Top 280 Quotes & Sayings by Warren Farrell - Page 3

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.

He and she become selective at different points; she can be selective when he wants his primary fantasy - sex; he can be selective when she wants her primary fantasy - commitment.

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.

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.

We have entered 'The Era of the Three-Option Woman and the No-Option Man.'

Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.

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.

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.

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.

If a woman isn't being hazed, she's not being tested; therefore, she is not being trusted.

In San Diego there is a highly popular course called How to Marry Money. Note that the marriage is to money - not to a person. I inquired about the percentage of men attending... 'The course is really for women,' [the instructor replied,] 'it's not relevant to men.'

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.

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.

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.

In the case of a man and a woman [accused of commiting a crime together], both will often agree to the man taking the rap despite the man being more likely to receive a longer sentence and more likely to be raped in prison. If blacks were agreeing to do that for whites, the black community would be smart enough to call that 'learned subservience.'

When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.

How can I call security a woman's primary fantasy if I am saying it is also her primary need? Because while her primary need is the security of a home and a family circle, her primary fantasy is that someone else will earn enough to pay for them. Hence the focus of 2 billion women on the latest royal wedding.

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

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

When a government requires a man to support a child he was tricked into creating, that government subsidizes fraud. No. It is worse than that: It subsidizes the woman using a man's body for 18-21 years without his consent.

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.

Men will not change as long as women 'marry up.' Men won't change until we have a perspective on how powerless power makes us. A woman cannot help a man change until she has a perspective on how powerless power makes men.

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.

The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.

[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.

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

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.

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

The less a man is willing to give up a sex object, the more he'll be trapped into becoming a success object.

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.

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.

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

Only when a woman shares male risks can she really begin to understand men.

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.

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

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.

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.

Feminists often discuss women having two jobs: work and children. True. But no one discusses those divorced and remarried men who have three jobs: work, and two sets of children to nurture and financially support.

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

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 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?

Letting men die is a money-saving device. Safety costs money as one safety official put it, 'When everything is hurry, hurry, hurry, when you start pressuring people and taking shortcuts, things can go wrong. And then people die.' No. And then men die.

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

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

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.

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.

Humans 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.

Male makeup is men's titles, status and paying for dates. Makeup is what both sexes use to bridge the gap between the power they have and the power they'd like to have. Both male and female makeup are compensations for feelings of powerlessness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women.

To me, God is the accumulated wisdom I've gathered throughout my life. When I pay attention, my body gives me a printout of this wisdom.

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.

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.

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.