Warren Farrell Quotations | Page 2

When we suggest that men are at the top because men discriminate, we miss the point. Men are at the top of the work hierarchy because work has been primarily men's responsibility.

Unless a woman asks men out (the first time) as often as men ask her out, then the assertion He asked me out, therefore he pays is just a double jeopardy of the male role: he must not only do the asking, he must pay extra for risking extra rejection.

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.

Just as women needed the help of the law to enter the workplace in the 20th century, men will need the help of the law to love their children in the 21st century.

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

When birth control pills were available in Europe but not in the United States, American women created an uproar about how the unwillingness to make the pill available showed a contempt for the lives of women... When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released birth control pills with high dosages of hormones that were later found to be unnecessarily high, they were attacked for not caring about women enough to do the necessary tests.

In the past we believed both sexes were born with original sin. Today, we have come to unconsciously believe in the original sin of boys, but the original innocence of girls.

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.

A shared choice movement sees the fetus as the genes of a woman and the genes of a man; the flesh of the woman, the flesh of the man; the bone of a woman, the bone of a man; the responsibility of a woman, the responsibility of a man; the rights of a woman, the rights of a man. It desires a transition to equality.

Sex role training becomes divorce training.

There are 25 differences in the way women and men behave in the workplace. These 25 differences lead to men receiving higher pay and women having better lives or at least more balanced lives.

The 'enduring theme' [in fiction] of male competition and female competition for the hero/survivor has taken us from the fittest surviving to the brink of no one surviving. Sex roles have gone from functional to dysfunctional almost overnight. This is why the enduring theme must be questioned now.

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.

There is what might be called a Catch-22 of hazardous occupations: The more hazardous the job, the more men; the more men, the less we care about making the job safer. The Catch-22 of hazardous occupations creates a 'glass cellar' which few women wish to enter. Women are alienated not just out of the fear of being hurt on the job, but by an atmosphere that can make a hazardous job more hazardous than it needs to be.

A person working 45 hours per week averages 44% more income than someone working 40 hours per week. That's 44% more income for 13% more time.

Women's genetic celebrity power magnifies men's protector instinct. It inspires the government-as-substitute-husband. Men's addiction to the genetic celebrity is either invisible or in the denial stage thus we either don't see it, or when confronted, deny it.

During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women [chapter] in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives they were the wives of male executives. As long as her income came from her husband, she was not feeling generous when affirmative action let another woman have a head start vying for her husband's (her) income.

Alan Alda is loved not because he's sensitive, but because he's successful and sensitive.

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.

Women-in-jeopardy movies are, in essence, the updated versions of men dying to save the princess from the dragon to earn her love. They are modern-day training films for teaching women to select the best protectors while weeding out the rest.

Employers are NOT prohibited from practicing sex discrimination in hiring and promoting employees.

Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all.

One danger of a man succeeding is that it teaches his wife and daughter not to worry about success.

When divorces meant marriage no longer provided security for a lifetime, women adjusted by focusing on careers as empowerment. But when the sacrifice of a career met the sacrifices in a career, the fantasy of a career became the reality of trade-offs. Women developed career ambivalence.

Perhaps the most prevailing expectation of men is our Superman expectation: the fear we are merely Clark Kents who won't be accepted unless we are a Superman.

Women's greater social desirability and beauty power afford opportunities for creating both measurable and invisible income. While the opportunities are available to almost all women and some men, they are available in abundance to the genetic celebrity ... a woman so beautiful that men do more than look and talk--they follow her.

People who get higher pay are more willing to relocate--especially to undesirable locations at the company's behest... A corporate secretary may change companies in the same town; a corporate executive is more likely to change towns with the same company. A talented corporate secretary sees an invitation to relocate as an invitation; a future corporate executive sees an invitation to relocate as an opportunity--and an obligation.

If an employer had to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman could do for 59 cents, why would anyone hire a man?

In brief, when a man fails as a wallet, we put him in prison; when a woman fails as a mother, we offer her social services. We're taking a criminal approach to men, a social services approach to women.

The irony of primary parent laws is that on the one hand feminists were arguing for women's equal rights to jointly-created career assets that emanated from the male financial womb, but arguing against men's equal rights to jointly-created children that emanated from the woman's child-bearing womb.

Is a man's body at stake? Any time a man is asked to work to pay child support, he is using his body, his time, his life -- not for nine months, but for a minimum of 18 to 21 years. So the motto of the feminist with integrity is, It's a woman's and man's right to choose because it is a woman's and man's body at stake.

Dads in the family are even more important than women in the workplace: The workplace benefits from women, but the family needs dads.

A family that knows how to play together has the tools to stay together.

The more the father is involved, the more easily the child makes open, receptive, and trusting contact with new people in its life.

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

If a female employee is offended, a boss would like her to tell him, not sue him.

If we hold the married man accountable for finances gone legally awry, then the married woman should be held accountable for children who go awry.

The sexist perception that violence by anyone against only women is anti-woman while violence by a woman against only men is just generic violence creates a political demand for laws that are even more protective of women.

All societies that have survived have survived based on their ability to prepare their sons to be disposable, in war and at work--and therefore as dads.

Empathy is at the core of family stability and love. I've never had a couple come to me and say, I want a divorce; my partner understands me.

[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.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

Men tuned into women but not tuned into their own hurts usually retained the attitude that women needed special protection.

Crime, especially crime involving money, reflects the gap between the expectation to provide and the ability to provide... If we really want men to commit crime as infrequently as women, we can start by not expecting men to provide for women more than we expect women to provide for men.

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

Sexual harassment in the workplace confuses rewards for performance with rewards for attractiveness and sexual availability.

Sexual harassment legislation in its present form makes all men unequal to all women.

Our children are better served by speaking not of visitation versus custody, but of parent time.

Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.

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

And with the rape, I was showing why the rape statistics are exaggerated, and saying that date rape was much more complex than the way feminists had portrayed it, as men oppressing women.

When a dad admits he is wrong or asks for help, he allows the child to see him- or herself as adequate even when she or he is also wrong. It encourages children to make suggestions and, therefore, to discover their creativity because they have a chance of making a contribution.

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.

Women do not enter a profession in significant numbers until it is physically safe. So until we care enough about men's safety to turn the death professions into safe professions, we in effect discriminate against women. But when we overprotect women and only women it also leads to discrimination against women. ...If [an employer works] for a large company for which quotas prevent discrimination, they find themselves increasingly hiring free-lancers rather than taking on a woman and therefore a possible sexual harassment lawsuit...

Options allow a woman to tailor her role to her personality, but if a man expects to provide well, he expects to wear a suit, not to wear what suits him.

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.

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

The legal bias for special protection for women has begun to wreak havoc with the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

A man convicted of murder is twenty times more likely than a woman convicted of murder to receive the death penalty... Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, 120 men and only 1 woman have actually been executed. The woman, from North Carolina, said she preferred to be executed... In North Carolina, a man who commits second-degree murder receives a sentence on average of 12.6 years longer than a woman who commits second-degree murder.

In one decade, women had gotten more protection against offensive jokes in the workplace than men had gotten in centuries against being killed in the workplace.

For the first time in human history the psychology that is a prerequisite for intimacy has become the psychology that is a prerequisite for species survival.

When men in relationships have more money, we say they have the power. When women in relationships have more money, we say they are being used.

Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.

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.

After a divorce, men's biggest fear is, typically, losing their children (women's is poverty).

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.

Here's the pay paradox that Why Men Earn More explains: Men earn more money, therefore men have more power; and men earn more money, therefore men have less power (earning more money as an obligation, not an option). The opposite is true for women: Women earn less money, therefore women have less power; and women earn less money, therefore women have more power (the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job).

The deeper purpose of a more positive attitude toward men is a better life for the children who are parented by the men who are their dads and stepdads; less shame for our sons who will become men; and, for our daughters, a deeper understanding of men's desire to please that leaves them feeling their willingness to please is not unrequited but returned--allowing our daughters to feel less lonely and more loved. If we earn more and love less, we pay for a home in which we do not live.

As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.

Men give the same lines to different women for the same reason women wear the same perfume for different men; we all try the things that work.

Women attempt suicide more often because they want to become the priority of those they love rather than always prioritizing them.

Our focus on discrimination against women during the past 30 years has blinded us to opportunities for women.

Visitation reflects the era of the absentee father; parent time influences the re-emergence of the involved father. Visitation reflects the destruction of the family; parent time influences the reconstruction of the family. Parent time influences an era that understands that as either parents loses, so lose the 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.

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

Although our grammar schools are teaching a whole generation computer language to adjust to the technological needs of a Stage II [post survival-focused] society, we have neglected to teach this generation relationship language and conflict resolution skills to address the social and psychological needs of a Stage II society. And when it is taught, in countries like Germany, although called social competence it focuses on workplace teamwork -- still on survival, breadwinner oriented work goals.

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

Sometimes I have a feeling, when I look back on my life, that all I've been through has prepared me perfectly for just what I'm doing now.

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.

Ideally there should not be a men's movement but a gender transition movement; only the power of the women's movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men's movement. And this creates a special challenge for men: There are few political movements filled with healthy people, yet few healthy changes have occurred without political movements.

By giving women training to sue a company for a 'hostile environment' if someone tells a dirty joke, we are training women to run to the Government as Substitute Husband (or Father). This gets companies to fear women, but not to respect women. The best preparation we can give women to succeed in the workplace is the preparation to overcome barriers rather than to sue: successful people don't sue, they succeed.

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.

I define power as control over one's life. Pay is not about power. Pay is about giving up power to get the power of pay.

At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.

Men may be way behind in creating choices for themselves, but have actually been quiet supporters of the choices women want for themselves.

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.

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

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.

I am often asked why men don't get as worked up as they might about women particularly poor women having to use their bodies as prostitutes. Because most men unconsciously experience themselves as prostitutes every day the miner, the firefighter, the construction worker, the logger, the soldier, the meatpacker these men are prostitutes in the direct sense: they sacrifice their bodies for money and for their families.

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.

When a parent denies a child its parent time, that parent is denying the child its child support -- its psychological child support.

On an unconscious level, the demonization of sexuality usually implies the demonization of males and the victimization of females.

As long as society tells men to be the salespersons of sex, it is sexist for society to put only men in jail if they sell well. We don't put other salespersons in jail for buying clients drinks and successfully transforming a "no" into a "maybe" into a "yes." If the client makes a choice to drink too much and the "yes" turns out to be a bad decision, it is the client who gets fired, not the salesperson.

Laws are made with such attention to protecting women that, if a man's constitutional rights conflict with a woman's protection, his rights disintegrate before her protection disintegrates.

The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother's time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours... It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.

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

[With respect to child custody] a woman has no right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a man's life any more than a man would have the right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a woman's life.

But when feminists suggest that God might be a She without suggesting that the Devil might also be female, they must be opposed.

In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor.

In 1969, nationwide, female professors who had never been married and never published earned 145% of their counterpart male colleagues.