Warren Farrell - The Myth of Male Power (1993)

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Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs—or 'death professions.'

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
ITEM: The Mike Tyson trial. The hotel in which the jury is sequestered goes ablaze. Two firefighters die saving its occupants. The trial of Mike Tyson made us increasingly aware of men-as-rapists. The firefighters' deaths did not make us increasingly aware of men-as-saviors. We were more aware of one man doing harm than of two men saving...

Warren Farrell
We have restricted humans from giving 'free' food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is 'free feeding'.

Warren Farrell
Women's scars and rituals involved beauty (piercing ears and noses, binding feet, and wearing corsets); men's involved protecting women. In cultures in which physical strength is still the best way to protect women, as among the Dodos in Uganda, each time a man kills a man, he is awarded a ritual scar; the more scars, the more he is considered eligible.

Warren Farrell
Minimizing the role of sexual attraction in rape denies our responsibility for reinforcing men's addiction to female sexual beauty and then depriving men of what we've helped addict them to.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
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.

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
Hazing is both testing and training to subordinate self to the team.

Warren Farrell
In post offices throughout the United States, Selective Service posters [reading "A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do] remind men that only they must register for the draft. If the Post Office had a poster saying "A Jew's Gotta Do What A Jew's Gotta Do..." or if "A Woman's Gotta Do..." were written across the body of a pregnant woman...

Warren Farrell
Early feminists sensed this: they were strong opponents of protective legislation. They knew that as long as the princess was protected from the pea, women would be deprived of equality. The modern-day woman's 'pea under the mattress' is the rough spots in the workplace. When today's feminists are proponents of protective legislation, they oppose equality. Sexual harassment legislation is sexist because it makes only the man responsible for the male role in the sexual dance.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
Somehow, women's romance novels are not titled He Stopped When I Said No. They are, though, titled Sweet Savage Love, in which the woman rejects the hand of her gentler lover who saves her from the rapist and marries the man who repeatedly and savagely rapes her. It is this marry the rapist theme that not only turned Sweet Savage Love into a best-seller but also into one of women's most enduring romance novels.

Warren Farrell
The most frequent way men are raped by adult women is "birth control rape."

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

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
Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search—for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

Warren Farrell
The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
If the law tries to legislate our yeses and noes it will produce the straitjacket generation – a generation afraid to flirt, fearful of finding its love notes in a court suit. Date rape legislation will force suitors and courting to give way to courts and suing.

Warren Farrell
Men's immediate path from the Insanity Track to the Sanity Track is in demanding that both sexes have the freedom to strike a balance between homeplace and workplace. Men must expect their wives to financially support them to be fathers as much as they now financially support their wives to be mothers. Women must have our approval to marry the warrior of love rather than the warrior of money.

Warren Farrell
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.

Warren Farrell
When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision.

Warren Farrell
Laws with broad definitions of rape are like laws making 55 mile per hour speed limits for men and no speed limits for women.

Warren Farrell
It is important that a woman's noes be respected and her yeses be respected. And it is also important when her nonverbal yeses (tongues still touching) conflict with those verbal noes that the man not be put in jail for choosing the yes over the no. He might just be trying to become her fantasy.

Warren Farrell
Deprivation of the beautiful woman and sex with her until the man guarantees economic security in return;

Warren Farrell
Sexual harassment legislation feels unfair to men because if they sued over an ethnic joke, or over a woman discussing pornography or asking them out, they'd be laughed out of the company.

Warren Farrell