Warren Farrell - Power Quotes

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Both sexes work on their lines before they appear onstage. His lines are a lifetime of work; her introductory 'line' is her appearance—or her lack of lines. Just as careers give men power, so beauty gives women power. But just as the comparison between herself and the most beautiful women makes a woman feel powerless, so the comparison between himself and the most successful men makes a man feel powerless.

Warren Farrell
Feminism justified female victim power by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

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

Warren Farrell
Here's the pay paradox that Why Men Earn More explains: Men earn more money, therefore men have more power; and men earn more money, therefore men have less power (earning more money as an obligation, not an option). The opposite is true for women: Women earn less money, therefore women have less power; and women earn less money, therefore women have more power (the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job).

Warren Farrell
Men will not change as long as women 'marry up.' Men won't change until we have a perspective on how powerless power makes us. A woman cannot help a man change until she has a perspective on how powerless power makes men.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
Myth. Rape is a manifestation of male political and economic power. Fact. Any given black man is three times as likely to be reported a rapist as a white man. Do blacks suddenly have more political and economic power? Maybe rape does not derive from power, but rather from powerlessness.

Warren Farrell
As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.

Warren Farrell
Sexually, of course, the sexes aren't equal. It is exactly a woman's greater sexual power that often makes a man so fearful of being rejected by her that he buys himself drinks to reduce his fear. In essence, her sexual power often leads to him drinking; his sexual power rarely leads to her drinking. If anything is evidence of her power over him, it is his being expected to spend his money to buy her drinks without her reciprocating.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
Ideally there should not be a men's movement but a gender transition movement; only the power of the women's movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men's movement. And this creates a special challenge for men: There are few political movements filled with healthy people, yet few healthy changes have occurred without political movements.

Warren Farrell
I define power as control over one's life. Pay is not about power. Pay is about giving up power to get the power of pay.

Warren Farrell
Male makeup is men's titles, status and paying for dates. Makeup is what both sexes use to bridge the gap between the power they have and the power they'd like to have. Both male and female makeup are compensations for feelings of powerlessness.

Warren Farrell
When men in relationships have more money, we say they have the power. When women in relationships have more money, we say they are being used.

Warren Farrell
Women's genetic celebrity power magnifies men's protector instinct. It inspires the government-as-substitute-husband. Men's addiction to the genetic celebrity is either invisible or in the denial stage—thus we either don't see it, or when confronted, deny it.

Warren Farrell
When mining… and other death professions are discussed in feminist publications, they are portrayed as examples of the male power system, as male-only clubs. However, when Ms. Magazine profiled female miners, the emphasis was on how the woman was 'forced' to take a job in the mines because it paid the best, and how taking such a job was the only way she could support her family.

Warren Farrell
If power means having control over one's own life, then perhaps there is no better ranking of the impact of sex roles and racism on power over our own lives than life expectancy.

Warren Farrell
Our love for children is so immediate in part because we feel their powerlessness immediately; conversely, part of the way we deny our love for men is by denying men's powerlessness. Too often we have confused love for men with respect for them, especially for their power to take care of us—-which is really just love for ourselves.

Warren Farrell
Pay is about the power we forfeit to get the power of pay. For example, we forfeit power when we work for others, not ourselves, but we get the power of the paycheck when we do that.

Warren Farrell
Women's greater social desirability and beauty power afford opportunities for creating both measurable and invisible income. While the opportunities are available to almost all women and some men, they are available in abundance to the genetic celebrity... a woman so beautiful that men do more than look and talk—they follow her.

Warren Farrell
If we taught men to repress feelings and rewarded him instead for being a captain he might be willing to die to protect us; if we paid him enough to feed his family if he worked in a coal mine, he might be willing to die sooner to keep us warm. But all that required him to forfeit his feelings – his power as a human being – and substitute it for power as a human doing: feeling obligated to earn money someone else spent while he died sooner.

Warren Farrell
So while in men's magazines success is a power tool to get sex and love, and therefore the look of success is crucial, in women's magazines love and sex are power tools to get success—and therefore both the look of love and the sexual tease/promise are crucial.

Warren Farrell
One grand fallacy of the women's movement: Expecting work to mean "power" and "self-fulfillment."

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
When women are at the height of their beauty power and exercise it, we call it marriage. When men are at the height of their success power and exercise it, we call it a mid-life crisis.

Warren Farrell