Warren Farrell, the masculinist, has one house, which he does own, but it's "nothing phenomenal." He drives a 1989 Nissan 240SX. Nothing he has written about men for the New York Times has been published, without exception. The college professors have stopped calling and so have the feminists (although to this day the bio on his book jackets still begins with his NOW credentials). During his last appearance on "Donahue," Farrell says, he started to address men's issues. And that was, well, his last appearance on "Donahue." Phil didn't want him back, and Betty Friedan, if she didn't actually want him dead, would probably have preferred to see him muzzled.

It's hard work being a gender radical, especially when you switch sides.

Farrell says he was "100 percent" feminist in his thinking until sometime in the mid-1970s. At that time, he was leading anti-sexism workshops on college campuses across the country, most of them sponsored by feminist organizations. Farrell made men participate in "beauty pageants" to make them see what it was like for women to be judged on their looks alone. The feminists were good with that; they loved him; they sponsored him; they took him out to dinner and told him how wonderful he was.

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But Farrell also wanted the women to see what it was like to be a man. Men, according to Farrell, "take 152 risks of rejection from first eye contact with a woman until intercourse." He decided that women should have to participate in a role-reversal exercise in which they were forced to ask a man out. The feminists did not like that. According to Farrell, most of them, after watching the men go through the beauty contest, walked out when it came time to participate in the role-reversal "date."

But Farrell's biggest argument with feminists came in the mid- to late '70s, when, one by one, NOW chapters across the country came out in support of giving mothers primary custody of children in cases of divorce.

"I said, 'Uh-huh. I see what this movement is about. It's about women having choices, not about fairness,'" recalls Farrell. "I definitely agree with choices for women, but I do not agree with choices for women when they eliminate choices for men. Rather, I think that the sexes need to make choices that lead to the maximum amount of win-win for both sexes."

Divorce, according to Farrell, leaves men who are dependent on women for their emotional lives with a gaping "love void" that must be filled. After his divorce with the feminist movement, Farrell experienced a political love void, and into it stepped men -- angry men, wounded men, men who want to be "nurturer-connectors" but who, according to Farrell, are simply viewed as "killer-protectors."

For Farrell, the stereotype of men as "success objects" came to feel just as pernicious as the stereotype of women as "sex objects," a fact that he believes has been ignored both by feminists, who see men as the keepers of power, and by traditional women, who rely upon men to support them.

Warren Farrell, masculinist, writes books that tend to make headlines because of their often inflammatory content, but that doesn't mean they are always taken seriously in a culture that views "men's issues" with derision on the one hand, and as a last, vicious grab for patriarchal power on the other.

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