Warren Farrell Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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].

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.