Warren Farrell Quotes (467 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. xvii.
Context: Was it possible for the sexes to hear each other without saying, My powerlessness is greater than your powerlessness? It was becoming obvious each sex had a unique experience of both power and powerlessness. In my mind's eye I began to visualize a listening matrix as a framework within which we could hear these different experiences. It looked like this:

“Programs like TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, formerly known as AFDC) and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) subsidize the exclusion of dads. In effect, they create, as we have seen, future welfare recipients. Or tax spenders.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 114.

“Our choice of partners is one of the clearest statements about our choice of values.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 341.

“Technology is dad-at-home friendly. It allows the family to be more creative and role flexible than it ever has in the past without being poor in the process.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 239.

“In the past, socializing men to become the best killer-protectors led to the survival of the “fittest.” In the future, with nuclear technology, training killers is more likely to lead to the destruction of everyone.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 3.

“We often hear, “Rape is rape, right?” No. A stranger forcing himself on a woman at knife point is different from a man and woman having sex while drunk and having regrets the morning. What is different? When a woman agrees to a date, she does not make a choice to be sexual, but she does make a choice to explore sexual possibilities. The woman makes no such choice with a stranger or an acquaintance.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 315.

“The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“If power means having control over one's own life, then perhaps there is no better ranking of the impact of sex roles and racism on power over our own lives than life expectancy.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 30.

“Both parents’ rights must exist primarily to assist the parents in fulfilling their responsibilities. Primarily does not mean exclusively.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 126.

“The teenage female has less demand to perform and more resources to attract love. Her body and mind are more genetic gifts.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 166.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994), p. 163.

“We are the offspring of approval-seekers. We want approval so badly that we vacillate between conforming to get it and standing out (being outstanding) to get it.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 24.

“Listening is self-empowerment via the empowerment of others.”

Warren Farrell

pg. 41.
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“If our binoculars search for our partner’s best intent, it will usually be found.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 32.

“I soon saw that feminists who supported the “Primary Parent Theory” were not in favor of equality of opportunity, but of unequal opportunism.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 167.

“When a woman appears to express fear, we cannot assure her without at least releasing her from responsibility; when we interpret the same emotion in a man as anger, we want to blame him and be certain he acknowledges responsibility. We want to find her guiltless; we want to find him guilty.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 22.

“Is loving men contradictory to feminism? Hardly. Every true feminist, I believe, is deepened and matured by being also a masculinist--a person who understands the male search for equality and approval as the male experiences it. As is every masculinist deepened by being a feminist (a person who understands the female search for equality and approval as the female experiences it.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 368.

“For me, the massiveness of what I don’t know is one way I experience God. It creates in me a feeling of humility and a sense of gratitude.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994), p. 47.

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

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 31.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 310.

“The more a man is trained to “be a man,” the more he is trained to protect women and children, not hurt women and children. He is trained to volunteer to die before even a stranger is hurt – especially a woman or child.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“Helping men express feelings starts with understanding why men don’t express them.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 158.

“Men for whom divorce means walking out of their children’s lives except when they choose to see the children are the male equivalent of the adolescent feminists: men who want options without obligations. Morally, they have no right to walk out. A law that allows that is similarly immoral. “Primary Parent” laws are just such laws.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 167.

“It is also possible for a woman to go back to a man’s room, tell him she doesn’t want to have intercourse, mean it, start kissing, have intercourse, and then wish she hadn’t in the morning. How? Kissing is like eating potato chips. Before we know it, we’ve gone further than we said we would.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 311.

“On oilrigs men who only work an 8-hour day are contemptuously called nine-to-fivers. In stark contrast, women are more likely not to take risks, even when the risks are minimal. What's the message to our sons? Our praise of our sons when they risk physical danger teaches them that a willingness to be physically abused creates love. Abuse-as-love? Yes.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 39.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 314.

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

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 52.

“When I eat a meal, I think of all the people whose labor has contributed to my nourishment, and that thought nourishes my appreciation. I hope it nourishes you too.”

Warren Farrell

Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994)

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 139.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 167.

“The challenge is shifting our appreciation: being willing to give up some of dad’s money for more of dad’s love. And, in the process, altering the psyche that makes him lovable.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 238.

“[This is] the basis of the Innocent Woman Defense —the Innocent Woman Principle : Women are believed when they say they are innocent of violence and most easily doubted when they say they are guilty of violence.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 255.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 128.

“Choosing safety is a choice of life over career.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 35.

“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.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 44.

“In brief, part of the need for funding comes from the need to create balance to a third of a century of funding an “attitude” toward men. And part comes from the need to study how both sexes can make a transition from those rigid roles to more flexible roads with a clear enough road map to not go over too many cliffs along the way…”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 241.

“When we look at the pay of men and women who do work equal hours, two discoveries are quite astonishing:
--When women and men work less than 40 hours a week, the women earn more than the men;
--When men and women work more than 40, the men earn more than the women.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 79.

“Even allegedly gender-neutral words like “sexist” imply slights only against women.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“Cosmopolitan is the best-selling magazine to single women. Cosmo tells single women how they can get a man to commit and achieve her primary fantasy of better homes and gardens. It’s the single female’s version of Playboy. Pornography is the male primary fantasy--access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection--at a price he can afford!”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 18.

“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.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. xx-xxi.

“In a democracy, a government’s policies are rarely questioned until the underlying assumptions that create them are questioned.”

Warren Farrell

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 147.

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

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 167.

“The nature of men’s responsibilities distanced men from feelings, whereas the nature of women’s responsibilities encouraged the expression of feelings.”

Warren Farrell

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

“Veterans of every war suffer Battered Man Syndrome in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder. The emotional consequences are also with them for years. But if a sufferer killed Admiral Zumwalt for ordering the spraying of Agent Orange, he would be convicted for murder. Men who suffer Battered Man Syndrome are not allowed to attack their abuser and call it self-defense.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 264.

“deprivation of the beautiful woman and sex with her until the man guarantees economic security in return; (…)”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part IV: Where do we go from here, p. 358.

“Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being "given up for a younger woman" is for a woman.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 174.

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