Warren Farrell Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

[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.

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