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Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.
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Male Message 1 is subconsciously experienced by the boy like this: ‘Some girls in my class already look like movie stars. If they wanted me as much as I want them, then I’d know I was okay. They are genetic celebrities. I am a genetic groupie.’
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Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another’s needs creates empathy.
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What’s true is that everyone is uncomfortable with expressing anger and being critical. Anger and criticism generates rejection. And everyone hates rejection.
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The hard part (of communication) is hearing criticism so it can be easily given.
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With men, we blame the victim. We blame men because we have camouflaged men’s victimization by teaching men to also be the victimizer. Men’s victimizer status camouflages men’s victim status.
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Men are socialized to trust women until evidence to the contrary surfaces; women are socialized to be suspicious of men until an individual man earns trust.
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Any guy who’s played team sports has practiced a skill I call 'team sport empathy': he’s practiced focusing on anticipating the other team’s moves. That means figuring out their way of looking at the situation.
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It is important for a father who feels pushed away to say, in effect, 'When you do that, I feel unwanted as a father,' or 'I feel my rough-housing is not bad parenting; it's my contribution to helping our child take risks.' Women cannot hear what men do not say. – page 105.
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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).
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The problem is that Americans care more about saving whales than saving males.
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Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.
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Helping women achieve higher pay is a core goal of this book.
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Raising children was not designed for single parents. (Which is why divorce was such a taboo prior to birth control.)
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Programs like TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, formerly known as AFDC) and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) subsidize the exclusion of dads. In effect, they create, as we have seen, future welfare recipients. Or tax spenders.
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Crime, especially crime involving money, reflects the gap between the expectation to provide and the ability to provide… If we really want men to commit crime as infrequently as women, we can start by not expecting men to provide for women more than we expect women to provide for men.
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I would suggest that just as women who make it in the world of business need male business mentors, perhaps men who make it in the world of emotions will need female emotional mentors.
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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.
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The more our children see men being paid to take responsibility for children, the more respectable it will be for men to do work compatible with their role as dads.
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The first instinctive response to any criticism is a defensive response. (The quicker the response, the more defensive.)
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'Visitation' reflects the era of the absentee father; 'parent time' influences the re-emergence of the involved father. 'Visitation' reflects the destruction of the family; 'parent time' influences the reconstruction of the family. 'Parent time' influences an era that understands that as either parents loses, so lose the children.
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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.
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In brief, she is the partner to what primarily he creates; he is the visitor to what primarily she creates. To me, this wasn’t equality.
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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.