Warren Farrell - Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (1998)

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Men's pay paid women to love and nurture, to connect and feel. To be nurturer-connectors. In contrast, men received their pay by being some form of killer-protector. By becoming a human doing (a captain or a coal miner), not a human being (a person who feels happy or sad).

Warren Farrell
The hard part (of communication) is hearing criticism so it can be easily given.

Warren Farrell
Schools currently excel in encouraging children to express opinions, but are deficient in encouraging children to say, for example, Oh, that's different from my perspective – tell me more.

Warren Farrell
A mother's traditional role prepared her to love her family by being with the family she loved.

Warren Farrell
All of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of Battered Woman Syndrome.

Warren Farrell
Because men complained less, we made the false assumption that the complaints women experienced were only women's complaints and, therefore, only women's problems. Which created the rationale for women's problems to be solved – or at least addressed – by public policy.

Warren Farrell
We are all gifted of the mouth, retarded of the ear.

Warren Farrell
Men tend to put all their emotional eggs in the basket of their wives (or womenfriends), it is difficult for a man to communicate feelings of disappointment to his wife because, if she withdraws, it feels to him like his entire emotional support system has collapsed.

Warren Farrell
What is the impact on our children of this international Sisterhood is Victimhood bonding?

Warren Farrell
Even allegedly gender-neutral words like sexist imply slights only against women.

Warren Farrell
Helping men express feelings starts with understanding why men don't express them.

Warren Farrell
Four men describe how their wives hit them in the lower back with a pole, cracked them over the head or in the neck with a frying pan... the audience renews its laughter after each story. The men are part of a PMS Men's Support Group. Imagine an audience of men laughing as battered women describe how their husbands threatened them with brain or spinal cord injuries by battering them over their heads or in their necks with a frying pan.

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
Notice that much of what men do is also done by single mothers so appreciating what men do also helps us appreciate what single moms do.

Warren Farrell
Teaching children to debate without teaching children to listen is divorce training.

Warren Farrell
Look under the Love and Friendship section and see dozens of cards designed for women to send to women, most bashing men, and virtually none saying anything loving about men.

Warren Farrell
By the mid-'90s, the anger at men had become so palpable that even sedate publications like The Economist were characterizing women's vs. men's workload as A woman's work is never done; a man is drunk from sun to sun.

Warren Farrell
Note the men's fear that if they reported this to the authorities, not only would they not be believed, they would be ridiculed.

Warren Farrell
Men's life expectancy was one year less than women's in 1920; today, it is seven years less, yet the federal government has only an Office of Research on Women's Health.

Warren Farrell
The best way to use these lists to replace anger with love in real life is to nurture each other by doing for your partner what your partner normally does for you.

Warren Farrell
Even men who share their personal experiences find that, instead of empathy, they get the response Dear Abby gave this man: Women have it worse. This belief is so strong that over the past quarter century, women's old fantasy of marrying a man-as-protector has been tainted by women's new nightmare of husband-as-batterer.

Warren Farrell
A week after you read this chapter, misandry will become apparent in commercials, in films, in everyday conversations. But the bias that is hardest to see is the bias we share.

Warren Farrell
Misandry – or man hating – is the equivalent of misogyny. If you are unaware of misandry, welcome to the club.

Warren Farrell
No legend told its children of beautiful princesses falling in love with conscientious objectors.

Warren Farrell
The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men – or males....

Warren Farrell
We think of the division of labor as being outdated, but in fact it has reemerged. In the early '80s, a mother was 43 times more likely than the father to leave the workplace for family responsibilities; more recently, a mom is 135 times more likely to leave the workplace for family responsibilities.

Warren Farrell
We had affirmative action programs to help women help themselves economically. Is it now time for affirmative action programs to do for men's feelings what the government did for women's economics?

Warren Farrell
Divorce laws have given women economic support after divorce; no laws have given men emotional support after divorce. Men are required to continue their obligations to their exes in the form of alimony or child support; women are not required to continue their obligation to their exes in the form of homemaking or nurturing.

Warren Farrell
A father's traditional role prepared him to love his family by being away from the love of his family.

Warren Farrell
Women are socialized to take advantage of four informal options for emotional support: husbands; womenfriends; children; and parents. Men are socialized to take advantage of only one of these informal options: their wife or womanfriend.

Warren Farrell