Save the Males: Common Sense on Gender and Family Issues. By R. F. Doyle. Forest Lake, Minnesota: Poor Richard’s Press, 2006. www.lulu.com. No price stated on book, but website gives price for book as US $16.45, for download US $6.95. 236 pages.

Richard Doyle, longtime toiler in the trenches on behalf of men’s rights, recognized for his efforts by the National Coalition of Free Men (among others), and emeritus editor of the eminent Liberator newsmagazine, has used his spare time since he handed over editorship of the Liberator to pen the book Save the Males. (Full disclosure: I have spent some brief yet treasured time with Mr. Doyle and admire his work and persistence.)

For an honored old-timer, Doyle has done an admirable job integrating recent developments into his book. He provides generally excellent if intermittently grumpy and idiosyncratic summations of pertinent issues, reading somewhat like a rumpled, less erudite (but who isn’t?) version of the late Daniel Amneus. Doyle’s proposals near the end of the book are often fresh and engaging, and frequently provocative, while varying in practicality for actual implementation. Doyle suggests creating defaults for custody awards that are based on the age and sex of the child. Younger children will tend to be placed with Mom, while older kids, particularly boys, will live with Dad, while some room is included for consideration of individual circumstances.

I was thankful for new information such as the discussion on p. 72 of the centuries-old roots of alimony in a now long obsolete type of limited divorce, in which the husband was still liable for the wife’s expenses. Fathers’ importance is deftly summarized in five pages, with Doyle underscoring the facts that neither rape nor income in itself affect the crime rate in a community, only family status, specifically, the absence of Dad. Doyle is good on health issues and I appreciated his mention of circumcision. The author backs up well his argument (p. 178) that women have a higher obligation to chastity, and makes some interesting proposals regarding marriage a few pages later.

Both the pluses and minuses of Doyle’s style are excellently typified by analyses such as p. 43’s discussion of rape and some women’s partial contribution to it by use of provocative clothing. The author demonstrates his penetrating originality, periodic infelicitous formulations, his courage of his convictions, his prejudices, jarring self-references, and areas of short-sightedness, all in the same paragraph:

“(Watch misandrists take passages from this paragraph out of context) Some women seem to have a rape wish. If one is curiously attired, or un-attired, it follows that one is going to be the object of curiosity. For that reason, flirtatious women who go about in public only partially clothed, whether or not in ‘style,’ have little cause to complain about rape or yobos leering after them….”

The book is poorly organized and could have used a good editor, whose necessity is not removed by 21^st century computer technologies. Thus we see the same Samuel Adams quotation repeated within six pages, and encounter some strange ideas such as the quasi-paranoid suggestion (p. 199) that alimony/child support expenditures would be better redirected “into tracking down the latest and biggest threat to this country, an ominous cooperative of terrorists, organized criminals and illegal aliens.” Among other points that could be made in response, can anyone imagine a “cooperative” of these three groups?

Doyle is not a proponent of men crying and repeatedly states his distaste for the entire mythopoetic movement. (In a paragraph at the bottom of p. 161, Doyle reveals himself to carry some pretty blinding prejudices toward men’s work toward self-discovery.) In my opinion, Doyle is right in questioning feminist-oriented men’s groups such as NOMAS (National Organization for Men Against Sexism), but his half-baked speculation on the sexual proclivities of NOMAS folks is a bit embarrassing. Nor does he believe that gays genuinely fall in love, finding them to be disgusting. Semi-coherent formulations and references to unfamiliar events the author evidently assumes are common knowledge periodically make it difficult to be sure what Doyle is saying. John Murtari’s name is repeatedly misspelled, making an Internet follow-up difficult for an interested reader to execute. I learned about a number of new books from Doyle, and I appreciate that. Yet without making any attempt to check his facts, I came across a number of errors. My research could not turn up any book titled “Brain Sex” by Michael Joseph, cited by Doyle on p. 167. “Feminizing the Nation’s Boys,” listed in the bibliography as a book, is actually a short article. The citation of feminist Anne Summers’ “The End of Equality” must be an error. It is silly to use 1974 statistics that are easily updatable, as Doyle does at least once, in marked contrast to his mostly up-to-date information; it is also somewhat sophomoric to list one’s supporters in an attempt to strengthen one’s credibility, and even more so to then add “and most anyone with a modicum of common sense.”

As I mentioned above, a good editor could do a lot to clean much of this up. Nevertheless, in its current state, “Save the Males” still merits serious attention for its insightful suggestions and fiery, quirky summary of the current state of males. Anyone who reads it for what it offers and bypasses what doesn’t serve will find the ride worth several times the ticket price.