Educators From The United States

"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."

"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."

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

"A man cannot tell whether a woman is in love with him or his security blanket until she is financially and psychologically independent enough to leave. Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love."

"A single woman who supports herself is called a career woman, while a single man who supports himself is called a playboy…Ironically, a woman who commits and becomes financially dependent is considered more mature than a man who does not commit but is financially independent."

"Commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. In exchange for forfeiting his primary fantasy, what does he hope to fulfill? His primary need: intimacy."

"One danger of a man succeeding is that it teaches his wife and daughter not to worry about success."

"Sex role training becomes divorce training."

"Alan Alda is loved not because he's sensitive, but because he's successful and sensitive."

"[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."

"Fear of emotional contact with men out of fear of being a sexual suspect makes boys, ironically, even more powerless before girls. Homophobia is like telling the United States it will be a sissy nation if it doesn’t get all its oil from OPEC."

"When women's consciousness was raised, women ended up seeing housework as their shit work ; when men's consciousness is raised, risking sexual rejection will be seen as the male shit work ."

"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.’"

"Both sexes work on their lines before they appear onstage. His lines are a lifetime of work; her introductory 'line' is her appearance--or her lack of lines. Just as careers give men power, so beauty gives women power. But just as the comparison between herself and the most beautiful women makes a woman feel powerless, so the comparison between himself and the most successful men makes a man feel powerless."

"[M]en who work to make it as computer whizzes or owners of black Porsches[...] are confused when they're told they are not vulnerable enough. We can't fall in love with men who appear invulnerable and expect vulnerability. Why did he want a black Porsche? Because he never saw an ugly woman get out of one."

"He and she become selective at different points; she can be selective when he wants his primary fantasy — sex; he can be selective when she wants her primary fantasy — commitment."

"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."

"From the male perspective, when commitment is associated with diamonds and mortgages, promises of love can feel like promises of payment."

"When divorces meant marriage no longer provided security for a lifetime, women adjusted by focusing on careers as empowerment. But when the sacrifice of a career met the sacrifices in a career, the fantasy of a career became the reality of trade-offs. Women developed career ambivalence."

"Perhaps the most prevailing expectation of men is our Superman expectation: the fear we are merely Clark Kents who won't be accepted unless we are a Superman."

"The 'enduring theme' [in fiction] of male competition and female competition for the hero/survivor has taken us from the fittest surviving to the brink of no one surviving. Sex roles have gone from functional to dysfunctional almost overnight. This is why the enduring theme must be questioned now."

"So while in men’s magazines success is a power tool to get sex and love, and therefore the look of success is crucial, in women’s magazines love and sex are power tools to get success—and therefore both the look of love and the sexual tease/promise are crucial."

"From evening soaps to preteen romances, [the message is that] inner values are for losers."

"The Female Western is the battle between the good and evil methods of getting the men who perform best."

"When men give lines, women learn to not trust men. When women wear makeup, men learn to not trust women. Male lines and female makeup are divorce training."

"In San Diego there is a highly popular course called How to Marry Money. Note that the marriage is to money--not to a person. I inquired about the percentage of men attending... 'The course is really for women,' [the instructor replied,] 'it's not relevant to men.'"

"How can I call security a woman's primary fantasy if I am saying it is also her primary need? Because while her primary need is the security of a home and a family circle, her primary fantasy is that someone else will earn enough to pay for them. Hence the focus of 2 billion women on the latest royal wedding."

"Cosmopolitan is the best-selling magazine to single women. Cosmo tells single women how they can get a man to commit and achieve her primary fantasy of better homes and gardens. It’s the single female’s version of Playboy. Pornography is the male primary fantasy--access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection--at a price he can afford!"

"The best-selling magazines to men are Playboy and Penthouse. These represent men’s primary fantasy: access to as many beautiful women as desired without risk of rejection. The best-selling magazines to women are Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, representing the female primary fantasy: better homes and gardens and a family circle."

"Most women’s ideal is to not be sexual until nine conditions are met: physical attraction; respect; emotional compatibility; intelligence; singleness; success (or potential ); being asked out; being paid for; and the man risking rejection by initiating the first kiss…. Men want sex as long as only one condition is met—physical attraction."

"Ralph had lost real power by trying to gain the appearance of power. He was a leader. But he was following a program for leaders ; therefore, he was a follower... he was, as he put it, a high-level mediocre."

"Together, we came to understand how we beg men to express feelings, but then when men do express feelings, we call it sexism, male chauvinism, or backlash."

"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."

"Men tuned into women but not tuned into their own hurts usually retained the attitude that women needed special protection."

"As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power."

"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:"

"There are people who just don't believe in the existence of a god. I don't know why because clearly, there is strong evidence that there's a god. But I believe that you serve all the people, not just those who profess to have faith but those with little or no faith. That's how you convert them."

"The way of truth is along the path of intellectual sincerity."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"I think living well is the key: trying not to build up regrets for the things we didn't do in our lives; to try to live a regret-free life in which we feel satisfied in what we're doing; and to try to be kind to ourselves and not disappointed in ourselves."

"One of the most important things was from a patient who said to me what a pity it was that he had to wait until now, when he was riddled with death, to learn how to live. And I have used that phrase many times: hoping that if you introduce people, in an appropriate way, to their mortality that might change the way they live and allow them to trivialise the trivia in their life."

"If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven't done, if we've lived an unfulfilled life, when death comes along, it's a lot worse. I think it's true for all of us."

"What an existential approach is about is positing that our bad feelings, our dysphoria, our despair, our anxiety emanates not only from our own life history and all the traumas we may have had in the past, and not only from the figures that we have introjected — many of these figures being unloving, or uncaring, or neurotic on their own parts — and emanates not only from our current life crises, but it emanates also, also, from our confrontation with the existential facts of life, with our confrontation with the human condition."

"Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified."

"When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time – starting now."

"The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole."

"When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential."

"A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time."

"There always will be limits to growth."

"In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving growth and at least one balancing feedback loop constraining growth, because no system can grow forever in a finite environment."