Art & Creativity Quote by Russell Baker

A whole national psyche gets skewered in eight words: appetite without mess. Russell Baker’s line is funny because it’s rude in exactly the way polite culture often is - a neat, cocktail-party insult dressed up as observation. The parallel structure ("fat books" / "thin women") makes the joke snap shut like a trap: two objects of desire, both shaped by status, both policed by taste.

Baker is working a familiar American contradiction. We fetishize excess in the mind and scarcity in the body. The "fat book" isn’t just long; it signals seriousness, virtue, the kind of cultural capital you can display on a shelf or in a tote bag. It’s ambition you can hold. The "thin woman" isn’t just an aesthetic preference; it’s the social demand that female bodies look effortless, disciplined, expensive - a public-facing proof that desire has been controlled, curated, made legible.

The subtext is not that Americans literally read doorstops or universally chase one body type. It’s that consumer culture trains us to want abundance where it flatters our self-image (knowledge, prestige, improvement) and austerity where it preserves old power arrangements (women as objects, women as symbols). Baker, a journalist and humorist steeped in mid-to-late 20th-century media, is also nodding at the industries that profit from both cravings: publishing that equates size with importance, advertising and entertainment that equate thinness with worth.

The sting is that the preferences aren’t personal quirks; they’re cultural tells. The laugh lands, then curdles.