Warren Farrell Quotes

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.”

Tackle football is a body-mind sport; flag football is a mind-body sport.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.