Warren Farrell Quotes

[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.

Sexual harassment in the workplace confuses rewards for performance with rewards for attractiveness and sexual availability.

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

Contract killings never get recorded as a woman killing a man.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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

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

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.