responsibility to think, behave and live as a mature, masculine man.
40 year old frat boys--or, as many mature, masculine men refer to them: man-boys--are the direct product of an anti-male, highly feminized culture. An anti-male culture encourages misogyny, it does not alleviate it. Looking at men as serfs for the matriarchy--and, boy, does our culture encourage that--helps provoke man-boys to objectify women. The strategy of condemning and trying to eradicate manhood and "maleness" only serves to help create perpetually hypersexualized man-boys, or milquetoast, gender-neutral doormats who are as ultimately as unsatisfying to women as the lives they end up leading are to the men. And they still don't like to dust or put up the laundry.
As such, I give Save The Males top marks. This material is important--arguably more for mothers and women generally than men. But the message that men have an obligation to reach for and achieve their own masculinity, no matter what the women in their lives or the popular culture says, could be made a lot more forcefully. If you really want to save the males, the case should be made that it is the mature man's job to save himself.
 Save the Males, from who, exactly? July 16, 2008
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
So let me test my understanding of the "Save the Males" position...
(all quotes from recent NYT review)
"...an entire generation of men have lost their moral compass because women decided to flash skin instead of flashing behavioral cue cards that say: Respect. Protect. Marry. Provide,"
...because: "empowered women choose to look out for themselves, she asks, what are men to do?" because "society discounts the importance of men as fathers and husbands, and does too little to make men feel self-assured in schools, in the workplace, the family and even the military."
...resulting in: men being "weary of being used as sperm donors and human A.T.M.'s"
...BUT! given that: "women are "biologically" programmed to like housework more than men do." meaning: "There's no way to make men into women."
Women should get back behing those brooms, allowing men to reclaim their vaulted position as "...sperm donors and human A.T.M.'s!"
This seems oddly circular to anyone else?
And who should we be saving the males from? From the women who expect/demand contemporary, respectful, respectable behavior from men, or the women whose expectations for men are so low and outmoded that they believe that they cannot master a swiffer-mop?
You Shall Not Criticize Feminism! July 6, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This well researched and thought-out book puts the, "We don't like men and we don't need men" rhetoric of the feminist educators and mass media into a present day context. It's the latest snap shot of our society post modern feminism, and things are worse than ever.
Men won't or can't ever be victims of a social movement they supposedly perpetuated. What they want is simply to STOP BEING BLAMED and stop being forced to PRETEND women are the same as men just for the sake of keeping the hoochie door open at home. Instead we're told everywhere men and women are equal in all regards except women are given special privilages because they can give life, (or legally take it depending on the situation at that time).
It's very sad to me that this book will never come close to making the NY TIMES best seller list or here at Amazon. The author/publisher had to know that "You Shall Non Criticize Feminism" is commandment #1 in the Feminist Manifesto, but yet she bravely proceeded onward to write a terrific and worthwhile observation of the gender wars today. I can only hope that someday it becomes a classic as more confused men and thoughtful women seek answers to the question, "Why do we hate each other so much?". This book contains many of those answers.
not a good book July 6, 2008
1 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is an awful book. I knew before I started it that Parker had a somewhat controversial thesis: feminism has a significant and deleterious effect on men. While most feminists are, well, pretty much every woman I know, there is a small but vocal minority that does in fact seem to hate men, or at the very least sees oppression by the patriarchy everywhere and blames men for every difficulty in life. Parker could have had, in my opinion, some legitimate issues to raise. But she blew it big time.
The first warning flag came when I noticed that the approving quotes on the book jacket are from Peggy Noonan, Bill Bennett, and George Will. Not a good sign. Then early on in the book, Parker approvingly cites "research" by the American Enterprise Institute, well known for picking results and then scrounging for data.
And it just goes downhill from there. Apparently, only violent rape, using physical force, is rape. Did you know that? Which is kind of odd, since not long after that, Parker introduces the idea of "emotional incest" in single-parent homes. She complains in incredulous tones about a teacher who used the pronoun "she" instead of "he" in situations of unspecified gender. Yes, that sounds odd. Which I think is a good thing - it sounds odd, and so makes you stop to think about it, and realize that always using "he" is quite odd too. And hopefully advance to using a gender-neutral pronoun ("they" works in singular too).
The problem is that while Parker does have some decent points, they are drowned out by seas of inanity and insanity. So many people have such strong feelings about gender relations that it's difficult to have a calm, sensible discussion about them, but sadly this book does nothing to change this.
Parker reiterates throughout the work that she's a feminist, women had it hard, men can be bad, etc. These constant qualifiers seem at best ineffectual, and more likely disingenuous. People who are actually moderate and pragmatic don't spend pages agonizing over very rare (and in any event harmless) things like pudenda parties that turn into tribadic festivals of mutual intercourse. I mean, really.
(Note: Amazon censored the original review that used more common synonyms in the last paragraph. Parker's book uses the original words, in case that's something that might offend you.)
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