Excerpts From Why Men Are the Way They Are

Introduction P. xix
• Is it possible for the sexes to hear each other without saying, “My powerlessness is greater than your powerlessness”? P. xx
• The fundamental feminist false assumption: Female powerlessness meant male power. P .xxi
• Instead of understanding male powerlessness we had come to understand only the female experience of male power. P. xxii
• It took me seventeen years to understand that men do not become more loveable until they are understood. P. xxii
• Men tuned into women but not tuned into their own hurts usually retained the attitude that women needed special protection. P. xxii
• Strict ideology is for women what macho is for men. P. xxiii
• Confessing feelings that risk rejection is genuine vulnerability. P. xxvi
• Women’s vulnerability confessing their desire to see men as a success object is matched by men’s confession of compulsiveness of sexual desire for women. P. xxvi
• Each theme in this book evolved from examination of actual behavior as opposed to claimed behavior. P. xxx
• Women’s desires were an important ingredient in determining why men are the way they are. P. xxxi

Chapter 1: Men Have the Power, Why Would They Want To Change?
• I redefine power from the traditional definition of the ability to gain access to external rewards to the ability to control one’s own life. P. 9
• Many men seen as leaders are actually following a program for leaders, making them actually followers. P.9
• The Five Components of Power P.9
• 1) Access to external rewards and resources equivalent to the level of a person’s expectation or desire.
• 2) Access to internal rewards and resources on a level equal to one’s expectation or desire.
• 3) Access to interpersonal contact (attention, affection, love and respect from others) equivalent to one’s expectation or desire.
• 4) Access to physical health, attractiveness, and intelligence equivalent to one’s expectation or desire.
• 5) Access to sexual fulfillment in a form that meets one’s expectations.
• Women who marry men attached to the image of the acquisition of power often lose their identities and their own power. P.10
• Our reaction to the fact that men die earlier than women is the quietist response to genocide in the history of humanity. P.12
• Sex roles systematically assign men a shorter life. They’re told they ask for it by playing their role of hero. P.12
• Women’s 9 conditions for sex: attention, respect, emotions, intellect, singleness, status/success, he asked out, pay and risk first advances. P. 13
• Men have only one condition----physical attraction. P. 13
• By being cautious until more conditions are met, women gain enormous sexual leverage power over men. P. 13
• Women can use this power to get the external rewards they feel deprived of. P. 13
• Men feel her minimum requirements are greater than his wildest fantasy. P. 13
• For women, learning to depend on the power of youth, beauty, and sexuality turns the attributes into power tools rather than internal sources of fulfillment. P. 14

Introduction to Part 2 P. 17
• In a time of such vitality for women, they feel men haven’t changed and seem mediocre and hopeless. P. 17
• Changing this hopelessness starts with understanding men adapt to women as much as women adapt to men, though it doesn’t appear so. P. 18
• As measured by magazine sales, men’s primary fantasy: access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection; women’s, security and family. P. 18
• The more a magazine sells to women, the less it focuses on employment. P. 19
• All primary fantasy magazines require their readers to work…..at the role they must play to secure their primary fantasy. P. 19
• Women’s primary means to their primary fantasy are glamour/beauty and men. P. 19
• Men’s primary means to their primary fantasy are heroism or performance. P. 19
• To get part of his primary fantasy, just one woman, he must perform; to get his entire primary fantasy, access to many, be a hero. P. 19
• The increase in divorce forced women to find alternative means to their primary fantasy; “new woman” magazines emerged to serve that change P. 21
• Yet, what women buy as reflected in the advertising of these magazines is no different than in the older glamour magazines for women.
• Advertising reflects women’s choices, therefore their values and the real signals women send to men. P. 22

CHAPTER 2: What Women Want: The Message the Man Hears P.24
• A look at our ads is a look at our checkbook stubs and therefore our subconscious values. P.24
• Not one full page ad for one gift a woman could give a man appeared in any Ms. magazine, including two Christmas issues. P.27
• If he’s a husband or lover, well, he’s getting her body and isn’t that enough? P. 27
• The De Beers Transfer Pt. 1: Her belief in equality forces her to deny him credit for what he does for her. She transfers the credit to herself. P.27
• Part 2: If a man is to spend money on a woman, the woman should be sold---she decides, he pays. P. 28
• What hasn’t changed about women doesn’t make the new. Superwoman makes the news; Cinderella doesn’t. P. 29
• Women in ads: if she’s beautiful she’s portrayed as having the wealthy surroundings without earning them herself. P.30
• Men in ads: He’s portrayed doing the type of activity it takes to earn possession of his environment. P. 31
• Cosmo’s formula: Use the appearance of a career to get the man to commit. P.34
• The new no-win situation for men: if he commits, it’s because she played hard-to-get using career or beauty; if he doesn’t, it’s because he’s threatened by her success. P. 34
• The Flashdance Phenomenon: Marrying in a minute what he earns in a lifetime. P.35
• For the nine or ten year old, the magical unicorn becomes the magical man; the gold at the end of the rainbow becomes the diamond at the beginning of commitment. p.36
• Seventeen teaches her that perfume, her “Magical Musk,” is her power for taming the beast in a man. Forbes teaches men what they must buy to earn a woman’s love. P. 39
• The more she believes in magic, the more he must create the miracles. P. 39
• With neither unicorns or adored heroes in posters on their walls do adolescent girls have to deal directly with their sexuality. P. 39
• Boys’ first posters are of male heroes, too; male role models to exemplify the role he must play to have access to his fantasy female. P. 40
• She is deciding the type of performer she should be sexual with; he is deciding how to perform to get sex. P. 40
• Whether the unicorn, the prince or the hero, they all offer girls the ideal of skipping sex itself, skipping a career and being “flashdanced” magically to security. P.40
• Soap opera message to men: none show an admired male hero caring for the children and house work while a woman supports him. P. 45
• Of the three best-selling magazines for teenage girls there was not a single article on careers. P. 45
• Seventeen’s ads and articles blatantly teach girls how they can prepare for greatness by a career in beauty----or a man’s success. P.48
• A woman’s secondary fantasy is sexual fulfillment; but if her partner doesn’t fulfill her primary fantasy as well, rarely will she commit to him. P.54
• Women are caught between two cultures: “Club Med” or her natural self, vs. socialized self which associates sex with love and then uses sex to gain commitment. P.54
• The man who commits to fulfilling her primary fantasy is often too busy to fulfill her secondary fantasy. P.55
• Disillusioned and depressed at not realizing both, and fearful of losing the first, she resorts to female pornography (romance novels) or has an affair. P. 55
• The common denominator of self-improvement articles for women is “do it without work”. P. 56
• The “workshop high” and belief in magical, overnight change makes us more demanding than our own real change warrants and makes us self-righteous. P.57
• Rape! with an exclamation point sells to a female audience. P. 58
• Romance novels’ messages to men: Once her security needs are met, she’ll be off with someone else who is really exciting. P. 58
• 25 million women every year read the fantasy of male death bringing female fortune; male death flashdancing women to power and status. P. 58
• Hustler Magazine and romance novels provide complementary images of death: hers through a meat grinder for male pleasure, his via terrorists for female pleasure. P. 59
• Boys still don’t get the message that sharing housework turns women on, rather that the best foreplay is success. P.62
• More men watch the Super Bowl and more women watch the Miss Universe pageant because both sexes are careful observers of the contests played out by their own sex. P.70
• From eleven to seventeen years old a girl learns in a million ways to look natural by being artificial. P. 71
• Makeup is her lie, her deception, the equivalent of his bragging or exaggerating. P. 72
• The Female Western is the battle between the good and evil methods of getting the men who perform best. P. 73
• From evening soaps to preteen romances, inner values are for losers. P.73
• The beauty focused woman has the most sexual problems and simultaneously most denies her sexual problems. P.76
• In men’s magazines, success is a power tool to get sex and love; in women’s magazines love and sex are power tools to get success. P.78
• Glamour’s instructions to women on flirting: “Think of flirting as you would a job interview.” Of course. It is a job interview. P. 84
• Unlike Richard Gere, most men find it hard to kill women (Goodbar), be an officer and a gentleman, self-destruct (Breathless) and make the front cover of Newsweek. P.84
• In preteen romance novels eleven year old female readers learn that if her body is not kept in scarce supply, she will be psychologically killed, i.e. not accepted by peers. P.85
• The boys the girls seek out pay the least attention to the girls’ no’s. P. 86
• While male adventures pit man against nature and eath, Sweet Valley High romances pit girl against male and sex. P. 86
• Both sexes’ mafias control their own kind by not letting a person give away what he or she has to offer without getting some of the primary fantasy in return. P.87
• Rape socialization: When 12 year old girls are taught to let their nuance say yes while their words say no. P89
• A large UCLA study: 54% of boys & 42% of girls felt it was okay to force a girl to have sex under certain circumstances. P.89
• Instructions for rape are sitting in most American living rooms at any given moment. P.90

• Chapter 3: The Flashdance Phenomenon P.91
• The “enduring theme” of male and female competition for the hero/survivor has taken us from the fittest surviving to the brink of no one surviving. P. 91
• Flashdancing is discrimination against the working woman; it’s also discrimination against the working man on the basis of his sex. P.95
• The “Flashdance phenomenon” reinforces the ethic of magic without work repeatedly. P. 95
• The Superman message to men: If she’s attractive and working, he’d better be even more successful to awaken her sexually. P. 96
• No wonder women are disappointed in men; next to Superman, there a lot to be disappointed in! P.97
• If this were only fantasy, Christopher Reeve would not have risen and fallen as a sex symbol in direct proportion to the degree of his association with Superman. P. 97
• In romance novels, deserting a male security blanket can be justified only by death, but teaches her that her husband’s disappointing her Superman fantasy justifies her death wish. P.98

Conclusion to Part 2
• The more sex is placed in opposition to morality, the more morality can be used (or rather misused) as an excuse to withhold sex. P. 102
• “Morality” turns into an excuse to have a man earn sex by providing a woman with security. P. 102
• For a man, when commitment is associated with diamonds and mortgages, promises of love can feel like promises of payment. P.103
• 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. P.103
• This dilemma is no one’s fault; we are all innocently born into a system in motion. P.103
• Women perceive a man shortage larger than is warranted statistically because far fewer men meet their greater number of demands. P.104
• He and she become selective at different points: she when he wants his primary fantasy---sex, he when she wants her primary fantasy---commitment. P.105

Part 3 Why Men Are The Way They Are P. 107
Chapter 4: Why Are Men So Preoccupied With Success? P.109
• Male message 1: She’s a genetic celebrity; I’m a genetic groupie. P. 110
• By 14, a boy feels the girls he’s been socialized to desire have beauty power before he has performance power. P.110
• Male Message #2: I must do something---perform---to earn my way to equality with the genetic celebrity’s first natural resource---her attention. P 112
• Female support, nurturing, is conditional---it goes to the men on the field. Therefore her support is really pressure to keep performing. P 114
• Cheer leaders are a socially sanctioned group of females using their bodies to cheer on 22 males to their self-destruction. P. 114
• It is organized practice for a girl to learn how she can get someone else to take life’s risks---preparation for financial dependency. P.114
• Boys primary fantasy, physical intimacy, is free for both sexes; girls primary fantasy requires male payments---dinner out, an engagement ring, etc. P.116
• Male Message #3: I must earn my way financially and/or by making myself a hero to gain equality with her second natural resource---her sexuality. P 117
• Male Message #4A: If you don’t initiate, women won’t---and what little there is will go to those who ask for it. Prepare to risk rejection 150 times between eye & sexual contact. P 121
• Raised consciousness in women saw housework as their “shit work”---raised consciousness in men will see sexual initiatives as theirs. P.123
• Locker-room bragging just increases a boy’s insecurity---each knows he’s exaggerating but he’s uncertain if the other guy is. P. 123
• Male Message #4B: Discover which nos mean no, which nos mean maybe, and which maybes mean yes. P. 124
• A man never considers the possibility of saying no himself; that’s a luxury that comes with abundance. P. 124
• Male Message #4C: Take responsibility for turning nos into maybes and mabes into yeses. Discover afterward whether you’re right or a rapist. P. 124
• Wimps get rejected more than men who don’t take no for an answer. P.125
• A woman’s set of cues can be clear to the woman; but every woman is an individual with cues as unique as the woman herself. P. 125
• The extent to which a woman protects a man’s ego is the extent to which she preserves ambiguity about the real meaning of her signals. P.126
• For some women, the clearer the no, the clearer the release from guilt, and then the clearer the yes….for HER. P. 127
• Male Message #5 Being attracted to other boys is off limits. P.128
• Fear of emotional contact with men out of fear of being a “sexual suspect” makes boys even more powerless before girls. P.128
• Stage 3: Coping with the helplessness men experience with the 5 Male Messages leads to compensations---defenses---against the vulnerabilities they generate. P.129
• Defense #1: It hurts less to be rejected by a sex object than a full human being. P.129
• Defense #2: Honesty about sexual feelings guarantees rejection, so suppress your feelings and be dishonest. P.130
• The boys having the most fun don’t ask girls to share initiatives, so sensitive behavior becomes deviant and extends the period of potential rejection. P. 130
• Defense #3: Railroad sex: getting from eye contact to intercourse as quickly as possible. P.130
• Success as panacea and trap: the less a man is willing to give up a sex object, the more he’ll be trapped into becoming a success object. P.134
• A career woman’s expectations are to support herself, not her husband. P.135
• Because career women marry up, it increases the pressure on men to perform to earn their way to equality with their wives. P. 135
• Not taking no for an answer creates the core of male strengths and the core of male neuroses. P. 136
• Success is the most respected defense against rejection, making it both the male insurance policy and the preventive medicine for the cancer of rejection. P.137
• Sex role training becomes divorce training. P.136
• What was genetically functional is now genetically dysfunctional. P.137
• Technology has made sex roles unnecessary by: P.137
• a.) obviating the need for brute male strength, the workplace is as amenable to women as men;
• b.) invention of the birth control pill led to smaller families and medicine to longer life, which
• c.) led to women no longer having to spend their entire lives at home.

Chapter 5: What Makes a Man Successful at Work That Makes Him Unsuccessful at Home? Or Why Can’t Men Listen? P.139
• The more a man listens to himself rehearse his contribution, the more likely his interjection will shift his boss’s attention from another employee to him. P. 140
• While men self-listen by problem solving or fault finding, women self-listen by pseudo-questioning. P.142
• Ironically, the very process that makes a man secure enough to risk initiatives with a woman is the same process that creates his contempt for her. P. 143
• Twelve steps for turning a complaint into an opportunity for love and intimacy. P144
• One danger of a man succeeding is that it teaches his wife and daughter not to worry about success. P. 148

Chapter 6: Why Are Men So Afraid of Commitment? P.150
• Commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. P.150
• Just as we cannot assume a man is in love by his willingness to go to bed with a beautiful woman, neither can we assume a woman is in love by her commitment to a successful man. P. 150
• A woman complaining about “men’s fear of commitment” may be avoiding looking at why she was rejected. P. 154
• He may pay for her play as well as his own, but he hasn’t “grown up” until he pays for her life. P.154
• While less likely to have fears of the idea of commitment, women often feel ambivalent about the man to whom they actually committed. P. 157
• The quality of the sexual connection is an important ingredient of commitment; sex itself is not. P. 159
• When a man commits, a crucial shift occurs: He trades in his primary fantasy and hopes to receive his primary unfulfilled need---love. P. 160
• For most women, security is the primary unfulfilled need; for most men it’s intimacy or love since he expects himself to handle his security needs. P.161
• A man thinks of sex over 600 times for each time he has it. P. 161
• Men’s willingness to shift gears upon commitment is the most unappreciated adaptation in all human behavior. P.161
• The meaning of commitment for men cannot be appreciated cannot be appreciated until we understand what the nature of commitment is to a male. P.162
• The male power structure does not save a man from the complete loss of intimacy by divorce or a wife’s death; when he needs it most, his “power” is powerless. P. 162
• Women, seeing “Better Homes and Gardens” turn into Cleaner Homes and Housework expected men to pursue the remaining housework and child care, calling them chauvinist if they complained. P.164
• We call it women’s “juggling act” when they add a career to marriage with children but ignore men’s intensifying act when they make the same commitment. P. 164
• Neither poor women nor wealthy women choose to provide for their husbands---or even the family. P. 169.
• The more successful a woman’s husband, the less likely the woman is to work. P.169
• A man’s commitment to a woman can mean her shifting from working out of necessity to working for fulfillment, postponing his ability to do the same. P. 170
• The greater the level of commitment, the more the man supports the woman, the less frequent the sex, and the poorer the quality of sex. P.172
• Married sex is sex with the familiar, which may ber part of the reason sex between married couples becomes almost taboo, the “Marital Incest Taboo.” P173
• The fact that we create different fantasies for each sex and use marriage to fulfill one sex’s fantasy but not the other’s is the real double standard. P.173
• When a woman hopes that a man will change, she is keeping a secret agenda, but he feels it and the contempt for him underlying it. P. 174
• The very real fear of commitment for many men who’ve had children comes from the memory of their first wives becoming childaholics. P.175
• Men are approximately nine times more likely to become stepfathers than women stepmothers. P.177
• Stepfathers are nine time more likely to suffer the “Two Year s Syndrome”: the almost constant rejection of him by his new children for two years. P.177
• If a woman can support herself financially and is not attached to the idea of marriage, it’s likely she is devoted out of love. P.182
• Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love. P.183
• The Relationships Revolution of the 80’s featured an amalgam of greater complexity, higher expectations, higher divorce rates, and yet a higher standard of loving. P.184

Part 4, Chapter 7: The New Sexism P.189
• We call biases against other races racism, biases against women sexism, biases against me humor. P. 194
• We claim men’s egos are fragile and yet attack men as if they are invulnerable. P.195
• In the last two decades we stopped merely categorizing men and now blatantly objectify them into inhuman categories of worms, turkeys and wolves. P. 199
• We’ve objectified men more subtly by bribing them; if they killed themselves, we’d call them heroes. P.199
• The new sexism prepares us not to care whether the average man is hurt or killed, and to do this we develop contempt for these “dogs”. P.199
• Few people are afraid of intimacy per se; they are afraid of the challenge to their self-centeredness that any relationship implies. P.200
• When we give lines, we promise what we perceive as the other person’s real needs---or their Achilles’ heels. P.215
• When men in relationships have more money, we call it power; when women have more money in relationships we say they’re being used. P.218
• The complaint of men “pooping out” on their own ambitions when they marry successful women is actually justification for the female habit of marrying up. P.219
• Among wives of executives in large corporations, 87% are unemployed. P.219
• If Daddy is employed, he is criticized for not taking care of the children; if unemployed, he’s suspected of molesting them. P.224
• Liberation has meant fathers going from “Daddy knows best” to “daddies molest. P.224
• The shocking truth of domestic violence: the percentage of male violence towards women is equally matched by female violence towards men. P226
• Killing a woman is taboo, killing a man is not, which is why women are killed in horror movies. P. 227
• The difference in killing women and men in movies: when women are killed, they’re seen as victims; when men are killed, they deserved it. P.228
• We protect women by not assigning them roles in which they must kill each other; in the process we make violence against them more appalling than violence against men. P.228
• The issue is not to circumcise or not, but the subconscious lack of caring about men involved when we don’t ask for the information needed to make the decision. P.231
• The rules of sexism do not free men from the terror of violence; they only keep men form complaining about it. P.232
• In Alex Haley’s Roots & Alice Walker’s The Color Purple not one black male was portrayed as a victim.P.235
• Women and men are both slaves and second class citizens in different ways. P.235
• Women are the only “minority” group whose “unpaid labor” enables them to buy $50 billion worth of cosmetics each year. P.235
• The sexes, unlike the classes, have approximately equal numbers of people born into privileged and oppressive conditions. P.235

Chapter 8: Why Did The Sexual Revolution Come and Go So Quickly?
• As women’s economic independence was seen to be economic insecurity, there was a quick shift back to a more conservative sexuality. P. 238
• Feminists dumped the morality rationale, developed a distrust-of-male-sexuality attitude and used it to shift back to a conservative sexuality before commitment. P.239
• Glamour magazine: mothers should experience the child’s sucking motions in a sexual manner and achieve orgasms. Yet incest was defined as “any contact with a child in which a man has sexual feelings. P.239
• A woman’s sexual experience with her child could be condoned wheras a man could be arrested merely on the accusation of touching his child too long while bathing the child. P.240
• He gets sex, she gets sex; if that is considered unequal, no wonder men are afraid of commitment. P. 240
• The old sex and the new sexism combine with sex roles to produce many more problems than they solve. P.242
• Sex as dirty is revealed in how most of the words we associate with sex are swear words. P.244
• The dichotomizing of love and sex, sensuality and sexuality, spirituality and sexuality always puts sex down. P. 244
• We allow our children to watch TV violence of the most brutal kind, but turn them away from watching sex scenes. P.244
• Once we’ve made both sexes’ genitals unnatural, we are ready to make the transition from genitals as nature to genitals as commodity. P.245
• During adolescence a girl learns that although her genitals are dirty, those disgusting men want her dirty genitals and she has possession over something both dirty and valuable. P.246
• “An erect penis has no conscience, but when it is not erect, we call a man impotent, which puts men between a rock and a soft space. P.256
• Men give the same lines to different women for the same reason women wear the same perfume for different men; we all try the things that work. P.246
• Sex is dirty, initiating sex is men’s responsibility, so men cannot be trusted. P. 246
• Whatever her restrictions, morality, fear of pregnancy, mistrust however legitimate---have become his conditions to prove himself before he’s “allowed” to have sex. P.248
• Women who oppose abortion are almost always likely to perceive their major source of income as men. P.248
• The more negative our attitude toward sex, the more men have to pay to “earn” it. P. 249
• It takes women who agree to have sex for “womanizers” to exist, so why do we call it being used when all that is exchanged is sex? P. 250
• If we don’t stop the sex object/success object cycle, the consequences are more rape and war. P.251
• Both sexes fake their emotional responses rather than risk the disapproval of the other sex. P.252
• Regardless of our sex, we tend to cut off our emotions when we fear the other expects us to be emotional about their primary fantasy before we’re ready to fulfill it. P.253
• Women’s magazines with articles and cartoons berating men for poor performance are actually covering for women’s own aversions about sex.. P.254
• Taken out of the male-female context with its economic implications, men and women engage similarly along the full range of sexual behaviors. P.258
• If rape is an extension of male political power, why do women report black men as rapists five times as often as white men? P.258
• Man the Infidel is a statistical myth. P.259
• The double standard in numbers of sexual partners of women vs. men is a function of what each admits to, not what they do. P.259
• Blaming her silence about her extramarital affairs on his ego transfers the responsibility to him. P.260
• The societal assumption that the man will promise or fail to promise to call after a date is sexism. P.262
• The man who feels the pressure to make the promise to call is buying into the notion that he owes her something more than she owes him. P.262
• I define impotence as a soft penis at a hard moment, and can be thought of as God’s way of keeping a man in touch with his feelings. P.263
• Socially impotence is a word that condemns men for their powerlessness to such an extent that they would forget what a soft penis is for. P.263
• Sexual freedom returned to the Old Sex when sexual freedom could no longer be linked with economic freedom. P.266
• Man the economic support system became man the major competitor and worse, the enemy. P.266
• Friends pay a price for rejecting us, but employers pay a price for accepting us. P. 267
• It is the economic provider’s ego on the marketplace, with the pressure upon it, that gets internalized to create a fragile ego. P.268
• Few women have husbands who depend on their wives’ acceptance or rejection by the marketplace. P.268
• The male ego is as fragile as it is because there is so much that appears fragile that depends on it. P.269
• Women who are beauty-focused have egos as fragile about beauty as men do about success. P. 270
• The success-oriented woman is caught between two value systems: 1) success is wonderful vs. 2) relationship is wonderful. P.271
• Women fear that their own success will make them fail to get a successful man. P.272
• Every time a woman assumes a man will pay on the first social occasion, she reinforces the mentality that leads to women earning less than men. P277
• “He asked me out, therefore he pays” is just the double jeopardy of the male role: he must not only ask, but pay. P.277
• “Romance” is often a cover for prostitution. P.278
• Don Juans are successful for their acute sensitivity not to what women say they want, but to what their experience with women has taught them women respond to. P.279
• Only the woman who makes a Don Juan into a primary fantasy object can possibly want what he is promising to begin with. P.280
• Women’s interest in supporting men’s part in gender transition is obvious since men’s private lives are in women’s homes and their political lives could ruin their homes. P.281

Part 5: Reweaving Masculinity; Should I Question My Motivations for Changing Him?
• When we’re feeling badly about ourselves, and need a “superiority fix,” we criticize others; and later, when we feel better, the criticism fades. P.285
• Willingness to seek out the best in men and apply it non-defensively is women’s acid test to determine if the urge to change men is merely a superiority fix. P.286

Chapter 10: What I Love Most About Men P.287
• Nothing about men’s socialization is strong enough to prevent any individual woman from attaining any of the characteristics that men are socialized to have. P.289
• Solutions, though they can run roughshod over listening to feelings, are male nurturance. P. 292
• One good thing about men expressing fewer feelings: it provides more air time for women to express theirs. P. 292
• Competing to be number one is too often seen as male ego fragility rather than recognizing the ego strength required to reevaluate one’s failures to get there. P.294
• When a man fails to achieve a promotion, his wife is the second most devastated by his failure, making seeking her support actually additional pressure. P.295
• Self-sufficiency implies earning rights while liberation has been defined as giving women the right to choose. P.299
• The silent, internal confrontation of his own vulnerability and failures, of the gap between image and reality, creates the male version of humility. P.302
• A man spends his prework lifetime sorting values and developing ideals, only to spend a work lifetime compromising those ideals. P.302
• Being less focused on commitment, men are free to enjoy the woman, not the potential. P306
• Although men have made fewer changes than women, they’ve done so without movements that blamed women. P.307

Chapter 11: How Can I Change a Man Without Just Getting Him Ready For the Next Woman? P 309
• “A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.” P.309
• In relationship, the person changing is aware of each time the toilet seat is put down; the other notices only when the toilet seat is up. P.313
• Men have changed less because the approval clues have changed less. P.313
• Men will not change so long as we convince women to marry up and men to marry down. P.314
• If only one of you is changing, you become the therapist, and therapists who sleep with their clients take grave risks. P. 316
• If each sex does not share its power, it will remain in the prison created by that power. P.317
• As women in business need male business mentors, men in the world of emotions need female emotional mentors. P. 317
• The less a woman supports herself the more she tends to rear honesty with her man. P.323
• Substituting discussions with women friends for discussions with your partner leads you to believe you’ve communicated more with your partner than you have. P. 324
• Want to change a man? Be certain you’re not dependent on him for providing a lifestyle you’re not willing to forfeit. P.332
• Male or female, the fragility we protect is the vulnerability we can rape, the underdevelopment we can ridicule, the ego we can exploit. P. 327

Chapter 12: How Can I Get Him to Express His Feelings? P.334
• While women are better at expressing some feelings, both sexes are very bad at expressing feelings of vulnerability. P.334
• For him, his volcanic eruption of feelings is more likely to be an outlet; for her it is the symbol of her having accomplished preparation to leave him. P.335
• Men avoid feelings by focusing on one or more of the “five male crutches,” and women do so with their own equivalent crutches. P.339
• We see women who fail to express their feelings as adaptive victims, while when men do express their feelings, we call them insensitive jerks. P.314
• Our choice of partners is one of the clearest statements about our choice of values. P.341
• Men put all their intimacy eggs in the basket of their wife or girlfriend, so when she shares his confessed vulnerabilities with a girlfriend, he experiences it as infidelity. P.342
• There is little incentive for the man to remain closed if he feels understood when he opens up. P.344
• Checkpoint both sexes can use to determine of they are pushing their loved one out of love and provoking the male or female volcano. P.345
• Couples who punish bad communication with bad passion have “civilized” themselves into a lose-lose situation. P.346
• Not holding back his anger means a man is treating a woman as an equal. P.346
• Women have an efficient process for soliciting from men what they want men to say; it might be called “awe training”. P. 348
• The flip side of the support to succeed is pressure to succeed.. P. 349
• It is likely that the more men cry, the less we will need to relieve tension by compulsive sex. P.350
• Telling a man “big boys don’t cry” is like telling him “big boys don’t urinate.” P. 350
• A man in touch with his feelings early enough will endure an “early-life” crisis---a time to sort out his values and direct his life by creating his own values. P. 351
• Even feminist men limit most of their feelings to those feelings they believe will be approved of by feminist women. P353

Chapter 13: Conclusion: Clearing The Way For Love P354
• Only when a woman shares male risks can she really begin to understand men. P.355
• As a man, I know we must take much of the responsibility for almost two decades of attacks without expressing our own feelings. P.358
• We have learned to think of ourselves as intimate with those who need us, but this can result in perpetuating neediness in our partners. P.359
• Too often we have confused love for men with respect for their power to take care of us---which is really just love for ourselves.P 360
• Men do not cause wars by fighting in wars any more than women cause wars by raising the boys who fight in wars. P.361
• It is both women and men who socialize our sons to be decision-makers and our daughters to marry them. P.363
• Blaming men because they fulfill the responsibility we assign them to take is part of the problem. P.362
• Equality implies equal responsibility for what does and does not happen. P.362
• Violent death in the Vietnam war was seven thousand males to each female, yet we still protest violence against “innocent women” more than the violence against “guilty men”. P.363
• As both sexes acknowledge our roles in reinforcing the symbiosis of the sex-role dance, we will begin to see men as part of us---rather than them. P.363
• Overall, the area in which we blame the other sex reflects the area in which we need to look at our own responsibility. P. 365
• What tempted us away from seeing this gender dance was how we overvalued the one component of power we assigned men to gather---external reward power. P.365
• Another contributor to our blindness to gender dance was viewing men’s adaptation to their jobs and not seeing its connection to men’s adaptation to women. P. 365
• This forgetfulness has led us to seeing men as enemy. P. 365
• To suggest we cannot create change because we cannot change our institutions is usually an escape from changing the most resistant system: ourselves. P. 366
• We cannot expect the system to change if we cannot make a living changing the system. P.367
• For every societal dysfunction, there is and equal and opposite potential for profit. P. 366
• Complaints are needs waiting to be fulfilled. P. 366
• The deepest paradigm shift is changing the neurotic need to see ourselves as right and someone else as wrong. P. 368
• Three methods of bringing about equality without blame: Alliance building, the listening matrix and reversing roles. P. 369
• Sex role training as divorce training could help even the pro-family advocates see the value of an Equal Rights and Responsibilities Amendment. P. 369
• For the first time n history the psychology that is a prerequisite for intimacy has become the psychology that is a prerequisite for species survival. P. 371
• If we co-exist in peace tomorrow it will not be due to new Galileo; it will be due to a willingness to share each other’s telescopes. P. 372