Warren Farrell

Warren Farrell (born June 26, 1943) is an American educator, activist and author of seven books on men's issues with women. He has served on the New York City Board of the National Organization for Women, and is a prominent voice in the Men's movement.

Warren Farrell, 2011

Quotes

Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988)

• 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:
  • p. xvii.

• 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.
  • p. xx-xxi.

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

• Women’s vulnerability confessing their desire to see men as a success object is matched by men’s confession of compulsiveness of sexual desire for women.
  • p. xxvi.

• 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.
  • p. xxvii.

• Ralph had lost real power by trying to gain the appearance of power. He was a leader. But he was following a program for leaders ; therefore, he was a follower... he was, as he put it, a high-level mediocre.
  • p. 9.

• Most women’s ideal is to not be sexual until nine conditions are met: physical attraction; respect; emotional compatibility; intelligence; singleness; success (or potential ); being asked out; being paid for; and the man risking rejection by initiating the first kiss…. Men want sex as long as only one condition is met—physical attraction.
  • p. 13.

• The best-selling magazines to men are Playboy and Penthouse. These represent men’s primary fantasy: access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection. The best-selling magazines to women are Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, representing the female primary fantasy: better homes and gardens and a family circle.
  • p. 18.

• 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!
  • p. 18.

• 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.
  • p. 16.

• 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.'
  • p. 43.

• When men give lines, women learn to not trust men. When women wear makeup, men learn to not trust women. Male lines and female makeup are divorce training.
  • p. 71-72.

• The Female Western is the battle between the good and evil methods of getting the men who perform best.
  • p. 73.

• From evening soaps to preteen romances, [the message is that] inner values are for losers.
  • p. 73.

• So while in men’s magazines success is a power tool to get sex and love, and therefore the look of success is crucial, in women’s magazines love and sex are power tools to get success—and therefore both the look of love and the sexual tease/promise are crucial.
  • p. 78-79.

• 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.
  • p. 91.

• 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.
  • p. 96.

• 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.
  • p. 101.

• From the male perspective, when commitment is associated with diamonds and mortgages, promises of love can feel like promises of payment.
  • p. 103.

• 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.
  • p. 103.

• 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.
  • p. 105.

• [M]en who work to make it as computer whizzes or owners of black Porsches[...] are confused when they're told they are not vulnerable enough. We can't fall in love with men who appear invulnerable and expect vulnerability. Why did he want a black Porsche? Because he never saw an ugly woman get out of one.
  • p. 106.

• Both sexes work on their lines before they appear onstage. His lines are a lifetime of work; her introductory 'line' is her appearance--or her lack of lines. Just as careers give men power, so beauty gives women power. But just as the comparison between herself and the most beautiful women makes a woman feel powerless, so the comparison between himself and the most successful men makes a man feel powerless.
  • p. 106.

• Male Message 1 is subconsciously experienced by the boy like this: ‘Some girls in my class already look like movie stars. If they wanted me as much as I want them, then I’d know I was okay. They are genetic celebrities. I am a genetic groupie.’
  • p. 111.

• When women's consciousness was raised, women ended up seeing housework as their shit work ; when men's consciousness is raised, risking sexual rejection will be seen as the male shit work .
  • p. 123.

• 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.
  • p. 128.

• [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.
  • p. 134.

• Alan Alda is loved not because he's sensitive, but because he's successful and sensitive.
  • p. 134.

• Sex role training becomes divorce training.
  • p. 136.

• One danger of a man succeeding is that it teaches his wife and daughter not to worry about success.
  • p. 148.

• Commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. In exchange for forfeiting his primary fantasy, what does he hope to fulfill? His primary need: intimacy.
  • p. 150.

• A single woman who supports herself is called a career woman, while a single man who supports himself is called a playboy…Ironically, a woman who commits and becomes financially dependent is considered more mature than a man who does not commit but is financially independent.
  • p. 154.

• A man cannot tell whether a woman is in love with him or his security blanket until she is financially and psychologically independent enough to leave. Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love.
  • p. 182.

• Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.
  • p. 194.

• 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.
  • p. 215.

• 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.
  • p. 246.

• 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.
  • p. 218.

• The rules of sexism do not free men from the terror of violence; they only keep men from complaining about it.
  • p. 232.

• He gets sex, she gets sex; if that is considered unequal, no wonder men are afraid of commitment.
  • p. 240.

• 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.
  • p. 277.

• 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.
  • p. 310.

• 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.
  • p. 314.

• I would suggest that just as women who make it in the world of business need male business mentors, perhaps men who make it in the world of emotions will need female emotional mentors.
  • p. 317.

• Our choice of partners is one of the clearest statements about our choice of values.
  • p. 341.

• Only when a woman shares male risks can she really begin to understand men.
  • p. 355.

• 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.
  • p. 360.

• 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.
  • p. 371.

• 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).
  • p. 368.

The Myth of Male Power (1993)

Simon and Schuster, 1st Ed., 1993; 2nd Ed., Berkely, 2000)

Part 1: The Myth of Male Power

• The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness.
  • p. 13.

• Feminism has taught women to sue men for sexual harassment or date rape when men initiate with the wrong person or with the wrong timing; no one has taught men to sue women for sexual trauma for saying “yes,” then “no,” then “yes.” … Men [are] still expected to initiate, but now, if they [do] it badly, they could go to jail.
  • p. 16.

• In post offices throughout the United States, Selective Service posters [reading "A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do] remind men that only they must register for the draft. If the Post Office had a poster saying "A Jew's Gotta Do What A Jew's Gotta Do..." or if "A Woman's Gotta Do..." were written across the body of a pregnant woman...
  • p. 28.

• 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.
  • Part I.

• There are many ways in which a woman experiences a greater sense of powerlessness than her male counterpart: the fears of pregnancy, aging, rape, date rape, and being physically overpowered; less socialization to take a career that pays enough to support a husband and children[...] Fortunately, almost all industrialized nations have acknowledged these female experiences. Unfortunately, they have acknowledged only the female experience.
  • p. 28.

• 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.
  • p. 30.

• ITEM: The Mike Tyson trial. The hotel in which the jury is sequestered goes ablaze. Two firefighters die saving its occupants. The trial of Mike Tyson made us increasingly aware of men-as-rapists. The firefighters' deaths did not make us increasingly aware of men-as-saviors. We were more aware of one man doing harm than of two men saving...
  • p. 36.

• It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim... Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'...
  • p. 40.

• We have entered 'The Era of the Three-Option Woman and the No-Option Man.'
  • p. 52.

• In Stage I, divorces were not allowed, so men's [sexual] affairs did not put women's economic security in jeopardy; in Stage II, affairs could lead to divorce, so men's affairs did place women's economic security in jeopardy. We did not want political leaders who would be role models for behavior that would put women's economic security in jeopardy.
  • p. 63.

• In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.
  • p. 65.

• 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.
  • p. 42.

• 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.
  • p. 44.

• 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.
  • p. 46.

• 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.
  • p. 72.

• Today, violence against women is rightly abhorred. But we call violence against men entertainment. Think of football, boxing, wrestling... All are games used to sugarcoat violence against men, originally in need of sugarcoating so our team --or our society --could bribe its best protectors to sacrifice themselves.
  • p. 75.

• Imagine how we would feel if I began this section saying, Today, violence against women is rightly applauded. We would know I favored the death of women; when we applaud for violence against men, we favor the death of men. We do it because we have learned that the more effectively we prepare men to sacrifice themselves, the more we are protected.
  • p. 76.

• Men often become nonviolent in societies that (1) have adequate amounts of food, (2) have adequate amounts of water, and (3) perceive themselves as isolated from attack. For example, the Tahitian men, the Minoan men on Crete, and the Central Malaysian Semai were nonviolent during the period in their history when all three of these conditions prevailed.
  • p. 77.

• It is often said that women are a civilizing balance to the innately warlike male. By taking care of the killing for women it could be said that men civilized women. When survival was the issue, men killing to protect what women bore was the male form of nurturance.
  • p. 79.

• How, then, can patriarchy be defined? Perhaps it can best be defined as the male area of dominance, responsibility, and subservience in a culture, reinforced by both sexes for the purpose of serving both sexes’ survival needs. How can matriarchy be defined? As the female area of dominance, responsibility, and subservience in a culture, reinforced by both sexes for the purpose of serving both sexes’ survival needs.
  • p. 98.

Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex

• 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.’
  • p. 105.

• 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.
  • p. 111.

• When mining… and other death professions are discussed in feminist publications, they are portrayed as examples of the male power system, as male-only clubs. However, when Ms. Magazine profiled female miners, the emphasis was on how the woman was ‘forced’ to take a job in the mines because it paid the best, and how taking such a job was the only way she could support her family.
  • p. 116.

• 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.
  • p. 119.

• 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…
  • p. 121.

• The more chauvinist the country, the more it protects women. And therefore the more it limits women. Like the United States, [Italy, Spain, and Denmark] give women options without obligations. These countries are, therefore, still male chauvinist… The degree to which a country is emancipated is the degree to which it frees men from the obligation to protect women and socializes women to equally protect men.
  • p. 136.

• Who causes war? War is caused by our primal fear of not surviving. This is a two-sex fear. And because the fear is so primal, we are easily seduced into exaggerating the evil intent of anyone [who] might threaten our survival. Why? One mistake of underestimating a threat could leave everyone wiped out; many mistakes of overestimating would just leave men wiped out.
  • p. 142.

• Parade magazine announces that 40 million Soviet men were killed between 1914 and 1945. The magazine’s headline reads ‘Short End of the Stick’. Because men died? No. The women were seen as getting the short end of the stick because they were stuck with factory and street-cleaner positions the men weren’t around to do.
  • p. 145.

• Men are likely to be not only the warriors of war but also the warriors of peace. Almost all those who risk their lives, are put in jail, or are killed for peace are men. While some of the peace warriors—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold—are remembered, most are forgotten. Remember Norm Morrison? After years of protesting the Vietnam war, Norm doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire on the steps of the Pentagon[…] But Norm Morrison is forgotten.
  • p. 153.

• 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.
  • p. 155.

• The teenage female has less demand to perform and more resources to attract love. Her body and mind are more genetic gifts.
  • p. 166.

• What makes a teenage boy’s anxiety so overwhelming is that a teenage boy’s socialization is the demand to perform without the resources to perform. As a result, not only are his risks many, but his failures many. And so apparent… Second, the biggest winners—the football players—are receiving love via self-abuse. For some boys, receiving love via self-abuse creates anxiety. But losing love creates even more anxiety.
  • p. 167.

• The world increasingly allows girls to be whoever they wish to be-- homemaker, mother, secretary, executive.
  • p. 167.

• In the past, both sexes were anxious about sex and pregnancy. Now the pill minimizes her anxiety and condoms increase his. Now the pimple faced boy must still risk rejection while also overcoming his own fear of herpes and AIDS and reassuring her there is nothing to fear. He must still do the sexual risk-taking, but now he can be put in jail if he takes risks too quickly or be called a wimp if he doesn’t take them quickly enough.
  • p. 168.

• Even a 30-year-old man whose wife dies is eleven times more likely to commit suicide than a 30-year-old man whose wife is living. At age 30, when men can bury themselves in their jobs and are physically and financially attractive to women, the loss of the one woman a man loves is so devastating it is often not softened even by the opportunities for many women… in brief, it is the loss of love that devastates men.
  • p. 169.

• Women attempt suicide more often because they want to become the priority of those they love rather than always prioritizing them.
  • p. 171.

• [T]he men who are successful have become the most dependent on success to attract love. When this man loses his success, he often fears he will lose love.
  • p. 172.

• Unemployment to a man is the psychological equivalent of rape to a woman.
  • p. 172.

• Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being "given up for a younger woman" is for a woman.
  • p. 174.

• The reporting of depression is often associated with the dependency of women on men. But it is dependency on men successful enough to allow a woman the time to think about more than survival. Which is why, when we think about women who report depression, we think of middle-class women, not working-class women. The working-class woman is too worried about survival to report depression. Depression is a diagnosis that tends to increase among those with the luxury of worrying about something other than survival. The more a person is in Stage II, the more that person can afford to focus on depression.
  • p. 177.

• 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.
  • p. 174.

• When women and men have approximately equal life expectancies, it seems to be because women die not only in childbirth (fewer than thought) but about equal from… diseases; poor sanitation and water; inadequate healthcare; and diseases of malnutrition. In industrialized societies, early deaths are caused more by diseases triggered by stress, which breaks down the immune system. It is since stress has become the key factor that men have died so much sooner than women.
  • p. 182.

• 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.
  • p. 183.

• The New England Journal of Medicine has recently reported that speaking about one’s faults creates abnormalities in the pulsations of our heart. Tiny abnormalities? No. Abnormalities as great as those produced by riding a stationary bicycle to the point of either exhaustion or chest pain. Perhaps [the criticisms men exchange beginning with adolescence], then, contribute to men being four times more likely than women to suffer heart disease before age fifty. In essence, our sons might be practicing heart-disease training.
  • p. 186.

• In brief, we do more research on men in prison, men in the military, and men in general than we do on women for the same reason we do more research on rats than we do on humans.
  • p. 189.

• Although a government study found that men’s health was much worse than women’s health or the health of any minority group, headlines around the country read: ‘Minorities Face Large Health Care Gap.’ They did not say: ‘Men Face Large Health Care Gap.’ Why? Because we associate the sacrifice of men’s lives with the saving of the rest of us, and this association leads us to carry in our unconscious an incentive not to care about men living longer.
  • p. 196.

• 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.
  • p. 195.

• Unfortunately, the process of gaining money in [a man’s] life usually meant alienating the wife in his life. Sometimes this leads to a legal divorce, but more often to a psychological divorce. Which is why a survey of doctors’ wives reported in Medical/Mrs. Found the doctors’ wives harboring hostility that was ‘stunning to behold.’ Yet the wives remained married to the doctors. Why? More than anything else, the wives said, they wanted security from marriage… the men, then, were often prostitutes to an illusion of emotional security. At least their wives had the reality of economic security.
  • p. 203.

• Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women.
  • p. 206.

• Gay sex meant two hours of sexual pleasure in exchange for two hours of sexual pleasure. Heterosexual sex meant two hours of sexual pleasure in exchange for a lifetime of responsibility. Heterosexuality was a bad deal! The fear behind homophobia was that no one would be providing for the next generation. Everybody would be having fun. Thus fun became a sign of immaturity; hedonism in many forms became illegal.
  • p. 208.

• 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].
  • p. 209.

• Men’s immediate path from the Insanity Track to the Sanity Track is in demanding that both sexes have the freedom to strike a balance between homeplace and workplace. Men must expect their wives to financially support them to be fathers as much as they now financially support their wives to be mothers. Women must have our approval to marry the warrior of love rather than the warrior of money.
  • p. 212.

• As females enter the workplace, will our tendency to protect women create rules that will also protect men? Yes and no. Yes, when, for example, the new concern for doctors working fewer than eighty hours per week also affects men. No, when working-class jobs get divided into the males taking the hazardous jobs… and women taking safer jobs. And in professional careers, if males take irregular hours and specialties such as surgery, while females take regular hours and specialties like psychiatry, then we will only reinforce the female-protected class and the male-disposable class.
  • p. 213.

• Blacks are six times more likely than whites to be victims of homicides.
  • p. 214.

• 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.
  • p. 215.

• 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.
  • p. 215-216.

• 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.
  • p. 221.

• Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.
  • p. 221.

• 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.
  • p. 223.

• 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.
  • p. 225.

• 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.
  • p. 228.

• Men are not only women's unpaid bodyguards, they actually pay to be a woman's bodyguard.
  • p. 230.

• Women will risk their lives to protect children, but rarely risk their lives to protect an adult man.
  • p. 230.

• One grand fallacy of the women's movement: Expecting work to mean "power" and "self-fulfillment."
  • p. 232.

• 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.
  • p. 233.

• 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.
  • p. 237.

• Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.
  • p. 238.

• The legal bias for special protection for women has begun to wreak havoc with the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.
  • p. 238.

Part III: Government as substitute husband

• 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.
  • p. 240.

• 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.’
  • p. 243.

• Since 1954, then, approximately 70,000 women have murdered; their victims include about 60,000 men, but, as we saw in the second Item of this chapter, not one woman has been executed after killing only a man. For nearly four decades now, we have become increasingly protective of women and decreasingly protective of men—even if that boy is a legal minor, as was Heath Wilkins.
  • p. 244.

• 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.
  • p. 250.

• Neither men nor women are exempt from killing loved ones. The difference is in what happens to them when they do. Twelve distinct female-only defenses allow a woman who commits a premeditated murder to have the charges dropped or significantly reduced. No man has successfully used any of these defenses in similar circumstances.
  • p. 254.

• [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.
  • p. 255.

• Farrell’s other eleven defenses are The PMS Defense ; The Husband Defense (Warren, I don’t quite know how to summarize this one—not sure I get it); The ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ Defense, aka Learned Helplessness; ‘The Depressed Mother’ Defense ; The ‘Mothers Don’t Kill’ Defense ; The ‘Children Need Their Mother’ Defense ; The ‘Blame-The-Father, Understand-The-Mother’ Defense ; The ‘My Child, My Right To Abuse It’ Defense ; The Plea Bargain Defense ; The Svengali Defense ; and The Contract Killing Defense.
  • Chapter 12.

• 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.
  • p. 264.

• Contract killings never get recorded as a woman killing a man.
  • p. 281.

• We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.
  • p. 282.

• Sexual harassment in the workplace confuses rewards for performance with rewards for attractiveness and sexual availability.
  • p. 284-5.

• [A man’s actions] are illegal if a woman decides [it creates a hostile environment], and if a man committed the ‘offense’… Who defines ‘hostile environment’? The woman. Not even the man’s intent makes a legal difference. In all other criminal behavior, intent makes all the difference. Even in homicide. Sexual harassment legislation in its present form makes all man unequal to all women. It is in blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection without regard of sex. Thus the political will to protect only women prevails over the constitutional mandate to protect both sexes equally.
  • p. 288.

• Sexual harassment legislation in its present form makes all men unequal to all women.
  • p. 288.

• 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.
  • p. 288.

• Sexual harassment legislation feels unfair to men because if they sued over an ethnic joke, or over a woman discussing pornography or asking them out, they’d be laughed out of the company.
  • p. 289.

• In a sense, sexual harassment lawsuits are just the latest version of the female selection process—allowing her to select for men who care enough for her to put their career at risk; who have enough finesse to initiate without becoming a jerk and enough guts to initiate despite a potential lawsuit… In the past, though, the process of his overcoming her barriers was called ‘courtship.’ Now it is called either ‘courtship’ or ‘sexual harassment’.
  • p. 291.

• When a man is attracted to a woman, being expected to take the sexual initiative does not increase his power, it increases his paralysis. The possibility of a lawsuit just intensifies the paralysis. Ironically, the more dangerous the waters, the more [telling dirty jokes] serves as a way of testing the waters: if she laughs, maybe she’s interested; if she looks disgusted, maybe she’s not. He would feel much more powerful if she took responsibility for testing the waters.
  • p. 294.

• If a female employee is offended, a boss would like her to tell him, not sue him.
  • p. 294.

• • Hazing is both testing and training to subordinate self to the team.
  • p. 295.

• If a woman isn't being hazed, she's not being tested; therefore, she is not being trusted.
  • p. 295.

• Sexual Harassment Legislation often creates a hostile environment, an environment of female-as-child.
  • p. 297.

• [T]here are really seven different [kinds of] sexual interactions occurring in the workplace… Sexual blackmail. A boss threatens to fire an employee unless she or he is sexual… Sexual bribery. An executive promises a promotion in exchange for sex. This can be explicit or implicit… Workplace prostitution. An employee is sexual in exchange for a promotion; a salesperson is sexual to win a sale. The sex can be given or just promised… Workplace incest. Consensual sex among employees. The workplace, like the family, has lines of authority which sexual bonding tends to blur… Sexual harassment. Repeated sexual advances at work after an employee has said ‘no’… Workplace flirtation. Suggestive dress, flirtations eye contact, a combination of touching and eye signals… Workplace porn. Pinups, lewd jokes, and sexual innuendos made in groups…
  • p. 297-9.

• Solutions: (...) Seek an understanding of the other sex's best intent.
  • p. 306.

• Early feminists sensed this: they were strong opponents of protective legislation. They knew that as long as the princess was protected from the pea, women would be deprived of equality. The modern-day woman’s ‘pea under the mattress’ is the rough spots in the workplace. When today’s feminists are proponents of protective legislation, they oppose equality. Sexual harassment legislation is sexist because it makes only the man responsible for the male role in the sexual dance.
  • p. 307.

• Myth. Rape is a manifestation of male political and economic power. Fact. Any given black man is three times as likely to be reported a rapist as a white man. Do blacks suddenly have more political and economic power? Maybe rape does not derive from power, but rather from powerlessness.
  • p. 310.

• 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.
  • p. 311.

• Minimizing the role of sexual attraction in rape denies our responsibility for reinforcing men's addiction to female sexual beauty and then depriving men of what we've helped addict them to.
  • p. 311.

• The problem with every judgment of sexual behavior is that it is made by people who aren’t being stimulated as they are making the judgment. A jury that sees a woman in a sterile courtroom, asks her what she wanted, and then assumes that anything else she did was the responsibility of the man is insulting not only the woman but the power of sex.
  • p. 312.

• A man being sued after a woman has more sex than intended is like Lay’s being sued after someone has more potato chips than intended. In brief, date rape can be a crime, a misunderstanding, or buyer’s remorse.
  • p. 312.

• While the label “date rape” has helped women articulate the most dramatic aspect of dating from women’s perspective, men have no labels to help them articulate the most traumatic aspects of dating from their perspective. Now, of course, the most traumatic aspect is the possibility of being accused of date rape by a woman to whom he thought he was making love. If men did label the worst aspects of the traditional male role, though, they might label them “date robbery,” “date rejection,” “date responsibility,” “date fraud,” and “date lying.”
  • p. 313.

• 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)
  • p. 314.

• Evenings of paying to be rejected can feel like a male version of date rape.
  • p. 314.

• If a man ignoring a woman’s verbal “no” is committing date rape, then a woman who says “no” with her verbal language but “yes” with her body language is committing date fraud. And a woman who continues to be sexual even after she says “no” is committing date lying.

Do women still do this? Two feminists found the answer is yes. Nearly 40 percent of college women acknowledged they had said “no” to sex even “when they meant yes.” In my own work with over 150,000 men and women – about half of whom are single – the answer is also yes. Almost all single women acknowledge they have agreed to go back to a guy’s place “just to talk” but were nevertheless responsive to his first kiss. Almost all acknowledge they’ve recently said something like “That’s far enough for now,” even as her lips are still kissing and her tongue is still touching his.

• • p 314.

• We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting.
  • pp. 314-315.

• Somehow, women’s romance novels are not titled He Stopped When I Said “No”. They are, though, titled Sweet Savage Love, in which the woman rejects the hand of her gentler lover who saves her from the rapist and marries the man who repeatedly and savagely rapes her. It is this “marry the rapist” theme that not only turned Sweet Savage Love into a best-seller but also into one of women’s most enduring romance novels.
  • p. 315.

• It is important that a woman’s “noes” be respected and her “yeses” be respected. And it is also important when her nonverbal “yeses” (tongues still touching) conflict with those verbal “noes” that the man not be put in jail for choosing the “yes” over the “no.” He might just be trying to become her fantasy.
  • p. 315.

• 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.
  • p. 315.

• Laws with broad definitions of rape are like laws making 55 mile per hour speed limits for men and no speed limits for women.
  • p. 317.

• Irony: While we increasingly hold people more responsible if they drink and drive, we hold women less responsible if they drink and have sex.
  • p. 320.

• Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal. It is exactly a woman’s greater sexual power that often makes a man so fearful of being rejected by her that he buys himself drinks to reduce his fear. In essence, her sexual power often leads to him drinking; his sexual power rarely leads to her drinking. If anything is evidence of her power over him, it is his being expected to spend his money to buy her drinks without her reciprocating.

… It is men – far more than women – whose mental capacities are diminished when they are “under the influence” of a beautiful woman.

• • p. 320.

• 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.
  • p. 321.

• The most frequent way men are raped by adult women is "birth control rape."
  • p. 335.

• Most rapes of men occur in prison. But even outside of prison, about 9 percent of reported rapes are against men (probably mostly by men, but no one knows for sure). Even rape outside of prison, then, is about as significant an issue for men as AIDS is for women—about 10 percent of the people dying of AIDS are women. Do we hear more about men being raped or about women getting AIDS?
  • p. 335.

• We do not yet understand that when we neglect men, we rape women.
  • p. 336.

• The Ms. survey can call it a rape; a relationship counselor will call it a relationship.

Spousal rape legislation is blackmail waiting to happen.

• • p. 338.

• The solution to all this is not criminalization but resocialization.
  • p. 340.

• If the law tries to legislate our “yeses” and “noes” it will produce “the straitjacket generation” – a generation afraid to flirt, fearful of finding its love notes in a court suit. Date rape legislation will force suitors and courting to give way to courts and suing.

The empowerment of women lies not in the protection of females from date rape, but in resocializing both sexes to share date initiative taking and date paying so that both date rape and date fraud are minimized. We cannot end date rape by calling men “wimps” when they don’t initiate quickly enough, “rapists” when they do it too quickly, and “jerks” when they do it badly. If we increase the performance pressure only for men, we will reinforce men’s need to objectify women – which will lead to more rape. Men will be our rapists as long as men are our initiators.… Laws on date rape create a climate of date hate.

• • p. 340.

• 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.
  • p. 344.

• Employers are NOT prohibited from practicing sex discrimination in hiring and promoting employees.
  • p. 344.

• We have restricted humans from giving ‘free’ food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is ‘free feeding’.
  • p. 346.

• Many black men leave because they are financially responsible--not because they are emotionally irresponsible.
  • p. 348.

• When a government subsidy deprives the child of its dad the government is really subsidizing child abuse.
  • p. 348.

• 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.
  • p. 351.

Part IV: Where do we go from here

• 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.
  • p. 356.

• 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.
  • p. 357.

• Framework, (...)
• addiction to female beauty and sex;
• deprivation of the beautiful woman and sex with her until the man guarantees economic security in return; (...)
  • p. 358.

• [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.
  • p. 361.

Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994)

From Jonathan Robinson, Bridges to Heaven: How Well-Known Seekers Define and Deepen their Connection With God (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint, 1994), a collection of interviews of various 'Seekers'.

• 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.

• I feel awed by the mystery of being both so finite and yet so infinite, so much and so little, so conscious and yet, so coincidental.
  • p. 46-47.

• 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.
  • p. 47.

• When I feel very loved, when I nurture and support people, my experience is deepened. I feel connected to a larger purpose and meaning.
  • p. 71.

• When I lose my larger sense of supporting people to be their best, I lessen my contact with the God inside me.
  • p. 101.

• This is the first time in history that we’ve had this level of luxury, so we have a new opportunity to rethink the way we approach God.
  • p. 115.

• By attending to the conscious part of ourselves, we contribute to the peace of others as well as ourselves.
  • p. 134.

• 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.
  • p. 163.

• 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.
  • p. 163.

• 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.
  • p. 183.

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

• In more than thirty years of conducting workshops, no one has ever said to me, “Warren, I want a divorce – my partner understands me.”
  • p. 15.

• A man becomes successful by repressing his feelings, not expressing his feelings.
  • p. 16.

• When either sex suppresses the expression of feelings, it’s almost always b/c they don’t feel there is a safe environment to express them.
  • p. 16.

• A man fears that conflict with his wife will lead to less intimacy, not more intimacy.
  • p. 17.

• Our choice of partners is perhaps the clearest single statement of our choice of values. Therefore, when we blame our partner for anything, we should really be confronting ourselves. Not as in “Yes, I made a bad choice,” but as in “How does this choice reflect my values?”
  • p. 17.

• If we have integrity about our desire to support men to express feelings, every institution and attitude between the sexes will require questioning and adjusting.
  • p. 18.

• Humans have spent (10k+) years learning to fight and debate with the other side, and almost no time learning to listen and empathize.
  • p. 18.

• What’s true is that everyone is uncomfortable with expressing anger and being critical. Anger and criticism generates rejection. And everyone hates rejection.
  • p. 21.

• 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.
  • p. 22.

• 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.
  • p. 24.

• Tone of voice is more crucial than words.
  • p. 25.

• If our binoculars search for our partner’s best intent, it will usually be found.
  • p. 32.

• Any guy who’s played team sports has practiced a skill I call “team sport empathy”: he’s practiced focusing on anticipating the other team’s moves. That means figuring out their way of looking at the situation.
  • p. 32.

• Empathy for women is an attribute of masculinity. When men play the protector role they are trying to save a woman from grief or pain. If they had no glimpse of her grief or pain, they wouldn’t know when to protect.
  • p. 33.

• It never occurs to most of us at a moment of disagreement with our partner to take the time to appreciate our partner’s positive character strengths as reflected in a stance we disagree with. When we do that, it allows our partner to know that no matter which decision she or he makes, our trust in their underlying character is never in question. It turns every disagreement into a potential gift of love.
  • p. 33.

• When we give trust, we receive trust. And people who trust us pay attention to us.
  • p. 33.

• During what years should a child be introduced to better ways of giving and receiving criticisms – to what I call “relationship language”? Before school age. The best teacher? Parents.
  • p. 36.

• Schools currently excel in encouraging children to express opinions, but are deficient in encouraging children to say, for example, “Oh, that’s different from my perspective – tell me more.”
  • p. 36.

• Teaching children to debate without teaching children to listen is divorce training.
  • p. 36.

• The hard part (of communication) is hearing criticism so it can be easily given.
  • p. 38.

• We are all gifted of the mouth, retarded of the ear.
  • p. 40.

• The first instinctive response to any criticism is a defensive response. (The quicker the response, the more defensive.)
  • p. 40.

• All defensive responses to criticism are natural. (It is natural to think of our own perspective before someone else’s.)
  • p. 40.

• Killing the criticizer, then, is part of our evolutionary past; listening in response to criticism is part of our evolutionary future.
  • p. 41.

• Listening in response to criticism mandates a shift in our internal psyche that marks perhaps the most important single evolutionary shift humans can make.
  • p. 41.

• Listening is self-empowerment via the empowerment of others.
  • pg. 41.

• The belief that men don’t need help is part of the problem.

• Men are still playing protector of women’s transitions, and both sexes expect only men to make transitions on their own.

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

• Sharing instructions about how to perform better for others is very different than sharing feelings about life experiences that make us happy or sad.

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

• Men’s pay paid women to love and nurture, to connect and feel. To be nurturer-connectors. In contrast, men received their pay by being some form of killer-protector. By becoming a human doing (a captain or a coal miner), not a human being (a person who feels happy or sad).

• Societies in which men were unwilling to dispose of themselves in war were societies that usually got disposed of. Societies that were protected were protected by killers, which is why I call the traditional role of men the role of killer-protector.

• Both sexes had an unconscious investment in keeping men from expressing feelings of fear and vulnerability.

• No legend told its children of beautiful princesses falling in love with conscientious objectors.

• If we taught men to repress feelings and rewarded him instead for being a captain he might be willing to die to protect us; if we paid him enough to feed his family if he worked in a coal mine, he might be willing to die sooner to keep us warm. But all that required him to forfeit his feelings – his power as a human being – and substitute it for “power” as a human doing: feeling obligated to earn money someone else spent while he died sooner.

• Becoming a human doing was exactly what society needed. But for an individual man, becoming a human doing was his undoing.

• All of this is men’s genetic heritage. However, men’s genetic heritage is in conflict with their genetic future.

• 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.

• In the future, women will increasingly want men who can nurture them and connect with them.

• In the future, women will increasingly want nurturer-connectors, since part of what he will be nurturing is her ability to protect herself.

• In order to connect and nurture, it is not just helpful to be in touch with feelings, it is necessary. So men’s first job – their next evolutionary strategy – involves being in touch with their feelings.

• During the past thirty years, the women’s movement has supported women to express virtually every feeling women felt. To other women. To Men. To society. Women’s feelings became course curriculum, women’s studies, TV specials, talk shows, and Lifetime cable. Women’s feelings were called both education and entertainment. Men’s were repressed until they were called ulcers.

• Because men complained less, we made the false assumption that the complaints women experienced were only women’s complaints and, therefore, only women’s problems. Which created the rationale for women’s problems to be solved – or at least addressed – by public policy.

• A father’s traditional role prepared him to love his family by being away from the love of his family.

• A mother’s traditional role prepared her to love her family by being with the family she loved.

• We think of the division of labor as being outdated, but in fact it has reemerged. In the early ‘80s, a mother was 43 times more likely than the father to leave the workplace for family responsibilities; more recently, a mom is 135 times more likely to leave the workplace for family responsibilities.

• Women are socialized to take advantage of four informal options for emotional support: husbands; womenfriends; children; and parents. Men are socialized to take advantage of only one of these informal options: their wife or womanfriend.

• Men tend to put all their emotional eggs in the basket of their wives (or womenfriends), it is difficult for a man to communicate feelings of disappointment to his wife because, if she withdraws, it feels to him like his entire emotional support system has collapsed.

• After a conflict, women are not only more likely to turn to other womenfriends for support, but are nine times more likely to be with their children should conflict become divorce.

• A woman living with her mother has limited freedom; a man living with his mother has limited freedom and limited respect. For most men, the vacuum (of no support system) is so devastating, they’d rather agree with their wife than express their feelings and risk emotional withdrawal.

• After divorce, women’s biggest fear is economic deprivation; men’s biggest fear is emotional deprivation.

• Divorce laws have given women economic support after divorce; no laws have given men emotional support after divorce. Men are required to continue their obligations to their exes in the form of alimony or child support; women are not required to continue their obligation to their exes in the form of homemaking or nurturing.

• We had affirmative action programs to help women help themselves economically. Is it now time for affirmative action programs to do for men’s feelings what the government did for women’s economics?

• By the mid-’90s, the anger at men had become so palpable that even sedate publications like The Economist were characterizing women’s vs. men’s workload as “A woman’s work is never done; a man is drunk from sun to sun.”

• What is the impact on our children of this international “Sisterhood is Victimhood” bonding?

• Hochschild’s biggest mistake, though, was one made by almost every popularized housework study: not adequately measuring men’s contribution to work around the home. For example, if mom drives the children to daycare, it’s called housework; if dad drives the family to grandma’s, it isn’t called housework.

• Notice that much of what men do is also done by single mothers so appreciating what men do also helps us appreciate what single moms do.

• The best way to use these lists to replace anger with love in real life is to nurture each other by doing for your partner what your partner normally does for you.

• Even men who share their personal experiences find that, instead of empathy, they get the response Dear Abby gave this man: “Women have it worse.” This belief is so strong that over the past quarter century, women’s old fantasy of marrying a man-as-protector has been tainted by women’s new nightmare of husband-as-batterer.

• If we believe that it is predominantly men who batter women, it is hard to see why women also need to change: We will continue saying, “Just change the men. They’re the batterers.”

• Four men describe how their wives hit them in the lower back with a pole, cracked them over the head or in the neck with a frying pan...the audience renews its laughter after each story. The men are part of a “PMS Men’s Support Group.” Imagine an audience of men laughing as battered women describe how their husbands threatened them with brain or spinal cord injuries by battering them over their heads or in their necks with a frying pan.

• All of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of “Battered Woman Syndrome."

• The emphasis of the men’s group was on understanding, coping, changing the situation and then, if all else failed, getting out; the emphasis of battered women’s groups is on getting out first, and second, locking up the problem (the man).

• In brief, when women batter, men’s first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women’s first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison.

• The motto of feminists: “There is never an excuse for hitting a woman.” Shouldn’t it be, “There is never an excuse for hitting.”?

• Sitcoms routinely portray women hitting men, almost never portray men hitting women. When he fails to leave, it is not called “Battered Man Syndrome”; it is called comedy.

• Note the men’s fear that if they reported this to the authorities, not only would they not be believed, they would be ridiculed.

• Men learn to call pain “glory”; women learn to call the police.

• Why did virtually every culture reward its men for enduring violence? So it would have a cadre of people available to protect it in war.

• The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men – or males....

• 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.

• We often think that when a man insults another man by calling him a “girl,” the insult reflects a contempt for women. No. It reflects a contempt for any man who is unwilling to make himself strong enough to protect someone as precious as a woman.

• 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.

• Those feminists who say that masculinity is about men believing they can batter women display the deepest ignorance possible about men and masculinity.

• What Men Would Say When Male-Bashing Is Called “Funny,” But Female-Bashing Is Called “Sexist”

• Misandry – or man hating – is the equivalent of misogyny. If you are unaware of misandry, welcome to the club.

• A week after you read this chapter, misandry will become apparent in commercials, in films, in everyday conversations. But the bias that is hardest to see is the bias we share.

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

• Men’s life expectancy was one year less than women’s in 1920; today, it is seven years less, yet the federal government has only an Office of Research on Women’s Health.

• The function of gossip is to create an “in group” bond by creating an “out group” enemy.

• Look under the “Love and Friendship” section and see dozens of cards designed for women to send to women, most bashing men, and virtually none saying anything loving about men.

Father and Child Reunion (2001)

• If there is one quality that I find is more essential to a successful and happy life than any other, it is empathy. It 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.”
  • p. 30.

• 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.
  • p. 31.

• Students coming from father-present families score higher in math and science even when they come from weaker schools.
  • p. 31.

• The more the father is involved, the more easily the child makes open, receptive, and trusting contact with new people in its life.
  • p. 34.

• We often hear that mothers do the caring; fathers just do the playing. This is a false dichotomy -- even a dangerous one -- because fathers’ particular style of play involves both a conscious focus on teaching and, as the research is now showing, is instructive to children even when it is not consciously designed to be so.
  • p. 57.

• A family that knows how to play together has the tools to stay together.
  • p. 59.

• Industrialization created the “Father’s Catch-22”: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.
  • p. 88.

• The Industrial Revolution, then, took men’s occasional absence from home -- previously needed only in wartime and for hunting -- and made it the norm. This increasing division of labor magnified the division of men’s and women’s interests. It magnified the belief in the maternal instinct and the reality of the distant father. Prior to industrialization, divorces usually led to children living with dads. Not after.
  • p. 88.

• Nothing threatens a father’s involvement in the family more than his obligation to be the family’s “financial womb,” creating “The Father’s ‘Catch-22’”: loving the family by being away from the family. It is the irony of traditional fatherhood: being a father by not being a father.
  • p. 90.

• Creating fatherhood means creating a major psychological shift. Both sexes find it's difficult to fully share the psychological responsibility for the other sex's traditional role -- especially when the other sex is around. – page 90.

• Implicit in the Hollywood formula of mom-by-option and dad-by-default is mom never at fault...to a fault.
  • p. 93.

• By starving our children of men, we have made them more vulnerable to the very abuse we are trying to prevent. – page 97.

• On an unconscious level, the demonization of sexuality usually implies the demonization of males and the victimization of females.
  • p. 97.

• The less our sons our trusted, the less women are able to really love them, and the more women feel entitled to use them as wallets.
  • p. 98.

• 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?
  • p. 98.

• When we add the devaluation of male values to the demonizing of male sexuality, many boys feel like a pervert before they know who they are.
  • p. 103.

• 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. – page 103.

• It is important for a father who feels pushed away 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. – page 105.

• When our binoculars are focused on the dad as “deadbeat,” it often even leads us to missing concrete cues a dad gives to show his desire to be involved.
  • p. 106.

• When we train men for war, we lose some part of every man we train -- even if we win the war. When we train men to be better nurturers, even men who fail the course will have won. And so will every child they ever meet. Training men to love is a nation’s best investment.
  • p. 112.

• If we want our children to have a balance between their abilities to earn money and show love, it will help if both their parents model that balance. – page 114.

• Dads in the family are even more important than women in the workplace: The workplace benefits from women, but the family needs dads.
  • p. 114.

• 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.
  • p. 114.

• Men are the Rosie-the-Riveters of parenting: They’re brought in only when needed, and considered disposable thereafter.
  • p. 115.

• The more our children see men being paid to take responsibility for children, the more respectable it will be for men to do work compatible with their role as dads.
  • p. 115.

• The Male Teacher Corps not only exposes children to men from a variety of professions, but exposes children to men with more risk-taking, entrepreneurial male energy and values, creating a balance between exposure to the male and female value systems.
  • p. 116.

• In a Stage I survival-focused world, a father needed to be a problem-solver. He needed to “tough it out” by denying feelings. He needed to persuade, argue, debate, set rules, distinguish right from wrong without flexibility. These skills made him “eligible,” they brought him a wife and children. In every sense of the word, these skills were his relationship language. Problem is, “toughing it out” fed his loved ones’ mouths, but didn’t nurture his loved ones’ souls.
  • p. 116.

• In a Stage II world, in communities in which survival is mastered enough to create a balance with self-fulfillment, we have the option of “relationship language” that nourishes the soul.
  • p. 116.

• Although our grammar schools are teaching a whole generation computer language to adjust to the technological needs of a Stage II 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.
  • p. 116.

• When I see dads being most effective with children, it is usually when they have an intuitive understanding that, for example, the car trip to and from the soccer game is potentially as important as the game itself.
  • p. 118.

• Part of what a good dad can do, then, is to make sure that his daughter also gets involved with team sports, and to help her with the lessons in life that are innate to any team empowering itself. –page119.

• Since no one is always right, always being right is really a role model for his children feeling inadequate.
  • p. 120.

• I could be a much better role model by sharing more openly with him my shadow side, my faults, my mistakes, asking him to be my teacher rather than being his.
  • p. 120.

• 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. – page 120.

• 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.
  • p. 121.

• In brief, sending a father-deprived child into the world and assuming everything is okay because the dad provides money is like sending a drunken driver onto the highway and assuming everything is okay because the gas is paid for. It doesn’t mean that the drunken driver will not get to his or her destination. It just means that the risks are enormous. And the consequences of failure are forever.
  • p. 122.

• 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.
  • p. 122.

• My first conflict with NOW erupted in the mid-’70s when NOW chapters increasingly rejected father involvement by rejecting shared parent time as the preferred arrangement after divorce.
  • p. 126.

• Both parents’ rights must exist primarily to assist the parents in fulfilling their responsibilities. Primarily does not mean exclusively.
  • p. 126.

• Both parents’ rights must be in balance so children can grow up with a balance between both parents.
  • p. 126.

• Male-female fusion does not create women’s rights. It creates a fusion of rights.
  • p. 132.

• 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.”
  • p. 132.

• 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.
  • p. 132.

• When only men could register to vote, we required only men to register for the draft. Today both sexes can vote, but only men must register for the draft.
  • p. 132.

• We are at a unique moment in history -- when a woman’s body is affected, we say the choice is hers; but when a boy’s body is affected, we say the choice is not his -- the law requires our 18 year old sons to register for the draft, and therefore potential death-if-needed.
  • p. 132.

• 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.
  • p. 136.

• We would not think of allowing a man to determine a woman’s life merely because a fetus he helped create was in her womb; then why would we allow a woman to determine a man’s life merely because a fetus he helped create is in her womb?
  • p. 137.

• 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.
  • p. 139.

• 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.
  • p. 143.

• In a democracy, a government’s policies are rarely questioned until the underlying assumptions that create them are questioned.
  • p. 147.

• 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.
  • p. 158.

• 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.
  • p. 163.

• I soon saw that feminists who supported the “Primary Parent Theory” were not in favor of equality of opportunity, but of unequal opportunism.
  • p. 167.

• 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.
  • p. 167.

• 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.
  • p. 167.

• In brief, she is the partner to what primarily he creates; he is the visitor to what primarily she creates. To me, this wasn’t equality.
  • p. 167.

• As feminism made this transition from equal opportunity to unequal opportunism, I made my transition from supporter to critic. But in my inner psyche, there was no transition: I went from supporter of equality to supporter of equality.
  • p. 167.

• 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.
  • p. 179.

• Most mothers want more of dad in their children’s lives, not less.
  • p. 186.

• Raising children was not designed for single parents. (Which is why divorce was such a taboo prior to birth control.)
  • p. 187.

• If we penalize mothers for denial of “visitation time” we must also penalize fathers who don’t show up for “visitation time.” The issue is not fathers’ rights to visitation time, but both parents obligations to their children. The issue is how to make both parents real parents despite what parenting was never designed to deal with -- divorce.
  • p. 187.

• Our children are better served by speaking not of “visitation” versus “custody,” but of “parent time.”
  • p. 187.

• When we speak of mom winning custody or of dad getting visitation time, we speak of someone winning, someone losing. When we speak of mom or dad spending “parent time” with a child, we speak of two parents, not a parent versus a visitor.
  • p. 187.

• “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.
  • p. 187.

• When a parent denies a child its “parent time,” that parent is denying the child its child support -- its psychological child support.
  • p. 187.

• After a divorce, men’s biggest fear is, typically, losing their children (women’s is poverty).
  • p. 190.

• From a woman’s perspective, sharing parent time feels like what a man might experience if his ex-wife came to his office and shared his career. He might claim the sharing is not in the best interests of the employer. But what he really would be caring about is the affront should his ex-wife do as good as he at his own job. While the fear is understandable, the difference is that his career is his, their children are theirs.
  • p. 191.

• If Women Have An Equal EMPLOYMENT Opportunity Commission, Why Don’t Men Have An Equal FAMILY Opportunity Commission?
  • p. 197.

• The worst form anger can take is that of a parent who feels her or his chance for “winning my child” is enhanced by “ruining my ex.” The law has given the most vindictive parent an invitation to play the “abuse” card. This is the “Great Temptation.”
  • p. 199.

• When women entered the workplace, many men were mentors to them and, in turn, also learned to respect women’s unique contributions (for example, their listening and facilitative skills). Now, as we give men responsibilities to care for children, women must be among the mentors, and we must also learn to respect men’s unique contributions.
  • p. 236.

• If we both ignore the unique contribution of “male-style” parenting and jail a man who responsibly contributes it, fatherhood becomes another hazardous occupation. More precisely, it becomes the largest 100%-male hazardous occupation. And in the process, our children lose one of the greatest potential gifts of Stage II -- genuine fatherhood. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are ways of creating a father and child reunion....
  • p. 237.

• Men goeth to that place from which appreciation cometh.
  • p. 238.

• 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.
  • p. 238.

• 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.
  • p. 239.

• Many women are discovering that the motherhood instinct implies a responsibility to be certain children have dads -- everyday, not far away; and some are aware that economic independence requires not holding on to her child as if it were her job.
  • p. 239.

• Shifting our attitudes about the future of fathers requires shifting our attitudes about the way our fathers loved. Recognizing that the rigid roles of the past were not designed by men to serve only men is not unrelated to shifting our attitudes toward dad.
  • p. 239.

• We cannot think of dads as being nurturing if we think of men as being self-serving.
  • p. 240.

• A paucity of funding from private and government sources would be much less a problem if billions of dollars each year were not funding feminist perspectives on men. This funding leads to Women’s Studies without Men’s Studies; to studies about deadbeat dads, but not dead broke or dead-ended dads -- or moms who deny dads access to children, or make false accusations to obtain children.
  • p. 240.

• The feminist-only funding leads to studies that misinform the nation that a divorced mother is economically more hurt than a divorced man, so judges feel a mandate to make his future income hers, and legislatures feel fine about refusing to make his mother subsidy payments tax deductible even as she pays no taxes on the money received. And all this perpetuates the belief that he earns more money....
  • p. 240.

• There is virtually no funding to study the validity of the more muted complaints of men: to study when a false accusation is being used as a weapon to keep the children from dad; or when the child is being bad-mouthed by the other parent; or when access to the child is being prevented; or when statistics about deadbeat dads are including men who are dead, unemployed, or denied their children; or when men are victims of domestic violence.
  • p. 241.

• The one-sided funding creates one-sided images that reinforce the press defining as progress an examination of only women’s issues. Thus, a quarter century’s-worth of studies showing domestic violence against men to be more than equal to domestic violence against women receive so little publicity as to barely make a dent on the public’s consciousness.
  • p. 241.

• From these biased studies come biased social policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars to enforce sanctions against fathers who don’t pay mothers; almost nothing to enforce sanctions against mothers who don’t allow fathers to see children.
  • p. 241.

• 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...
  • p. 241.

• There is little life where no one will listen. These are fathers, sons and families who are needlessly lost.
  • p. 241.

• Part of our evolutionary heritage is the ability to adapt -- species that survive, adapt. Humans adapt by altering their priorities to match evolving values.
  • p. 242.

• We need to fund relationship language in our schools so that future parents will know how to communicate about whether they want children; to communicate with the children they have, and teach their children how to communicate with the world. Technical progress without social skills is a Tower of Babel.
  • p. 243.

• Social policy that reunites father and child must always confront itself with the question, “Are we paying dads to stay, or to go away?” If a single mother receives more money when the father isn’t around than when he is around, there will be fewer fathers around. The government will become her substitute husband.
  • p. 245.

• No force is more powerful -- or more multiple -- than the family.
  • p. 246.

• Perhaps the biggest appreciation adjustment we need is toward the millions of men and women we call stepparents. We have taken for granted especially the stepparents who are raising no children of their own, and receiving no income from a significant other, but who have nevertheless chosen to invest love, time and money in children.
  • p. 246.

• If we are to inspire men to father it also helps to stop reflexively condemning men as afraid of commitment and address what they are afraid of. –page246.

Why Men Earn More (2005)

• Helping women achieve higher pay is a core goal of this book.
  • p. xvii.

• 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.
  • p. xvii.

• 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.
  • p. xviii.

• 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?
  • p. xix.

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

• Survey 2001: Men who never married, never had a child, worked full time and were college educated earn only 85% of what women with the same criteria earn.
  • p. xxii.

• A part-time working woman makes $1.10 for every dollar made by her male counterpart.
  • p. xxii.

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

• 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.
  • p. xxiv.

• 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.
  • p. 3.

• 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).
  • p. 11.

• 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.
  • p. 18.

• Pay is about the power we forfeit to get the power of pay. For example, we forfeit power when we work for others, not ourselves, but we get the power of the paycheck when we do that.

• Do women avoid fields like engineering because of the tendency of male-dominated fields to discriminate against women? Probably not. Prior to the women's movement, engineering was no more male-dominated than medicine and law. And women have entered medicine and law by the droves. When women enter male-dominated fields, they tend to enter the more glamorous occupations. And the media reinforces this. There was L.A. Law, but no L.A. Engineering. ER doesn't mean Engineering Room. Women receive six layers of encouragement to enter fields involving engineering, computers, and math and science: first, better starting salaries than men's; second, special programs for girls in high school; third, female-only government scholarships; fourth, female-only corporate grants and scholarships; fifth, the advertising that reaches out to women to create a more female-supportive atmosphere; and sixth, special grants for science programs at leading women's colleges.
  • p. 25.

• 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.
  • p. 27.

• Your daughter says, 'Dad. Mom. I want to join the armed services.' You look at her beautiful face, her life flashes before your eyes, and you see a body bag. Now's the time to let her know the biggest military secret: She can join the military and be as safe-from-death as she would be at home. How? In the war in Iraq, not a single woman has been killed in the Air Force. Nor has a single woman been killed in the Marines. And only one has died in the Navy. Your only job is to keep her out of the Army.
  • p. 30.

• Whether in a South African coal mine, on an Alaskan fishing boat, or in the American military, men's protective instinct toward women, and women's protective instinct toward themselves (and children) keeps men more disposable than women. Here's an example of the dynamic at work in the military. At the military's SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) schools, concern about the well-being of women was so prevalent among male students that trainers now work to desensitize men to sexual assault and other abuse of women lest their sensitivity be used against them in war. We think of women in the military as being safer in part because they are still prohibited from the most dangerous assignments. But this prohibition is just a reflection of the traditional male's instinct to protect women.
  • p. 33.

• Choosing safety is a choice of life over career.
  • p. 35.

• 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.
  • p. 39.

• While we call role models 'leaders', most 'leaders' are really followers. Most 'leaders' follow their bribes. And we are the people who offer the bribes. We in essence give men two bribes to risk their lives: pay and praise... A man who self-selects for a death profession expects his body to be used in exchange for pay. The unspoken motto of the death professions is 'My body, not my choice.'
  • p. 40.

• 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.
  • p. 69.

• When we don't take years of experience into account, it is easy for a woman to become discouraged when she reads headlines such as 'Study of TV News Directors Finds Discrimination Against Women.' When a woman in the mid-1980's read that TV news directors who were women got paid about 27% less than men directors, it might have made her avoid the field... If, on the other hand, a headline more accurately reflecting the study's core findings, read 'Female Managers Become TV News Directors Three Times as Quickly as Men,' well, that would have made a woman feel wanted... In brief, the road to higher pay is a toll road. But at this point in history, there are female tollbooths and male tollbooths, and the toll charged to women is lower. This should encourage every woman who wishes to embark on the road to higher pay to take it while the tolls are still low, and every man who wishes to be with his children--or just wishes to support the career-focused woman he loves--to be aware that there was never a better time to be a great dad and go with your wife's flow.
  • p. 85-87.

• 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.
  • p. 93-94.

• 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.
  • p. 79.

• Women today are less than half as likely as men to work in excess of 50 hours per week. (Again, working women put in more hours at home.) It is rarer still for women to sustain that commitment for 20 years and then, without having burned out, increase her hours still more as a CEO. But exactly because it is rare, women who are willing stand out as more exceptional. Women, as it turns out, are far more 'European'--working to live rather than living to work. But the glass ceiling is rarely cracked by healthy, balanced people who work to live.
  • p. 82.

• Single women often fear that the men they are going out with wouldn't be comfortable with less career and more child. Perhaps. If a woman selects a man with a lot of career ambition, she'll get what she selected. The solution? Choose among men who would love to be married to a career woman who valued his being home full-time with the children for a few years. Can't find these men? State your interest on your Match.com profile--the Internet's the best net to catch the right fish. You'll be surprised.
  • p. 83-84.

• People Who Get Higher Pay Require Less Security. ITEM. It's 2004. I am presenting Why Men Earn More to the sales and marketing teams of my publisher (AMACOM). To illustrate financial risk as one of the ways to higher pay, I ask everyone in the room who is paid by commission to stand up. Eight men stand; no women. I then ask those paid by salary to stand: About equal numbers of men and women stand.
  • p. 107.

• The United States follows the pattern of men taking the financial risks even within a given field. Women physicians are three times as likely as men to work for the government or an HMO; men physicians are much more likely to be self-employed in a solo practice.
  • p. 108.

• The corporate Catch-22: Don't be flexible, lose good women; be flexible, lose good women... A company listening to women's desires for [flexibility and therefore] fewer promotions, giving fewer promotions to women, and then being sued for giving fewer promotions to women. Yiddish has a word for this: chutzpah.
  • p. 111-12.

• 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.
  • p. 113.

• For thousands of years women chose men based on their ability to provide. The more women increase their mastery of the workplace, the more they open themselves to partnership with a new type of man. It is my hope that Part One has begun a paradigm shift in the way we view men. As we saw women doing financially better than men in male-dominated professions, it hopefully offers a more generous view of the male attitude toward women in the workplace. As we contemplate making sacrifices to earn more, it is my hope we appreciate the sacrifices men have made to nurture the family by being their family's 'financial womb.' Especially the sacrifices of 'working dads' and of dads' 'invisible juggling act'.
  • p. 122.

• Men may be way behind in creating choices for themselves, but have actually been quiet supporters of the choices women want for themselves.
  • p. 123.

• 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.
  • p. 123.

• 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.
  • p. 131.

• Throughout history, men learned that survival, respect and women’s love were all achieved by making a killing –whether killing animals, killing enemies, or making a killing on Wall Street . Women received the money that men produced by loving. Men came to feel themselves as unlovable without the money, property or the heroism it took to make them equal to a woman’s love. Women came to associate men spending money on them as a statement of how much they were valued—even loved-- by the man. Her ability to love became her source of security: a diamond is a girl’s best friend. Essentially this dynamic is true in almost all societies and all classes throughout history.
  • p. 135.

• The belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace reinforces a couple's tendency to have the woman stay at home. It is the tendency for women to stay at home that makes the workplace value her less. then, shortly after she is married, it begins to make sense for her to move for her husband's career, not for her husband to move for her career. Conversely, it makes sense for them to invest in his medical, law, or engineering degree--rather than hers... ironically, then, a reality has been created from a false reality. And, ironically, women's careers are hurt via comments meant to prod a society into helping women's careers. The road to hell is paved...
  • p. 145.

• 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.
  • p. 150.

• If organized team sports develop managerial skills for a corporate setting, pickup team sports are more like training to be an entrepreneur... Pickup team sports are still about 99% male. That is, this form of preparation to be an entrepreneur is about 99% male socialization. I believe this is one of many contributors to why men who run their own business earn twice what their female counterparts earn.
  • p. 156.

• 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.
  • p. 181.

• 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.
  • p. 191.

• When I was doing a book tour in Japan for Why Men Are The Way They Are, I was told of an institution called the snack. The snack works like this: A man is coming home from work, and has had a bad day. He doesn’t feel that his wife wants to hear about it, so he pays between $50 and $80 for a snack —a sandwich and a drink and an attractive woman who will listen empathetically to him—sort of a beautiful psychologist with refreshments. No men need apply.
  • p. 198.

• A study of attorneys found that the attorneys whose pictures were judged independently to be the better-looking ones were able to earn about 12% more per year than the less good-looking ones. The better-looking attorneys worked longer hours, but even when that and dozens of other variables were controlled for, the better-looking attorneys were able to bill significantly more per hour. Needless to say, the male attorneys were ranked as much less attractive than the women, increasing the gap in women’s pay over men’s. The bigger the gap in looks, the bigger was the gap in pay. The more time passed, the more the gap widened. Sometimes life isn’t fair.
  • p. 199-200.

• 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.
  • p. 207.

• Test this out on yourself. Imagine that for a month you have neither had your garbage picked up nor an opportunity to read about new anthropological discoveries. Which would you pay more money to remedy? A society that functions effectively adjusts the pay until the supply matches the need. Failure to make these adjustments not only leaves streets filled with garbage, but also leaves unemployment lines filled with anthropologists.
  • p. 211.

• Unemployment, of course, sends the economy into a recession, creating more unemployment. Ironically, unemployment hurts women more than men. Feminists argue that’s because of sex discrimination: women are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Correct on the outcome; wrong on the reason. We hire first what we need most, and we fire first what we need least. That’s why you hire the garbage collector first, and fire him last. Men may be hired first and fired last because more men are willing to do society’s dirty work and hazardous work for a lower price.
  • p. 212.

• 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.
  • p. 222.

The Boy Crisis (2018)

• “Dads-to-be are almost twice as likely to prefer a daughter to a son.”
  • pp. 2

• Young men between twenty-five and thirty-one are 66 percent more likely than their female counterparts to be living with their parents.
  • pp. 2

• Anticipating “the end of men” is not exactly an inspiration for your son’s life journey.
  • pp. 4

• Whenever only one sex wins, both sexes lose.
  • pp. 4

• We cannot solve the boy crisis by looking only at boys.
  • pp. 9

• I discuss men in a book about boys because men are the role models who either offer your son structure and inspiration, or leave him rudderless and depressed.
  • pp. 9

• The Great Law of the Iroquois is that our most sacred duty is to think seven generations ahead in making any decision—to be aware of whether the decisions we make today will benefit not just ourselves and our children, but our children’s children several generations into the future.
  • pp. 9

• When grandpa was a dad, no research documented why a dad’s typical style of hands-on parenting, such as roughhousing, or his expectation that his children serve rather than be served, was so crucial to his children’s development.
  • pp. 10

• While no vision of the future can be perfect, the goal of The Boy Crisis is to integrate the half century of national discussion about the challenges faced by girls and women with an equally nuanced national discussion about those facing boys and men.
  • pp. 10

• When a boy drives down the serpentine road of mental health, feeling depressed and isolated because he feels no one who knows the real him loves him, no one needs him, and there’s no hope of that changing, he may one day find a cliff and drive off.
  • pp. 15

• The murder-suicide combination of school and other mass shootings is largely young white boys’ way of driving off the cliff at the end of mental health’s tortuous road.
  • pp. 16

• The increase in suicide among white males led to as many white males’ lives lost to suicide as have been lost to AIDS.
  • pp. 15

• More black boys between ten and twenty are killed by homicide than by the next nine leading causes of death combined.
  • pp. 16

• Suicides increase as the pressures of the male role and hormones increase. Before puberty, the suicide rates among males and female are about equal. However, between ten and fourteen, boys commit suicide at almost twice the rate of girls.
  • pp. 16

• Between fifteen and nineteen, boys commit suicide at four times the rate of girls; and between twenty and twenty-four, the rate of male suicide is between five and six times that of females.
  • pp. 16

• Worth less, men considered themselves worthless.
  • pp. 16

• By 2015, in good economic times, boys and men were committing suicide three and a half times more often than women.
  • pp. 17

• There is probably no better evidence of the increase of the boy crisis as a mental health problem than the fact that the US jail and prison population increased by more than 700 percent between 1973 and 2013.
  • pp. 17

• We often allow that the disproportionate percentage of young black men in prison may reflect our racism, but rarely contemplate whether, since the other half of “black men” is “men,” that it may also reflect our sexism.
  • pp. 18
• To date, our prison debate has focused on rehabilitation versus incarceration, rather than prevention versus imprisonment. 
  • pp. 18

• Prison spending has increased at five times the rate of spending per grade school student.
  • pp. 19

• It is only now that boys and men under fifty are twice as likely to die as girls and women the same age.
  • pp. 20

• Every day, 150 workers die from hazardous working conditions.i And 92 percent of them are male.
  • pp. 21

• In aggregate, these jobs might be thought of as “glass cellar” jobs—all-male, because it is almost exclusively our sons who are willing to risk death so their family will have a better life.
  • pp. 22

• Whether through bigorexia or choosing the death professions, our sons, like our daughters, are often responding to what they feel will give them more approval and respect.
  • pp. 24

• The challenge for your son’s grandpa was grandpa’s job going nowhere; the challenge for your son is his job going elsewhere. 
  • pp. 25

• Your son will enter an economy that has made a transition from muscle to mental—or from muscle to microchip.
  • pp. 25

• Over the last forty years, the median annual earnings of a boy with just a high school diploma dropped 26 percent.
  • pp. 25

• The harder it is to find a job, the harder it is to find a woman.
  • pp. 26

• That is our genetic heritage. The process led to our survival in the past, but is not needed for our future. But since we can’t change evolution overnight, let’s help your son through the transition.
  • pp. 26

• In the United States, by eighth grade, 41 percent of girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent of boys are.
  • pp. 28

• While boys who are motivated can become many of society’s most constructive forces—becoming inventors and implementers of what they invent (the Amazons, Apples, Facebooks, Microsofts, and Googles)—boys whose energies are poorly channeled can become society’s most destructive forces—our serial killers and prisoners.
  • pp. 29

• Japan has vastly increased its vocational education programs, with 23 percent of Japan’s high school graduates studying at vocational schools. The result: 99.6 percent of Japanese vocational students received jobs upon graduation.
  • pp. 31

• Here’s why I predict emotional intelligence will be paramount for your son’s future: the more sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes, the more we will yearn for humans to fill the emotional intelligence void.
  • pp. 31

• When both sexes are offered pay should they assess the feelings of others accurately, the empathy gender gap disappears! The implication? The capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence is latent inside boys and men; we just have to let guys know we’ll value them for focusing on it.
  • pp. 32

• Both bullies and the bullied have three things in common: both come from negative family, school, and community environments; both have low self-esteem; and both have poor social skills.
  • pp. 32

• Since empathy and emotional intelligence can be taught, and these skills are key to preparing our sons for the professions that will be in the greatest demand, we need to integrate this curriculum into our schools in the formative years.
  • pp. 32

• Worldwide, boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math, and science.
  • pp. 34

• Boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s.
  • pp. 35

• Suicide now takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life” around the world.
  • pp. 35

• The rate of increase in male suicide in India is growing at more than nine times that of female suicide.
  • pp. 35

• Sensitivity to the death and suffering of boys and men is in competition with our survival instinct.
  • pp. 36

• To win wars, we had to train our sons to be disposable. We honored boys if they died so we could live. We called them heroes.
  • pp. 36

• The more a boy represses his feelings and puts armor around his heart, the harder it is to open our hearts to him.
  • pp. 36

• Whether we call it ikigai or sense of purpose, when we pursue what we believe gives life meaning, it gives us life.
  • pp. 46

• If he followed his bliss, it’s the money you’d miss.
  • pp. 48

• The road to high pay is a toll road.
  • pp. 48

• Fatherhood was about your dad trading in the old glint in his eye—what he loved to do—for the new glint in his eye: his love for you. 
  • pp. 48

• “My Father’s Glint Was His Career—He Always Did Just What He Wanted.”
  • pp. 49

• Whether or not we know our dad, we have a relationship with him. The relationship in our mind is our relationship.
  • pp. 51

• Your son may simultaneously feel that the male role is pressuring him to feel obligated to earn money someone else spends while he dies sooner. 
  • pp. 52

• Your son’s heroes didn’t climb traditional ladders—they built their own.
  • pp. 53

• The Japanese boys’ unconscious wisdom is: their dad as winner is really their dad as loser.
  • pp. 53

• If Don Draper ended up at Esalen in a state of introspection about what it means to be a man, maybe that’s where he should start.
  • pp. 55

• The women’s movement warned every girl how marriage can seduce her to make a sacrifice of her career. But no one warned every boy how marriage can seduce him to make a sacrifice in his career
  • pp. 57

• Had John attended to his first son, Julian, the way he attended to Sean, we would never have heard of John Lennon.
  • pp. 60

• The word hero derives from the root *ser-, from which we also get the word “servant”.
  • pp. 61

• Preparing his son to be a football hero was Jack’s dad’s unconscious way of preparing Jack for manhood by preparing him to sacrifice his body in exchange for the social bribes of being praised and valued.
  • pp. 64

• Your son learns the “hero paradox”: to value himself by not valuing himself. 
  • pp. 65

• In The Deadliest Catch, the death the men face is the source of entertainment, but not of concern.
  • pp. 67

• The pay of the volunteer fireman? Praise. Respect. Purpose. 
  • pp. 67

• These are the social bribes that, if your son absorbs them before the point where he is old enough and mature enough to understand their purpose, can make your son a slave to the safety of others with little regard for the safety of himself.
  • pp. 67

• Many of the qualities your son develops to kill in war—or be a hero at work—undermine the qualities it takes to love at home.
  • pp. 68

• The women who were best able to grow spiritually and psychologically had married men who were the least able to grow. 
  • pp. 71

• Nick was experiencing the father’s catch-22: loving his family by being away from the love of his family.
  • pp. 74

• And without love, your son’s purpose has no purpose.
  • pp. 77

• Emma Bovary had everything, and therefore nothing. 
  • pp. 78

• The more survival is at stake, the more we say, “Sorry, it’s a girl.” The more luxury we feel, the more we can say, “Sorry, it’s a boy.” 
  • pp. 79

• Valuing either sex less is unacceptable
  • pp. 81

• Women who have the option of being economically self-sustaining will increasingly want your son to also have emotional and relationship intelligence.
  • pp. 82

• Should your son follow his bliss, it’s most likely the money he’ll miss.
  • pp. 83

• Boys who are not interested in school almost always have an interest that can be catalyzed into future employment if it is pursued via hands-on experience.
  • pp. 87

• A key measure of emotional intelligence is knowing that every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice. 
  • pp. 89

• We interview people who are extraordinary successes, so they are visible. We ignore people who create a balanced life, so they are invisible.
  • pp. 93

• While your son’s internal security is most likely to be enhanced by the hands-on involvement of both parents, even one conscious parent can lead the way.
  • pp. 93

• Exercise helps build the muscle of a child’s brain even more effectively than studying.
  • pp. 94

• Pick-up sports are excellent preparation for entrepreneurship.
  • pp. 94

• When your son participates in individual sports, plus both organized and pick-up team sports, he will be experiencing sports as a boy-friendly liberal art.
  • pp. 94

• The motto for the evolved boy is “When the going gets tough, tune in to know when to tough it out.”
  • pp. 95

• The traditional male hero is about self-sacrifice, not self-actualization.
  • pp. 97

• In the traditional male hero’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is nowhere to be found—because the more he values himself, the less he is willing to sacrifice himself.
  • pp. 97

• The discipline of postponing gratification is the single most important discipline your son needs.
  • pp. 98

• The solution—raising a balanced male—requires blending the best of the traditional male with the self-actualized male. 
  • pp. 99

• The boy crisis cannot be solved, then, without addressing the most important single crisis in developed countries: dad-deprived children, and especially dad-deprived boys.
  • pp. 102

• Dads—like moms, air, and water—are essential to our lives.
  • pp. 105

• And when boys are hurt, they hurt us—physically, psychologically, and economically.
  • pp. 106

• After divorce or loss of a father, both girls and boys experience unhappiness, but especially with divorce, girls’ grief eases within a year or two, while boys’ does not.
  • pp. 109

• Careers are for Now, Children are Forever.
  • pp. 113

• The absence of Dad creates the presence of government.
  • pp. 114

• Father involvement is an underused resource in the family in the same way that female involvement has been an underused resource in the workplace.
  • pp. 116

• The desire to be a father begins in the son, who sees in his own dad who he could become.
  • pp. 117

• Prisons are centers for dad-deprived males—boys who never became men. 
  • pp. 120

• When he is convicted, on average your son will receive a 63 percent longer sentence.
  • pp. 120

• The gap in sentencing is six times greater for men versus women than it is for blacks versus whites.
  • pp. 120

• The gender gap in education might really stem from sons’ greater vulnerability to father absence.
  • pp. 122

• Even when race, education, income, and other socioeconomic factors are equal, living without dad doubled a child’s chance of dropping out of high school.
  • pp. 122

• Father absence is not just correlated with negative outcomes but actually causes negative outcomes. 
  • pp. 123

• Students coming from father-present families score higher in math and science even when they come from academically weaker schools.
  • pp. 123

• When children in homes with less income and more father were compared to children in homes with more income but less father, there was no difference in the rates of violent crime.
  • pp. 123

• Not one daughter who had a good relationship with her biological father had a baby before the age of nineteen.
  • pp. 123

• When unmarried couples live together when their child is born, by the child’s third birthday, 40 percent of those children will have no regular contact with their dad for the next two years—between ages three and five.
  • pp. 124

• Half of children born to mothers under thirty were born outside marriage.
  • pp. 124

• The Moynihan report concluded that in a majority-black community the main predictor of growing up poor was not race but being born to parents who are not married. Why? A predictable outcome of no marriage was no father involvement.
  • pp. 125

• While the Moynihan Report identified the quarter of black children born outside marriage as a crisis with a solution in 1965, today the percentage of white children born outside marriage is 36 percent.
  • pp. 126

• “My mom warns and warns; it’s like she ‘cries wolf.’ My dad gives us one warning, and then he becomes the wolf.”
  • pp. 136

• Teaching a child to treat boundaries seriously teaches him or her to respect the needs of others.
  • pp. 136

• Empathy is a virtue which, when it only goes from parent to child, and is not required of the child, becomes a vice.
  • pp. 138

• Working from home requires self-starting. And children raised with poor boundary enforcement rarely master the postponed gratification that self-starting requires.
  • pp. 141

• Playing with dad is like being on a roller coaster—kids are excited because they feel safe.
  • pp. 142

• When Martin teased, he taught Maggie and Marty Jr. to interpret the meaning of a twinkle in his eye, slight alterations of his voice, shifts in his facial expression.
  • pp. 149

• The exchange of wit-covered put-downs is boys’ and men’s unconscious way of training each other to handle the criticism it takes to become successful.
  • pp. 150

• The trading of wit-covered put-downs is boys and men training each other to handle criticism, unconsciously knowing that the ability to handle criticism is a prerequisite to success.
  • pp. 151

• Among guys, if you can’t tease ’em, you can’t trust ’em.
  • pp. 152

• Married couples who tease each other during conflict feel more connected and happier after the conflict than those who criticize in a straightforward way.
  • pp. 152

• Especially in the military, hazing helps recruits amputate each other’s individuality because the war machine works best with standardized parts, not with people who say, “I’m special.”
  • pp. 153

• If female-to-female teasing and hazing does occur, as in Mean Girls, it signals that the woman being teased and hazed is on the outs, not that she’s being vetted for inclusion. 
  • pp. 154

• Parenting plans should be consistent.
  • pp. 165

• Children express intense dissatisfaction with the traditional arrangement of every other weekend.
  • pp. 167

• Two-parent stability trumps geographical stability.
  • pp. 168

• In a study of more than twelve thousand teenagers after divorce, children living with single dads fared better than children living with single moms.
  • pp. 174

• Divorced men are almost ten times more likely to commit suicide than divorced women from similar backgrounds.
  • pp. 175

• The word “warrior” is not added lightly. A warrior makes himself aware of the barriers to achieving his purpose. Then, rather than focus on what is standing in his way, a warrior focuses on how to get past those barriers. Which is exactly what he’ll be teaching his children.
  • pp. 176

• Your son is unlikely to choose to be a “father warrior” if he doesn’t feel two things: first, a sense of purpose; second, that his contribution will be pivotal. So his role in the checks and balances of parenting requires a deeper dive.
  • pp. 178

• The male-female pay gap is not a gap between men and women; it is a gap between moms and dads. 
  • pp. 182

• If your son is nontraditional, he needs to know that the most important work of his life is selecting a woman who is free enough from social constraints to free him from social constraints.
  • pp. 184

• Dads were user-friendly for companies, because they could most easily be used.
  • pp. 185

• “Social workers tend to consider the children’s wishes as long as their preference is for maternal custody. When children express a paternal preference, their wishes carry no weight.
  • pp. 189

• In The Second Stage, Friedan predicted women’s career goals would never be achieved if men were not more incorporated into the fathering role.
  • pp. 189

• A mom has the right to children, but a dad has to fight for children. 
  • pp. 191

• 70 percent of child support debt is owed by parents with incomes of less than $10,000 per year
  • pp. 192

• When your son has sex with a woman, he puts his life in her hands.
  • pp. 193

• Virtually 100 percent of TV ads that portray only one sex as a jerk portray the man as the jerk.
  • pp. 193

• But a happy marriage is less about money, children, or lack of sex than about how we communicate about money, children, or lack of sex.
  • pp. 197

• When the house is clean and the bills are paid, the effort our partner makes to keep things the same are invisible exactly because things are the same. 
  • pp. 199

• If your son sees being an oppressor as his future, being a failure to launch might look like progress.
  • pp. 200

• “The best parent is both parents” means mommy is no substitute for daddy, money is no substitute for daddy, and another man is no substitute for daddy.
  • pp. 202

• The future will increasingly see the home place becoming the work place.
  • pp. 203

• Mastery of content that is measurable, tangible, and translates into respect.
  • pp. 210

• Three-quarters of dads who were in South Carolina jails for being behind in child support payments suffer from extreme poverty. And one-eighth of all South Carolina inmates are in jail for being behind in child support payments.
  • pp. 222

• We spend billions to get from dads the money few of them have, and virtually nothing to allow dads to give the time they do have—the time their children need.
  • pp. 223

• Our “cultural shrug” toward both the boy crisis and father involvement has led to no significant government effort to reduce the presence of government by increasing the involvement of dads.
  • pp. 225

• If we get more of what we pay for, then let’s pay to get more dads, rather than pay more when dads are absent.
  • pp. 227

• In the almost 20 years following Australia’s change in gun policy, mass shootings fell to zero.
  • pp. 229

• Guns are not the cause of the boy crisis, but as we are working on the causes, the control of guns can limit the damage of dad-deprived sons.
  • pp. 229

• When boys and men are told they are needed, they respond, and become responsible.
  • pp. 231

• The male-female life expectancy gap has grown almost 400 percent.
  • pp. 236

• Both parents’ cumulative health creates your son’s health; your son’s health begins before his beginning.
  • pp. 236

• To be a hero is to be emotionally constipated. 
  • pp. 237

• A desire to be nurtured is in our son’s nature. But it’s a nature we don’t often nurture.
  • pp. 237

• Does the new heroine mean your son won’t have to risk his life for her love?
  • pp. 239

• If your son is unclear as to what a highly powerful woman wants from him, he is more likely to go for a woman who is less powerful who has some need for him.
  • pp. 240

• The female superhero’s lack of sexual neediness makes her a “super” superpower.
  • pp. 240

• Hollywood plants the seeds for male-only draft registration.
  • pp. 240

• If the life of a beloved woman—whether romantic partner or mother—is at risk, his life is at risk. 
  • pp. 241

• Even if your son tries to use his power to save a woman, if he fails, that power will implode.
  • pp. 241

• If a good woman is killed, a man is to blame.
  • pp. 241

• We have taught boys that, while building strength is considered masculine, preventing its loss is feminine.
  • pp. 245

• Preserving the best of traditional masculinity should be a priority of parents because your son is preoccupied with the paradox of learning how to simultaneously fit in and stand out.
  • pp. 248

• Among former college players, 56 percent suffered from severe CTE pathology, which was associated with signs of dementia 85 percent of the time.
  • pp. 251

• We teach boys to associate being abused with being loved.
  • pp. 253

• Tackle football is a body-mind sport; flag football is a mind-body sport.
  • pp. 253

• “Flag football is so much more about strategy. You can’t ‘take someone out’ with your body, so it’s more about your mind.”
  • pp. 254

• Tackle football is using taxpayer money to risk the minds and bodies of only our sons before the age of consent. 
  • pp. 255

• Even if a soldier lives, the risks of war come home with the warrior—that for every soldier killed, about twenty-five veterans kill themselves. 
  • pp. 256

• The more your son wishes to be part of the elite, the more he will abhor being pitied. Yet boys who join the elite today are often the ones who are pitied tomorrow. 
  • pp. 256

• You can easily feel judged and alone if you are the only one to understand that your son’s anger is the mask of his vulnerability. 
  • pp. 260

• When a potential girlfriend hears a guy complain, it violates her instinct to be protected; but when a mom hears her son complain, it triggers her instinct to protect.
  • pp. 261

• Compassionate listening positively affects the development of an adolescent’s brain in a way that affects the rest of his or her life.
  • pp. 261

• Between ages thirteen and sixteen, boys show a temporary decline in empathy on a biological level—a decline not suffered by girls.
  • pp. 263

• The rate of PTSD among boys who moved to better neighborhoods was like the rate found among soldiers returning from combat.
  • pp. 265

• Counterintuitively, when it comes to a loss of friendships and love, your son is the more vulnerable sex.
  • pp. 265

• The bully who is healed is the best protection for the bullied.
  • pp. 268

• The male-female suicide gap in the United States has tripled since the Great Depression.
  • pp. 273

• By age eighty-five, men’s suicide rate is 1,650 percent higher than that of women the same age.

Women cry, men die.

• • pp. 274

• Whether via forced unemployment, retirement, or loss of spouse, men’s response of suicide can just be the killing of what has already been killed.
  • pp. 276

• Suicide is contagious.
  • pp. 276

• There is almost no difference in the percentage of men versus women experiencing depression.
  • pp. 278

• When the National Association of Social Workers studies suicide, they study only female suicide.
  • pp. 284

• With confidentiality as the key, men’s groups open the door to men opening their hearts.
  • pp. 286

• In my forty-five years of forming men’s groups, I have never heard of a man who was actively involved in a men’s group being hospitalized for depression, or commit suicide.
  • pp. 287

• When a veteran internalizes that he’s failed to take personal responsibility, he is a step closer to suicide.
  • pp. 289

• Many veterans are “rough, tough cream puffs.” 
  • pp. 290

• Veterans create privilege for all those who have not had to serve.
  • pp. 290

• Traditional men make their sacrifices in significant measure in the hopes of being appreciated when they come home, and having their learning experiences integrated into their homes.
  • pp. 291

• One in five young men are not fertile.
  • pp. 292

• Men with lower sperm count, even if they can reproduce, are likely to have a shorter life.
  • pp. 292

• It is exactly this men’s health void that creates your son’s men’s health opportunity.
  • pp. 300

• Love doesn’t eliminate defensiveness, because love creates vulnerability, and defensiveness is vulnerability’s mask.
  • pp. 308

• The negative symptoms of the male culture are harnessed by the prescription drug culture.
  • pp. 310

• While recess provides the playground in which bullying may be found, it is also the laboratory for reducing bullying.
  • pp. 311

• Healed people heal people.
  • pp. 312

Miscellaneous

Roses aren't always red
Violets are violet, not blue
While you can't count on the flowers
You can count on my love for you.

Love forever, Warren

Posted on Facebook, 2/16/15

External links

• New York Times: Are Women Responsible for Their Own Low Pay?, an interview with Warren Farrell, 2005.