Daily Inspiration Quote by Julie Burchill

Burchill’s line is a grenade dressed up as a compliment: it flatters women by offering “best sort” status, then immediately narrows the definition of “best” to whatever is easiest for a certain kind of man to consume. The sentence performs its own thesis. “Looks like a girl” isn’t neutral; it codes youth, malleability, and a pornographic gloss of innocence. “Thinks like a man” isn’t equality either; it treats male cognition as the default setting for seriousness, rationality, and humor, implying that women become more valuable as they approximate masculine norms.

The real tell is the pivot from “to be” to “to have and to hold.” Even the fantasy of selfhood is quickly absorbed into possession. Burchill, a journalist notorious for provocation, is likely not naively endorsing this so much as staging the ugliness of it: how modern sexism survives by disguising itself as taste, preference, even liberation. It’s the logic of the “cool girl” before that phrase had currency: be youthful but not needy, smart but not intimidating, sexually available but not complicated, basically one of the guys while still looking like a girl.

Context matters: Burchill emerged from a British media culture that rewarded barbed generalizations and a punkish contempt for piety. The quote works because it’s brisk, brazen, and syntactically seductive; it also curdles on reread, revealing a worldview where women are optimized, ranked, and ultimately handled.