The Backlash! - January 1996

The good fight A conversation with Fred Hayward by Jeffrey Seeman Copyright 1995 by Jeffrey Seeman

A

Born and raised in New York, Hayward received a B.A. in mathematics from Brandeis University and an M.A. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. While living in Massachusetts in 1977, he founded Men's Rights, Inc., which has since become one of the nation's leading men's advocacy and lobbying groups. Later in the '70s, he went on to form a Boston chapter of the National Coalition of Free Men, then an organization which was primarily focused on conducting educational conferences and consciousness-raising groups for men.

Over the years, Hayward has appeared on literally hundreds of radio and television shows to discuss men's issues and present the often overlooked male perspective on gender topics. In 1993, he was granted the National Coalition of Free Men's award for excellence in the advancement of men's issues. Presently, he hosts SacraMENshow, a community access television program on men's issues that is taped in his current home of Sacramento, California.

A s I spoke to Hayward about his life in the men's movement, I became aware of just how amazing a career this man has had. Whether he's recruiting lawyers to argue a case before the Supreme Court, being banned from the National Conference on Men and Masculinity, or being thrown off the Oprah Winfrey show, Hayward has always been the calm eye in the center of a hurricane of controversy. And now, sadly, that controversy has entered his personal life, as he finds himself locked in a bitter dispute over the custody of his toddler son.

When did you first become interested in men's rights?

A

A lot of men active in the men's rights movement had a pro-feminist stage. Did you ever have a pro-feminist stage?

I

"I know that if their experience is so different from mine that I can't understand it, then mine is so different from theirs that they can't understand it."

In Massachusetts, you started Men's Rights, Inc., and also a chapter of the Coalition of Free Men. Why both?

I

MR, Inc. seems to put a particular spotlight on the media, more so than any other men's organization I know of.

T

How did you start publicizing yourself when you first created MR., Inc? How did you get contacts?

I

One of the first things I did was incorporate Men's Rights as a non-profit organization. The reason I went to all that trouble was to qualify for grants. It turned out that the biggest payoff to incorporating was that on paper I was suddenly director of a corporation, which added credibility to what I was saying. One of the next things I did was to teach a course at Tufts University on the "male as victim." There was a lot of research that needed to be done and I wanted to come up with some quick answers on things and get some research done quickly on certain issues. I figured I didn't have time to do it all myself, I can't afford to pay other people to do it, so I'll teach a course and assign it and get it done for free. And it turned out the biggest payoff in that was now on paper I was suddenly visiting lecturer at Tufts University and that added more credibility to what I was saying. So these were two key things that I did for other reasons and by pure accident there was a big payoff that I had never even anticipated.

"So I combated the discrimination on a statistical basis, proving to them that men do a lot more driving than women and that insurance companies were not coming up with accidents per mile driven but only accidents per driver, based on a stereotype."

Then, the next thing was ladies' nights, which I knew would get a lot of publicity, especially if I was successful. So we had hearings on that (in Massachusetts) and I gave a really good argument for it. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination -- I became friends with the Commissioner later and he told me they were all prepared to laugh at what I was going to say -- listened to it and just had to look at each other and go, "He's right." So they declared ladies' nights illegal and that became page one news -- literally page one news.

So now the biggie. You were also involved in a case before the Supreme Court, Goldberg v. Rostker. What was the story behind that?

I

Of course, that only pushes the discrimination back one level. So then the question becomes, okay, so why are only men being sent into combat?

Y

"For me the lesson was judges make their decisions based on how they feel and then they look to the law to try to justify it."

Sort of reinforces to me that I see the big work for the movement right now being raising consciousness, not getting bills passed. The first step is, get people aware of this stuff and get people angry. Then the next step is, okay, how can we work this out legally?

I've also heard a story about how you were responsible for Oprah Winfrey walking off her show.

T he first time I was on her show, she threw me off. We got off on the wrong foot. Right from the start, her introduction -- and these are not her exact words, but it was something to the effect of -- "We all know men don't have any serious problems, but this guy's job is talking about them anyway. Please welcome our guest, Fred Hayward."

I don't know why I reacted the way I did, because talk show hosts do that all the time. They play the devil's advocate, especially with someone who's talking about men's issues. They don't play the devil's advocate to women, but they do play devil's advocate to men because they're trying to cater to the women who are watching. So I said to her, "You know, the black population in prison is eight times as high proportionately as the rest of the population. Why do you think that is?"

"Men, at that time, were twenty-four times as likely to be in prison than the rest of the population."

(Laughing) I'm sure it wasn't. You were supposed to be an asshole.

The next time they asked me on, the topic was male chauvinism, and they had three avowed male chauvinists. They had a guy who talked like Rocky, he was a construction worker from Chicago. They had George Gilder, who at that time was an adviser to Reagan. The third guy was someone they paid $250 to disguise him.

"Then they had Susan Brownmiller, they had a Chinese lesbian socialist -- who did articulate well the feelings of all the Chinese lesbian socialists out there in America."

And if they had said they weren't all that good in the bedroom, he really would have been assaulted in the parking lot.

Of which there are many, I'm sure.

Too bad. It does make a better story when it's you.

And you actually now have your own show: SacraMENshow. How did that start?

Finally, we just both challenged each other. He said, "Ill get the crew if you do the show." I said, "All right, I'll do the show if you get the crew." That's how it started, and it got publicity immediately because there's just nothing else like it, nobody else is talking about males. The "male-dominated media," like everything else, is driven by consumers, (who are) mostly women. The electorate is mostly women, the viewership is mostly women, the readership is mostly women, the purchasing power is in the hands of women. So we got a lot of publicity, got really good local coverage, and then got national coverage. I've been contacted by other stations all over the country. Because of the publicity, they want to carry it. But because of the restrictions of cable, I can't make any money from it. It's really a hassle to go through all the trouble of copying tapes and sending them for nothing. I'm already doing as much work for nothing as I can do.

"But there's that forty percent who are men that's totally untouched. Nobody's talking to them. So the first show that talks to men is going to have a monopoly."

Let me shift gears here. I have the impression that there are a lot of men who are basically sympathetic to men's rights issues, but keep their mouths shut for fear that they will be rejected by women if they speak out, that women will not choose them romantically if they speak out. That actually hasn't been my experience. What has your experience been with that?

S

If you have money in the bank, you can say whatever you want.

When did you first meet Warren Farrell (author of The Myth of Male Power)?

I

It sounds like you may have influenced him as much as he influenced you.

"When the national powers -- like Bob Brannon, Shepard Bliss -- when they found out I was going to be on a panel, they threatened to boycott their own conference. They put pressure on the Boston people. They said certain people do not warrant the Constitutional right of freedom of speech, like Nazis and Fred Hayward."

Spoken like a true feminist.

Then Warren came to the National Congress for Men in 1982, and in the beginning everyone was introducing themselves and he said, "My name is Warren Farrell and I'm boycotting the Men and Masculinity conference because they wouldn't allow Fred Hayward to speak."

I was sitting there and I didn't even know anything about it. The last contact I had had with Warren was planning to meet in San Diego. I showed up and he stood me up. I figured, "Well there's a friendship down the drain." (laughing) And here he is, announcing that he's just severed his ties to this organization that he was a hero of because of the way they treated me. I ran up to him and said, "That's me!" And we hugged and we've just been really tight ever since.

Several years later, the M&M Conference was meeting in Hartford, Connecticut and those local organizers invited me. I showed up again and this time I also had the support of Gordon Clay, who was one of the co-chairs of the organization. When Bob Brannon showed up and found out that I had been invited again -- he was almost in retirement by that point -- he came out of retirement to try to organize another boycott movement to get me kicked out. He only got about six votes in the entire conference, so I was allowed to give my workshop. Brannon had organized some hecklers, so at the beginning of the workshop I just couldn't get anything done because of them. People got impatient with that and finally said, "Let him to his workshop." So I gave my workshop and it was great, it really was. At the end of it, expect for Brannon and his six friends, all the other participants were saying to him -- suddenly, he was on the defensive -- why have you been teaching us to hate this guy all these years? What he's saying is perfectly reasonable.

So Brannon lost a lot in that conference and came out of retirement and re-took control of the organization and changed their mission statement. First he rammed through a rule that from now on no one can give a workshop unless they have sworn allegiance to the M&M mission statement. And the mission statement said that the organization was "pro-feminists, gay affirmative, and male positive."

My reaction was, well, it's stupid for you to do that, because if there's a good speaker, I believe in freedom of information, I don't think you should restrict who's going to be speaking if they're going to contribute something. But that's okay with me, because I can swear allegiance to that. My dictionary says feminism is the advocacy for women of all the political, social, and economic rights enjoyed by men, and I fully support that and I defy you to come up with anything in my record -- any statement or action -- which contradicts my support for women, which specifies some right or privilege that I think only men should have and women should not. I defy you to come up with that. On the other hand, I could come up with all kinds of things from you which are not "male positive" at all. You dump on men all the time.

So he had to go back and change the mission statement. First, he rammed through the rule that you had to swear loyalty to the mission statement, then he had to change the mission statement. So because of the workshop I did, they took "male positive" out of their mission statement. The organization is no longer officially "male positive," now it's just "pro-feminist and gay affirmative."

Oh, and I got compared to the devil. I graduated. I'm no longer on par with Nazis; now I'm on par with the devil.

Congratulations.

Were you familiar with Herb Goldberg's work (The Hazards of Being Male) back in 1976?

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. There is an attitude that if people are talking about men's rights, that doesn't really mean that men have any issues, it just means that the victim mentality in our culture has gone to the absolute extreme. How do you respond to that?

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I figured it might.

If he's single, it might be initiative in relationships and paying for women on dates that are going to press his buttons. You can talk all you want about children, but if he's nineteen-years-old, that has no affect on him. For somebody else, that might really be an issue. For somebody else, he might still be recovering from his experience in Vietnam and the draft might be his issue. And for somebody else, it could be that he's recovering from his wounds that his father died when he was really young and life expectancy might press his buttons if you start telling him how he didn't have to lose his father because of such-and-such.

"Oh, stop whining just because you're going to die?" That's a pretty serious thing.

Or not having enough toilets in the women's room.

You've been writing pretty strongly lately about men's reproductive rights. There was an article that appeared in Playboy recently.

Y

How so?

My woman friend, who used to proofread my articles before I sent them to the publisher, read that one and -- I don't know whether it was a coincidence or not -- but all I know is that within weeks she did the same thing to me. She tricked me into fathering a child, she told witnesses that she was going to do it, witnesses who would testify to it, she won my entire income in child support.

But unlike Serpico, I sued for legal rights. It's been hell. She had proofread all my articles, she knew my work. I'm always writing about the awful things that can happen to men, and she said, "If you try anything legally, you can forget you have a son. Don't forget, I spent years with you. I know all the things a woman can do to a man if she wants to keep him away from his children, and I'll do them to you." So that's what I've been going through ever since then, one false allegation after another.

But it's also been heaven, because she screwed up her allegations at one point and I ended up essentially my son's primary caretaker. I'm now raising this little boy. I mean, it's hell what I'm dealing with with her, literally having the police every week, the bills, the harassment from her; she's assaulted me, she's vandalized my property. She knows that they don't prosecute women in our world, she knows that she's not going to get in trouble for perjury. So it's really been hell, but my son is just a doll, an absolute doll, and he more than compensates for it. And that's now how I spend my days, raising a little boy.

How old is he now?

And what's his name?

So he spends most of his time with you?

So I have to ask the obvious question, then. If you're the primary caretaker, is she paying you child support?

We understand this, yes.

I

Great. Congratulations. Shifting gears, there's been a slowly growing movement of what I'll call "dissident feminists" -- people like Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia, etc. Do you see them as allies?

Y

Particularly on gender issues.

That's occurred to me and I haven't done it. But it's definitely occurred to me.

Within the men's rights movement, it feels like there are two separate camps. There seems to be a group of men coming from the left, liberal mentality of supporting feminism in the truest sense, of equal rights and responsibilities, and then there seems to be a more conservative group, that's really more focused on fathers' rights and are more gender traditionalist. Do you see those two camps as being able to work together?

I

The human species inherited these roles and the problems that we have are a direct by-product of the roles that we inherited. I think both of those sides make a mistake by identifying themselves either with left or with right because once they do, then all they've accomplished is alienating that half of the population that identifies with the other side. So there's this big drawback to it, because you alienate all these people, and there's no gain to it because politicians on the left or the right still don't care about us.

You know, the average conservative is feeling that men's issues are silly because a real man should be able to take care of himself. And the average liberal is thinking that men's issues are still because men have it too good, anyway. So appealing to either the left or the right -- there's just no payoff and there's a tremendous disadvantage to it.

One of the labels that the men's rights movement sometimes gets branded with is "misogynist." And there have been a few men's rights activists that I've interacted with who do seem to be genuinely anti-woman. How pervasive is that in the movement?

I

One last question: You've been doing this work for quite a few years now. Do you see it getting easier? Do you see it getting better? Is there cause for optimism right now?

I

Another is the tremendous rising awareness of the negative repercussions of fatherlessness in America, both from the left and the right. People are recognizing that the serious social issues that are grabbing all the attention correlate more to fatherlessness than to anything else, that they're not so much a question of race, they're not so much a question of income. The question is how are we going to get fathers back into the lives of our children? That's a tremendous positive step.

"But I wouldn't honestly say that I'm optimistic. I'm hopeful. I know that if the men's rights movement doesn't succeed, it's going to be fatal. Society as we know it will die. We have no choice."

I also take solace in the balance of nature. Nature has a lot of mechanisms inside it that keep things going, that keep things balanced. Things are not in balance now and nature will do something to put men and women back into balance. So to me that's also positive.

But I wouldn't honestly say that I'm optimistic. I'm hopeful. I know that if the men's rights movement doesn't succeed, it's going to be fatal. Society as we know it will die. We have no choice. The awareness now of the importance of fathers is being compounded by the financial problems -- that our society is being bankrupted by welfare and crime and all of these other things that are also related to fatherlessness.

So I think there's going to be an increasing focus on that and to me that's really positive. But you can never underestimate how blind people will remain and their capacity to be totally illogical. It also takes a lot of luck. It's like Nazi Germany. It's defeat was not so much that good will triumph in the end, democracy will defeat dictatorship in the end, we also had a lot of luck. If they had the bomb first, if they followed up Dunkirk with an invasion of Britain, if the Japanese followed up Pearl Harbor with an invasion of California, if the Germans maintained their truce with the Soviet Union and didn't get bogged down there -- there were a lot of ways that we were lucky. Otherwise, you and I would have been baked in an oven long ago.

We may end up that way anyway, at this point.

S