Warren Farrell
American educator, activist and author of seven books on men's and women's issues.
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.
If my parents had made love a tenth of a second earlier or later, I wouldn’t exist. What an enormous miracle, just being given life.
Men often become nonviolent in societies that (1) have adequate amounts of food, (2) have adequate amounts of water, and (3) perceive themselves as isolated from attack. For example, the Tahitian men, the Minoan men on Crete, and the Central Malaysian Semai were nonviolent during the period in their history when all three of these conditions prevailed.
While we call role models 'leaders', most 'leaders' are really followers. Most 'leaders' follow their bribes. And we are the people who offer the bribes. We in essence give men two bribes to risk their lives: pay and praise... A man who self-selects for a death profession expects his body to be used in exchange for pay. The unspoken motto of the death professions is 'My body, not my choice.'
By attending to the conscious part of ourselves, we contribute to the peace of others as well as ourselves.
Sex role training becomes divorce training.
By giving women training to sue a company for a ‘hostile environment’ if someone tells a dirty joke, we are training women to run to the Government as Substitute Husband (or Father). This gets companies to fear women, but not to respect women. The best preparation we can give women to succeed in the workplace is the preparation to overcome barriers rather than to sue: successful people don’t sue, they succeed.
The deeper purpose of a more positive attitude toward men is a better life for the children who are parented by the men who are their dads and stepdads; less shame for our sons who will become men; and, for our daughters, a deeper understanding of men's desire to please that leaves them feeling their willingness to please is not unrequited but returned--allowing our daughters to feel less lonely and more loved. If we earn more and love less, we pay for a home in which we do not live.
A man cannot tell whether a woman is in love with him or his security blanket until she is financially and psychologically independent enough to leave. Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love.
Male-female fusion does not create women’s rights. It creates a fusion of rights.
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.
Our children are better served by speaking not of visitation versus custody, but of parent time.
Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.
When we suggest that men are at the top because men discriminate, we miss the point. Men are at the top of the work hierarchy because work has been primarily men's responsibility.
As long as society tells men to be the salespersons of sex, it is sexist for society to put only men in jail if they sell well. We don’t put other salespersons in jail for buying clients drinks and successfully transforming a no into a maybe into a yes . If the client makes a choice to drink too much and the yes turns out to be a bad decision, it is the client who gets fired, not the salesperson. We expect adults to take responsibility.
Ralph had lost real power by trying to gain the appearance of power. He was a leader. But he was following a program for leaders ; therefore, he was a follower... he was, as he put it, a high-level mediocre.
We have entered 'The Era of the Three-Option Woman and the No-Option Man.'
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.
From evening soaps to preteen romances, [the message is that] inner values are for losers.
In a sense, in the area of child care, children's relationships with parents' working has come full circle. We have gone from the mom-and-pop store (or mom-and-pop farm), with its integration of child care and work, to children-at-home and dad-at-work; to the mom-plus-daddy working at home, with its integration of childcare and work again. From mom-and-pop back to mom-and-pop.