Life & Wisdom Quote by Warren Farrell

Farrell’s line is engineered as a provocation: it flips a familiar feminist story about male power into a quasi-hostage narrative where women control the most primal resource (sex) and use it to extract the most modern one (income). The phrasing “you could make a case” performs a lawyerly shrug, a rhetorical move that invites the reader to entertain a charged thesis while giving the author plausible deniability about its crudeness. “Addicted” is doing the dirtiest work here. It medicalizes male desire, implying compulsion rather than choice, and recasts men as acted upon, not acting.

The subtext is a barter model of intimacy: female sexuality as leverage, male labor as payment. That framework doesn’t just describe relationships; it smuggles in a moral diagnosis of the breadwinner system. If men are “addicted,” then women become dealers; if sex is “withdrawn,” then marriage (or commitment) becomes a withholding strategy. It’s an account designed to re-center male grievance while sounding like evolutionary realism.

Context matters. Farrell emerged from the 1970s gender debates, often positioning himself as a bridge figure turned critic of mainstream feminism. This quote sits squarely in a men’s-rights-adjacent argument: that society has ignored how male identity is conditioned by sexual access and economic provision, and that women wield “soft power” that institutions refuse to name.

Why it works, rhetorically, is also why it polarizes: it compresses sprawling social history into a clean, memorizable transaction. What it leaves out is just as telling - women’s restricted economic options for much of modern history, the coercion embedded in “providing,” and the way “income” has often been controlled by men even after it’s earned.