She Says It's the Men Who Are Enslaved
By Judith Weinraub Special to The New York Times
- June 13, 1972
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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June 13, 1972, Page 50
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LONDON—Esther Viler was awakened in her hotel room here the other day by an emphatic knock on the door. She opened it to find a group of hatted English matrons in their fifties who quietly but earnestly asked her to leave the country.
“They told me I am insulting English women. I've even had to change my hotel room,” the surprised Miss Viler said.
The cause of all the commotion is Miss Viler's book, “The Manipulated Man,” which has just been published amid considerable controversy in England. A best‐seller in the original German, it will be published in 18 different countries including Iceland, Greece and Turkey as well as the United States, and takes the position that women's liberation has got it all wrong.
“They're getting nowhere because they have the male idea about women. They make women the object of male charity,” said Miss Viler, who wrote her book in angry rebuttal of women's liberation two years ago, while surveying the United States from a small pension on Houston Street.
Miss Vilar, who is 36 years old and divorced, said she does not think things are fine the way they are. She points the finger of blame at women—ticking off as faults she finds: laziness, selfishness, stupidity, inability to feel.
The crux of the situation as Miss Viler sees it is that men are slaves to women, working all their lives to support women, while women choose a life of domestic idleness, working either intermittently or not at all.
“A married woman always has the choice to work or not. Men never do,” said Miss Vilar, who is convinced that most women can complete their essential housework in two hours each morning.
“Women always work with a net under them; they can let themselves fall. Women work for luxuries, like lace curtains and wall‐to‐wall carpeting. Men work because it's their responsibility to support a family.
“What I want to see is even one woman who is permanently willing to let her husband stay home to look after the children, while she goes out to work,” Miss Viler said, pulling her light brown hair away from her face.
Both in her book, which isn't scheduled to be published in the United States by Farrar Straus & Giroux until next January, and in her explosive interviews with the press here, no one escapes her icy scrutiny—from the woman who has never married (“she's more honorable than the rest, but she has had to be”) to the housewife (“housework is so easy that in psychiatric clinics it is traditionally the job for morons who are unfit to do any other kind of work”) to the emancipated women (“the, work chosen by the emancipated woman rarely involves effort or responsibility, although she makes herself believe it Involves both”). His Scale of Values
But, according to Miss Viler, if women are guilty, it is because men let them be.
“What a man fears most is freedom,” she insisted. “He needs some kind of system to tell him he is worth something. A woman is a man's scale of values, but if he doesn't have a woman to manipulate him, he will find another system.”
Born in Argentina of German refugee parents who separated when she was 3 years old (“a broken home like Kate Millet's and Gloria Steinem's”), Miss Viler studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. She speaks fluent English.
In 1960 she went to West Germany on scholarship to continue her studies in psychology and sociology and worked for a year as a doctor in a Bavarian hospital. In 1961 she gave it up and since then has worked as a medical translator, an assembly‐line worker in a thermometer factory, a salesgirl, and secretary.
She married and divorced the German author, Klaus Wagn (“I didn't break up with the man, just with marriage as an institution”), and is now devoting her time to the care of their 8‐year‐old son, Martin, her writing, and to the study of what she calls “man's delight in nonfreedom.” “The Manipulated Man” is part of this study.
Miss Viler, who was wearing a blue T shirt, blue jeans and no bra, Is soft‐spoken and delicate woman. Nevertheless, she has taken on the most militant women's liberationists, the most complacent housewives, and the most defiant male chauvinists.
“People are afraid to read my book,” she asserted. “Women's liberation is much more flattering for men. They love to hear that they are tyrants because they are educated that way.”
Miss Vilar's attacks on women extend to other spheres:
Her intelligence—“woman's stupidity is so overwhelming that anyone who comes into contact with it will become, in a way, contaminated by it.”
Her ability to feel—“If she lets herself feel, she might make the wrong choice of husband, and it's the most important choice she will ever make.”
Her love of children—“It's a selfish love; if women really loved children, they would adopt them rather than insisting on having their own.”
Nor is she particularly sympathetic to the woman who does manage to work and raise her children at the same time.
“Sending a small child to a kindergarten for the whole day is cruel, but why should it always be the woman who stays home to look after them,” said Miss Viler, who has always managed to do free‐lance writing and translating while taking care of her son.
“It is a very rude book. It Is black and white. I meant it to be. Otherwise nobody would have listened. I'm not interested in revolution. I don't want to change all the rules; people must find their own solutions. I just wanted to bring it to consciousness that it is men who are enslaved—not women.”
