Warren Farrell Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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].

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

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

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