Life & Wisdom Quote by Alex Comfort

A woman's greatest asset is her beauty sounds like a tidy, almost managerial summary of gender relations: reduce a person to a single form of capital and you can pretend the rest is negotiable. That bluntness is the point. Comfort, best known to many as the author of The Joy of Sex, wrote in a mid-century culture that was busy laundering old patriarchy through new language of liberation. Sex could be discussed more openly; the terms of who benefited from that openness often stayed stubbornly traditional.

The line works because it borrows the cool authority of economics. "Asset" implies a ledger, a market, a measurable return. It frames attractiveness not as pleasure or taste but as a resource a woman must manage to secure security, attention, marriage, status. Under that logic, her body becomes both résumé and currency, while men's "assets" remain diffuse: ambition, competence, earning power, authority. The asymmetry is the subtext, and it's doing heavy cultural work: it normalizes the idea that women are evaluated, and men evaluate.

Intent matters here because Comfort wasn't simply a scold from the Victorian attic; he sat in the modernizing wave that promised sexual candor. Read charitably, the statement could be offered as a bleak description of what society rewards. Read uncharitably, it becomes a prescription disguised as realism: a rationale for why women should prioritize appearance, and why men can feel entitled to treat it as the main metric.

Either way, the sentence is a small machine that turns social bias into common sense. Its efficiency is what makes it sticky and damaging.