Warren Farrell quotes:

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  • We always look at the 'Fortune 500,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.

  • Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war; disposable in work. We need warriors and volunteer firefighters, so we label these men heroes.

  • Boys with a 'failure to launch' are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete.

  • A woman with organizing skills can run a construction company without ever picking up a hammer and nail.

  • The five different areas in which boys are in crisis - education; jobs; emotional health; physical health; and fatherlessness - are handled by different portions of the government.

  • Men rarely worry about using or being used because all relationships work that way. A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman. 'Use' is a dirty word only when there's an imbalance in the relationship.

  • Without children, men have more liberty to earn less - that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.

  • Men's competitive team sports focus on the balance between individual achievement and team achievement with the emphasis on team achievement.

  • I don't think there's anything that is a greater area of discrimination against women today than the fact that nowhere in the world is there a female role model in team sports that more than half of a general audience would recognize.

  • It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.

  • There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist.

  • Men are fair, and they have learned not to personalize anger - they can disagree with you and argue to the bone, but afterward they still consider you a nice person with whom the underlying human relationship need not be altered.

  • A man's primary fantasy is access to a variety of attractive women without the fear of rejection.

  • Women are the only 'oppressed' group that is able to buy most of the $10 billion worth of cosmetics each year; the only oppressed group that spends more on high fashion, brand-name clothing than its oppressors; the only oppressed group that watches more TV.

  • I define power as 'control over one's life.' A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.

  • One can make a case that says that since 85% of children being brought up in single family homes are being brought up by women that about 85% of elementary school teachers should be males to balance out the feminization that the boys and girls receive.

  • Men have the influence and power in business and politics. It is the mother who can make the child's bedtime earlier, take away desserts or ground the child.

  • For blacks in our society, victimization may be a true issue. But it isn't a true issue for women. Neither men nor women are victimized. The true issue, that I try to point out, is that both sexes suffer restricted roles.

  • Once boys' and men's challenges are clear, the question 'why now' quickly becomes 'why didn't we see this sooner?' The answer? Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable.

  • Feminists who say that I switched sides because I am an opportunist should know that exactly the opposite is true. It's cost me a lot of money. I've gone from being well-to-do to being $70,000 in debt. I have done something self-destructive financially. I could only do it because I don't have to support a wife and child.

  • So long as you create laws that define women as victims, as creatures that demand protection, that need bodyguards, you are going to perpetuate the very worst of our sexist past.

  • The Myth of Male Power dealt much more with the political issues, the legal issues, sexual harassment, date rape, women who kill, and those issues were very much more interfaced with the agendas of feminism.

  • While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation.

  • Companies like I.B.M. have offered women scholarships to study engineering for years, and women engineers routinely get higher starting salaries than men.

  • Financial analysts make a lot more than accountants.

  • If women had to promise to provide for a man for a lifetime before he removed his veil and showed her his smile, would we think of this as a system of female privilege?

  • I'm a great supporter of women who take risks and don't make victimhood into an art. It's not good for women, and it's not good for men. Too many men put all their emotional eggs in one basket - a woman's basket.

  • I am always someone who follows the research more than my self-interest. It certainly has not been in my self-interest to defend men. I've gone from being quite wealthy, when I was defending women, to being quite poor defending men.

  • Those who call me an opportunist are following the old rule: If you can't attack the data, attack the person.

  • The key to wealth is not what we earn. It is in what is spent on us.

  • If you are a woman, you might feel torn between logical agreement and emotional resistance. Why? It seems like a simpler solution to blame men for the pay gap than to engineer your own bridge to higher pay.

  • For example, the equivalent of a woman being treated as a sex object is a man being treated as a success object.

  • Without husbands, women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology.

  • Our main reasons for fearing males having sex with males is that you really had to construct a more powerful social role to keep men in their place than you did to keep women in their place.

  • Let's face it: men do a lot of things in the workplace that women just don't do.

  • When women criticized men, I called it 'insight'... When men criticized women, I called it 'sexism' and 'backlash.'

  • And we reduce almost all male-female problems by working on both the female and the male. And that usually means having both sexes take responsibility.

  • Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

  • Men are often a lot less vindictive than women are, because we are rejected constantly every day.

  • The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.

  • When women hold off from marrying men, we call it independence. When men hold off from marrying women, we call it fear of commitment.

  • We take men's obligation to earn money, and when they do it well, we blame them for having power and being oppressors. And when they don't do it all, women just don't marry men who are reading 'I'm Okay, You're Okay' in the unemployment line.

  • A lot of young men are frustrated and looking for someone to blame.

  • In America and in most of the industrialized world, men are coming to be thought of by feminists in very much the same way that Jews were thought of by early Nazis. The comparison is overwhelmingly scary.

  • Feminists have confused opportunity with outcome.

  • Because of the feminist perspective, we have gotten a view of the world that is distorted.

  • Nobody has said to men, 'It is OK if you want to be a full-time dad; find a woman who will support you.'

  • I realized that women's liberation is men's liberation, too.

  • My wife's income allowed me to do what I really loved. I realized that women's liberation is men's liberation, too.

  • Since no one is always right, always being right is really a role model for his children feeling inadequate.

  • Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.

  • It is important for a father who feels pushed away [by the mom] to say, in effect, When you do that, I feel unwanted as a father, or I feel my rough-housing is not bad parenting; it's my contribution to helping our child take risks. Women cannot hear what men do not say.

  • I define power as control over ones life. A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.

  • Women and men look at their life, and women say, What do I need? Do I need more money, or do I need more time? And women are intelligent enough to say, I need more time. And so, women lead balanced lives; men should be learning from women.

  • On a deeper level, if our sons are learning they are obscene, disgusting, and untrustworthy, is this the best preparation for fatherhood? And is it the best preparation for becoming a mother -- to feel this way about her son?

  • So we've moved from an era when women's biology was women's destiny to today, which is an era in which men's biology is men's destiny.

  • [H]umans tend to start the process of change by acknowledging themselves thus blacks asserted black pride and black is beautiful; women declared I am woman, I am strong:;; men are saying I am man, I am okay. After a quarter of a century of male bashing, that's not a bad start.

  • Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs or 'death professions.

  • With men, we blame the victim. We blame men because we have camouflaged men's victimization by teaching men to also be the victimizer. Men's victimizer status camouflages men's victim status.

  • In our society, the sound of men complaining is like nails on a chalkboard.

  • Together, we came to understand how we beg men to express feelings, but then when men do express feelings, we call it sexism, male chauvinism, or backlash.

  • In a sense, in the area of child care, children's relationships with parents' working has come full circle. We have gone from the mom-and-pop store (or mom-and-pop farm), with its integration of child care and work, to children-at-home and dad-at-work; to the mom-plus-daddy working at home, with its integration of childcare and work again. From mom-and-pop back to mom-and-pop.

  • By starving our children of men, we have made them more vulnerable to the very abuse we are trying to prevent.

  • Were we to still be circumcising the hood of the female clitoris, we would not have difficulty considering this a continuation of our tradition to keep girls sexually repressed. America's reflexive continuation of [male] circumcision-without-research reflects the continuation of our tradition to desensitize boys to feelings of pain, to prepare them to question the disposability of their bodies no more than they would question the disposability of their foreskins.

  • When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision.

  • Our love for children is so immediate in part because we feel their powerlessness immediately; conversely, part of the way we deny our love for men is by denying men's powerlessness. Too often we have confused love for men with respect for them, especially for their power to take care of us---which is really just love for ourselves.

  • I found that women entrepreneurs earn 50% less than their male counterparts.

  • Both sexes allow men dentists inside our mouths, but, well, have you ever let a man who is a dental hygienist inside your mouth? The man must earn his way to our private places in a way not required of a woman--he must become the doctor or the dentist, or forget it.

  • Perhaps the best reason to consider the hard sciences is that, well, one study suggests science, engineering, medicine, and dentistry graduates live longer than arts graduates (or law grads). So whatever money you make you can keep a bit longer.

  • The government passed more laws to protect women from dirty jokes than to protect men from death by faulty rafters at a construction site.

  • Irony: While we increasingly hold people more responsible if they drink and drive, we hold women less responsible if they drink and have sex.

  • Men are socialized to trust women until evidence to the contrary surfaces; women are socialized to be suspicious of men until an individual man earns trust.

  • Framework, (...) addiction to female beauty and sex; deprivation of the beautiful woman and sex with her until the man guarantees economic security in return; (...

  • If my parents had made love a tenth of a second earlier or later, I wouldn't exist. What an enormous miracle, just being given life.

  • We always look at the 'Fortune ,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.

  • Hazing is both testing and training to subordinate self to the team.

  • Self-help books for those who believe You can have it all often advise, Follow your bliss and money will follow. With the collapse of the stock markets the reality of trade-offs is more like, When you follow your bliss, it's money you'll miss.

  • The world increasingly allows girls to be whoever they wish to be-- homemaker, mother, secretary, executive.

  • When we hear men are the greater victims of crime, we tend to say, 'Well, it's men hurting other men.' When we hear that blacks are the greater victims, we consider it racist to say, 'Well, it's blacks hurting blacks.' The victim is a victim no matter who the perpetrator was.

  • Now, since I'm a husband and father, discrimination against women isn't just political, it's personal.

  • Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

  • Industrialization created the Father's Catch-22:;: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.

  • It is ironic that a movement that made its reputation championing the irrelevance of biological differences when those differences were to most women's disadvantage immediately returned to biological determinism when those differences were to the most women's advantage.

  • The worst aspect of dating from the perspective of many men is how dating can feel to a man like robbery by social custom - the social custom of him taking money out of his pocket, giving it to her, and calling it a date. To a young man, the worst dates feel like being robbed and rejected. Boys risk death to avoid rejection (e.g., by joining the Army

  • The Government as Substitute Husband did for women what labor unions still have not accomplished for men. And men pay dues for labor unions; the taxpayer pays the dues for feminism. Feminism and government soon become taxpayer-supported women's unions.

  • Asking the legal system to resolve divorce is like asking a boxing coach to be our marriage counselor.

  • I'm an awfully loyal friend. Once I've started a relationship with someone, it's like they are syrup and I'm a pancake. Their syrup gets into my pancake, so to speak.

  • Male-female fusion does not create women's rights. It creates a fusion of rights.

  • Students coming from father-present families score higher in math and science even when they come from weaker schools.

  • A 2001 survey of business owners with MBAs conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology found that money was the primary motivator for only 29% of women, versus 76% of men. Women prioritized flexibility, fulfillment, autonomy and safety.

  • When women are at the height of their beauty power and exercise it, we call it marriage. When men are at the height of their success power and exercise it, we call it a mid-life crisis.

  • Why do we resist giving help to homeless men? In part because we don't understand how our pressure on men to support families often forces men to take transient jobs that are but a step away from homelessness (the death-of-a-salesman jobs, the migrant worker jobs...) and in part because we respond differently to men who fail [than women who fail].

  • No movement calls [migrant workers] oppressed for providing money for women from whom they are receiving neither cooking nor cleaning; for providing their wives with homes while they sleep on the ground.

  • Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another's needs creates empathy.

  • Fear of emotional contact with men out of fear of being a sexual suspect makes boys, ironically, even more powerless before girls. Homophobia is like telling the United States it will be a sissy nation if it doesn't get all its oil from OPEC.

  • By the 1970s, the American woman was being called 'liberated' or 'superwoman' while the American man was being called 'baby killer' if he fought in Vietnam, 'traitor' if he protested, or 'apathetic' if he did neither. Even men who came home paraplegics were literally spit on.

  • Women's scars and rituals involved beauty (piercing ears and noses, binding feet, and wearing corsets); men's involved protecting women. In cultures in which physical strength is still the best way to protect women, as among the Dodos in Uganda, each time a man kills a man, he is awarded a ritual scar; the more scars, the more he is considered eligible.

  • It is in the interests of both sexes to hear the other sex's experience of powerlessness.

  • Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.

  • When I feel very loved, when I nurture and support people, my experience is deepened. I feel connected to a larger purpose and meaning.

  • Men are the Rosie-the-Riveters of parenting: They're brought in only when needed, and considered disposable thereafter.

  • All women's issues are to some degree men's issues and all men's issues are to some degree women's issues because when either sex wins unilaterally both sexes lose.

  • For thousands of years, most marriages were in Stage I--survival-focused. After World War II, marriages increasingly flirted with Stage II--a self-fulfillment focus... Love's definition is in a transition.

  • Boys with a failure to launch are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete.

  • Every movement has radicals. But the important thing is that the radicals are not the leaders.

  • A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman.

  • The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness.

  • Men don't oppress women any more than women oppress men.

  • If a man belittles a woman, it could become a lawsuit. If women belittle men, it's a Hallmark card.

  • In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

  • We have been suckered into believing that, because there are more men at the top than women at the top, that this is a result of discrimination against women. That's been the misconception. It's all about trade-offs. You earn more money, you usually sacrifice something at home.

  • I don't have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous wound in kids due to a lack of their dads.

  • Men have not stacked the decks against women.

  • Throughout my life I have always been amazed that people couldn't listen to other people, that they couldn't hear their best intent, that there seemed to be an enormous need to demonize.

  • Is there discrimination against women? Yes, like the old boys' network. And sometimes discrimination against women becomes discrimination against men: in hazardous fields, women suffer fewer hazards.

  • Is there discrimination against women? Yes. There's no denying that the old boys' network is alive and well. But there's also discrimination against men.

  • Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

  • Women and men look at their life, and women say, 'What do I need? Do I need more money, or do I need more time?' And women are intelligent enough to say, 'I need more time.' And so, women lead balanced lives; men should be learning from women.

  • The average full-time working male works more than a full-time working female.

  • [Success as panacea and trap:] The less a man is willing to give up a sex object, the more he'll be trapped into becoming a success object.

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