Warren Farrell on Power

"If your son is unclear as to what a highly powerful woman wants from him, he is more likely to go for a woman who is less powerful who has some need for him."

"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."

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

"Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness."

"We have taught boys that, while building strength is considered masculine, preventing its loss is feminine."

"Guns are not the cause of the boy crisis, but as we are working on the causes, the control of guns can limit the damage of dad-deprived sons."

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

"The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness."

"Even if your son tries to use his power to save a woman, if he fails, that power will implode."

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

"No force is more powerful -- or more multiple -- than the family."

"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."

"Listening is self-empowerment via the empowerment of others."

"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."

"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."

"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. It looked like this:"

"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."