Warren Farrell Quotes

“Are women inherently less warlike than men? Throughout history, women in power have used a rationale similar to men’s to send men to death with similar frequency and in similar numbers.

For example, the drink Bloody Mary was named after Mary Tudor (Queen Mary I), who burned 300 Protestants at the stake; when Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne, she mercilessly raped, burned, and pillaged Ireland at a time when Ireland was called the Isle of Saints and Scholars.

When a Roman king died, his widow sent 80,000 men to their deaths. If Columbus was an exploiter, we must remember that Queen Isabella helped to send him.”

“Both sexes contribute to the invisible barriers that both sexes experience. Just as the 'glass ceiling' describes the invisible barrier that keeps women out of jobs with the most pay, the 'glass cellar' describes the invisible barrier that keeps men in jobs with the most hazards.

Members of the glass cellar are all around us. But because they are our second-choice men, we make them invisible. We hear women say, 'I met this doctor...' not 'I met this garbageman...'”

“During wartime, experimental drugs were often tried on men. If a drug failed, the man died. But if a drug succeeded, it was used to save both women and men, but without women dying to develop it.

Men were similarly used as guinea pigs in the development of emergency procedures, microwave ovens (a man was inadvertently 'cooked' during the testing process), and other advances that served both sexes.

Later it was labeled sexism that physicians studied men more than women. No one labeled it sexism because men were used as guinea pigs more than women.”

“Eleven women from the Miss Black America Pageant all claimed Mike Tyson touched them on their rears. So the founder of the pageant filed a $607 million lawsuit against Mike Tyson. Several of the contestants eventually admitted they had lied in the hope of getting publicity and cashing in on the award money.

Think about it. If each woman had the potential for being awarded $20 to $30 million, aren’t we really bribing women to make false accusations? And the Miss Black America Pageant itself got more publicity than it had received in its history.

The lawsuit made tabloid headlines; the dropping of the lawsuit was buried in the back pages. When we fail to give as much attention to an accusation being false as to the original accusation, the accused is left with an image problem.

When this image problem was added to Tyson’s already tarnished image, Tyson was doubtless more likely to be found guilty when one of the Miss Black America contestants (Desiree Washington) accused him of date rape than he would have if tabloid headlines had recently been saying 'Black Beauties Bribed by Big Bucks'.”

“Even before World War II, some parents began to redefine love. But they could usually afford to do that only after their last child was 'married off', as with Tevye and Golde of 'Fiddler on the Roof'.

TEVYE: Golde, do you love me?

GOLDE: Do I love you? For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?

TEVYE: But my father and my mother said we’d learn to love each other. Do you love me?

GOLDE: For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him. Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?”

“For three years I served on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City. As I explained women’s perspectives to men, I often noticed a woman 'elbow' the man she was with, as if to say: See, even an expert says what a jerk you are.

I slowly became good at saying what women wanted to hear. I enjoyed the standing ovations that followed. The fact that my audiences were about 90 percent women and 10 percent men (most of whom had been dragged there by the women) only reinforced my assumption that women were enlightened and men were 'Neanderthals'; that women were, after all, Smart Women stuck with Foolish Choices.

I secretly loved this perspective — it allowed me to see myself as one of America’s Sensitive New Age Men.”

“For women to have the privilege of avoiding prison by going free on probation, doing less time when sentenced, or receiving treatment sentences rather than prison sentences — and then to complain about there being fewer prisons, well... there could hardly be a better example of chutzpa. Yet The New York Times reports these conclusions without questioning them.

Why wouldn’t a government commission on gender bias see through this gender bias? Because these 'government' commissions are not really government commissions — they are feminist commissions.

That is, the government relies upon recommendations of organizations such as the feminist National Organization for Women and the mostly feminist National Association of Women Judges in choosing which issues to research and which to ignore.”

“I am a men's liberationist (or 'masculist') when men's liberation is defined as equal opportunity and equal responsibility for both sexes. I am a feminist when feminism favors equal opportunities and responsibilities for both sexes.

I oppose both movements when either says 'our sex is the oppressed sex, therefore, we deserve rights'. That's not gender liberation but gender entitlement.

Ultimately, I am in favor of neither a women's movement nor a men's movement but a gender transition movement.”

“If taking on a wife for life in an institution called marriage were a sign of male privilege, why did 'husband' derive from the Germanic 'house' and the Old Norse for 'bound' or 'bondage'?

Why did it also come from words meaning 'a male kept for breeding', 'one who tills the soil', and 'the male of the pair of lower animals'.

Conversely, if marriage were as awful for women as many feminists claim, why is it the centerpiece of female fantasies in myths and legends of the past, or romance novels and soap operas of the present? Spartan boys who were deprived of their families were deprived, not privileged. Boys deprived of women’s love until they risked their lives at work or war were also deprived — or dead.

Training boys to kill boys was considered moral when it led to survival, immoral only when it threatened survival. In these respects, 'patriarchy' created male deprivation and male death, not male privilege.”

“In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.

But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation — with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.

By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.

No feminist protested.”

“Man as 'N*gger'? In the early years of the women’s movement, an article in Psychology Today called 'Women as N*gger' quickly led to feminist activists (myself included) making parallels between the oppression of women and blacks.

Men were characterized as the oppressors, the 'master', the 'slaveholders'. Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s statement that she faced far more discrimination as a woman than as a black was widely quoted.

The parallel allowed the hard-earned rights of the civil rights movement to be applied to women. The parallels themselves had more than a germ of truth. But what none of us realized was how each sex was the other’s slave in different ways and therefore neither sex was the other’s 'n*gger' ('n*gger' implies a one-sided oppressiveness).

If 'masculists' had made such a comparison, they would have had every bit as strong a case as feminists. The comparison is useful because it is not until we understand how men were also women’s servants that we get a clear picture of the sexual division of labor and therefore the fallacy of comparing either sex to 'n*gger'.

For starters, blacks were forced, via slavery, to risk their lives in cotton fields so that whites might benefit economically while blacks died prematurely. Men were forced, via the draft, to risk their lives on battlefields so that everyone else might benefit economically while men died prematurely.

The disproportionate numbers of blacks and males in war increases both blacks’ and males’ likelihood of experiencing post-traumatic stress, of becoming killers in postwar civilian life as well, and of dying earlier. Both slaves and men died to make the world safe for freedom – someone else’s.”

“Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.”

“My body, my choice. In the 1990s, if a woman and man make love and she says she is using birth control but is not, she has the right to raise the child without his knowing he even has a child, and then to sue him for retroactive child support even ten to twenty years later (depending on the state).

This forces him to take a job with more pay and more stress and therefore earlier death. Although it’s his body, he has no choice. He has the option of being a slave (working for another without pay or choice) or being a criminal.

Roe v. Wade gave women the vote over their bodies. Men still don’t have the vote over theirs – whether in love or war.”

“One of my core themes in The Myth of Male Power — that history’s controlling force was not patriarchy, but survival — is still ignored.

Instead, the leading universities’ women’s studies and 'gender studies' courses still emanate from the Marxist and Civil Rights model of oppressor vs. oppressed. We’ll see in this book exactly why the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed is both inaccurate and, more important, undermines love and women’s empowerment.

In virtually every leading university this leads to a demonizing of men and masculinity that distorts the very essence of traditional masculinity — being socialized to be a hero by being willing to sacrifice oneself in war or in work.

The possibility that being socialized to be disposable is not genuine power is, to this day, either considered radical, heretical, or, most frequently, not considered.”

“One reason the jobs men hold pay more is because they are more hazardous. The additional pay might be called the 'Death Profession Bonus'. And within a given death profession, the more dangerous the assignment, the more likely it is to be assigned to a man.”

“Practically speaking, when more than 90 percent of women got married and divorce was rare, discrimination in favor of men at work meant discrimination in favor of their wives at home.

When workplace discrimination worked in favor of women at home, no one called it sexism. Why? It was working for women. Only when discrimination switched from working for women to working against women (because more women were working) did it get called sexism.

For example: During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives — they were the wives of male executives.”

“The black man is sometimes called an endangered species but receives little of the protection an endangered species is normally accorded. In regions where the owl is endangered, we wouldn’t think of depriving the male owl of its children or the owl’s children of their dad.

Yet the U.S. government has a huge program that creates exactly that outcome for the male human who is poor, and especially for the male human who is black and poor. It is called Aid to Families with Dependent Children; it deprives a family of aid if the dad is present, thus depriving the father of the two most important incentives for living: love and feeling needed.”

“The facts give a different picture:

1. Equal risks. If women shared equal risks, Panama would not have resulted in the deaths of 23 men and 0 women (also 0 women injured); and the Persian Gulf practice operations and war would not have led to the deaths of 375 men versus 15 women.

For both wars combined, 27 men died for each woman; but since there are only 9 men in the armed services for each woman, then any given man’s risk of dying was three times greater than any given woman’s.

If men accounted for less than 4 percent of the total deaths and any given man had only one fourth the risk of dying, would Congresswoman Schroeder have said men equally shared the risks?

Equality is not making women vulnerable by chance when men are made vulnerable by design. Were women being denied combat positions in order to deny them equal opportunity as officers? Or to deny them equal pay?

2. Equal opportunity as officers. Women constitute 14.5 percent of the total military, but 16.6 percent of the officers as of 2011.

3. Equal pay. Both sexes in the Persian Gulf received $110 per month extra combat pay. The sexes received equal pay despite unequal risks.

In brief, men get fewer promotions and, therefore, less pay for longer periods of service and a threefold greater risk of death, yet we read about discrimination against women, not discrimination against men.”

“The single biggest barrier to getting men to look within is that what any other group would call powerlessness, men have been taught to call power. We don't call 'male-killing' sexism; we call it 'glory'.

We don't call the one million men who were killed or maimed in one battle in World War I (the Battle of the Somme) a holocaust, we call it 'serving the country'. We don't call those who selected only men to die 'murderers'. We call them 'voters'.

Our slogan for women is 'A Woman's Body, A Woman's Choice"; our slogan for men is 'A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do'.”

“To experience the male tragedy in its present form, listen to Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle”. The son asks, 'When you comin’ home, Dad?' The dad responds, 'I don’t know when.'

Yet the father’s yearning for his son is so deep that the moment the dad was no longer preoccupied with providing for his son, he reached out for his son’s companionship. Unfortunately, the pressure on the dad is relieved only when the son has a job of his own. So the son responds, 'My new job’s a hassle and the kids have the flu.'

Historically, the obligations of dads deprive dads of love while the obligations of moms provide moms with love. Deprived of genuine love, dads are deprived of genuine power. Ironically, the son had ached for connection with his dad so intensely that he vowed: Some day I’m gonna be like him.”

“True or false? Employers are prohibited from practicing sex discrimination in hiring and promoting employees. Answer: False.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that in job areas dominated by men, less qualified women could be hired. It did not allow less qualified men to be hired in areas dominated by women (e.g., elementary school teacher, nurse, secretary, cocktail waiting, restaurant host, office receptionist, flight attendant).

The law also requires sex discrimination in hiring by requiring quotas, requiring vigorous recruitment of women, and requiring all institutions that receive government aid to do a certain percentage of their business with female-owned (or minority-owned) businesses.”

“Violence against Men as Women’s Liberation. 'Thelma and Louise' was widely touted as a film of women’s liberation. It was, for example, the only film celebrated by the National Organization for Women at its twenty-fifth convention.

Never in American history have two men been celebrated as heroes of men’s liberation after they deserted their wives, met one female jerk after another, and then killed one woman and left another woman stuffed in a trunk in 120-degree desert heat.

Male serial killers are condemned – not celebrated — at men’s liberation conventions. The moment a men’s movement calls it a sign of empowerment or brotherhood when men kill women is the moment I will protest it as fascism.”

“Wasn't polygyny an example of women as men's property? In no country at no period of time, were women safe from the insistence that their bodies existed only in relation to man, for his pleasure and progeny.

Academic feminism often equates mistresses, concubines, and polygyny (a man having more than one wife) with male dominance. Once we understand the Immortality Rule, though, we can move to a deeper understanding of why God blessed the many wives and concubines of David — as in David and Goliath.

As a king, David had enough wealth and power to support more than one woman — so why should other women miss out? Polygyny did not mean any man could have many wives — it meant a poor man would be deprived of a wife so a woman could have a rich man.

No one took pity on the man who was poor for being deprived of love.”

“When Time magazine ran a cover story of each of the 464 people shot in a single week, it concluded: 'The victims were frequently those most vulnerable in society: the poor, the young, the abandoned, the ill, and the elderly.'

When you read that, did you think of men? One had to count the pictures to discover that 84 percent of the faces behind the statistics were those of men and boys. In fact, the victims were mostly poor men, young men, abandoned men, ill men, and elderly men.

Yet a woman – and only a woman – was featured on the cover. Men are the invisible victims of America’s violence.”

“Why was a beautiful young woman such a big deal?

Beauty was a sign of health and reproductive capability; thus, a beautiful woman historically had wide hips (for childbearing), body symmetry (indicating no deformities), hair and teeth that weren’t falling out (indicating health) and she was young — at the beginning of her fertile years.

Society needed to reinforce men’s biological dependency on female beauty for the same reasons it needed to make women dependent on male income: dependency created an incentive to marry.

A man who was addicted to a woman’s beauty, youth, and sex would temporarily 'lose his mind' – he would make the irrational decision to support her for the rest of his life.

Female beauty, then, can be thought of as nature’s marketing tool: the way of marketing a woman for the survival of her genes. Which is why female beauty is the world’s most potent drug.”

“Women are segregated into the worst jobs, aren't they?

While we have seen that twenty-four out of the twenty-five worst jobs are male jobs and that many men also have low-pay jobs (busboy, doorman, dishwasher, gas station attendant, etc.), many of the lowest-paid jobs are predominantly occupied by women.

Why the distinction between the 'worst' and 'low-paid' jobs? Because many of the low-paid jobs are low-paid because they are safer, have higher fulfillment, more flexible hours, and other desirable characteristics that make them more in demand and therefore lower in pay.

When either sex chooses jobs with these desirable characteristics, they can expect low pay. Women are much more likely to choose jobs with seven of these eight characteristics – what might be called the 'Female Occupations Formula'.”

“Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture’s luxury items than the 'oppressor'; the only 'oppressed' group whose 'unpaid labor' enables them to buy most of the fifty billion dollars’ worth of cosmetics sold each year; the only 'oppressed' group that spends more on high fashion, brand-name clothing than their 'oppressors'; the only 'oppressed' group that watches more TV during every time category than their 'oppressors'.

Feminists often compare marriage to slavery – with the female as slave. It seems like an insult to women’s intelligence to suggest that marriage is female slavery when we know it is 25 million American females who read an average of twenty romance novels per month, often with the fantasy of marriage.

Are feminists suggesting that 25 million American women have 'enslavement' fantasies because they fantasize marriage? Is this the reason Danielle Steele is the best-selling author in the world?”

“Women do not enter a profession in significant numbers until it is physically safe. So until we care enough about men's safety to turn the death professions into safe professions, we in effect discriminate against women.”