For the Love of Men Quotes

“The biggest lie is that the fight to address male suffering is separate or at adds with the battle to liberate women. We all experience gender. We are all limited by oppressive gender stereotypes.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“The biggest lie is that the fight to address male suffering is separate or at odds with the battle to liberate women. We all experience gender. We are all limited by oppressive gender stereotypes. We must transcend the myth of the gender war. We’re all on the same team.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“But of course saying 'just let go of toxic masculinity' to a man is like saying 'just relax' to a person having a panic attack. Men will only break free from the masculinity trap when they have a safe alternative, but for the time being they're growing up receiving the message that they are being surveilled and that any deviation from the ideals created by rigid masculinity will be grounds for embarrassment and rejection from men as well as women. The change is first and foremost individual, but it also has to be collective. No one is free from gender norms, and the messages that men receive about their gender is setting them up to fail, particularly in their intimate relationships.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Benevolent sexism is sort of like the Macarena: you don't remember when you learned it, but for some reason you're really good at it.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“It's at that moment that I realized why chivalry annoyed me. Although it's presented as something men do for women, it's really something men do for themselves.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“It reveals itself in the way we're more comfortable with the image of a boy playing with a toy gun rather than a boy playing with a toy doll, because we're more comfortable seeing a boy hold something that kills rather than something that cries.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“The system works because it’s not questioned. The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Being a man felt less like an identity and more like a job or a reward you received only after going through excruciating circumstances. The men we spoke to felt an unforgiving pressure to perform their masculinity constantly. Being a man was something you earned.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“We are puzzled when boys act terribly, failing to realize that this is precisely the bar we set for them. We have such low expectations of boys that we made up a term for it.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“We live in a culture that teaches boys stoicism over authenticity, dominance over empathy, and that if they don’t follow their script, someone will take notice and take their “man card” away.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“Having an identity that fits into the dominant culture protects you.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“While women are encouraged to ask questions, men are expected to pretend like they know everything even when they don’t, even when it comes to large and existential questions about their gender and their lives.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Shame creates lies about how men should think and act, and when men don't fulfill those roles, they have additional shame. We see it play out in one of the greatest and most-ignored crises of our times: homelessness. We largely see it as an economic problem, because it is. It's a result of a lack of economic mobility and opportunity as well as a housing crisis, but it's also enabled by the lies we tell about men.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Freedom is in fact like breadsticks at the Olive Garden; it’s unlimited. Contrary to popular belief, every time a woman earns her basic rights and freedoms, a man does not lose his manhood.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“author Richard Rohr, who says that whatever pain you don’t transform, you will transmit. Indeed, what you don’t become conscious of ends up controlling you.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“If questioning the falsehoods women absorbed about themselves has led to so much social progress, imagine what reassessing the ones we hold about men could do.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. —bell hooks”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“Having more men in care work, teaching and the health care sector would mean better outcomes for children, the ill and the elderly. When we limit who can work, we limit who can enjoy the fruits of that labor.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“According to a paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, equal pay would be one of the most cost-effective ways to end child poverty. Their data shows that women making as much as men would lift 2.5 million families with children out of poverty.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“Men have to understand that if they don’t know someone in their life who has been assaulted it’s because they haven’t made it safe enough for them to say they were. The chances are overwhelming that someone that is close to you has had their lives destroyed from sexual violence or abuse.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“If you want to know how our culture feels about two men having emotional intimacy, look no further than the term we use to speak of it: a “bromance.” Male friendship is so fraught that we as a culture have invented a special term to characterize the extraordinary”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“The more I read about men’s relationship to directions and maps, the more it explained the absence of a substantive and open conversation about masculinity. While women are encouraged to ask questions, men are expected to pretend like they know everything even when they don’t, even when it comes to large and existential questions about their gender and their lives.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“Just as much as there is an outdated version of masculinity in society, there is an archaic understanding of disability as well.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“There is no quick fix to ending terrorism and organized violence, but disregarding the way that false definitions of manhood are used to prey on marginalized men who end up joining those groups is ignoring one of the potentially most cost-effective paths to a rigorous and global terrorism reduction strategy.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity

“Throughout this book I’ve argued that isolation can lead to personal hardship and poor physical and mental health for men, but what often goes unnoticed is that this also makes men more vulnerable to predators who capitalize on that poor emotional integration to recruit them for violence.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“When a culture assigns masculine value to violence, it becomes a proxy through which men who become estranged from normative paths to employment and status in their families or communities earn power.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Measuring gender equality by only showing the way it has costs for women is inaccurate because it doesn’t capture the scope of harm for the entire population. The problem with the Basic Index of Gender Inequality is that it continues to pit women’s issues against men as if they weren’t related. Recognizing women’s pain doesn’t preclude us from recognizing men’s. Ranking our pain is unproductive because it gets us away from the fact that our afflictions are all connected.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Toxic masculinity was most powerful when it was invisible, and it was most subtle when it was ritualized.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

“Although there’s nothing wrong with teaching someone to be self-reliant, there can be negative consequences when it’s imposed rather than encouraged.”
― Liz Plank, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity