Love & Passion Quote by Beatrice Wood

Wood’s line lands like a flirtatious provocation, then reveals itself as a little booby trap. She offers a clean binary - women as secret romantics, men as blunt sexual realists - but the phrasing is too sly to read as simple belief. “If they just had a chance” is the tell: romance isn’t presented as an innate female essence so much as a luxury women are often denied. Love becomes a socially protected space, sex a terrain policed by reputation, risk, and economics. Under those conditions, “believe in love and not sex” can sound less like purity than strategy.

Wood, an artist who moved through the early-20th-century avant-garde (and lived long enough to watch “free love” become a marketing slogan), is speaking from a century when women’s sexual agency was publicly punished and privately negotiated. Her sentence sketches the asymmetry: men can “believe in sex” because society permits them to treat desire as a casual fact, while women are pushed to narrate desire as romance to make it legitimate.

The quote also has the performative bite of someone who understood persona as medium. Wood’s infamous “I Shock Myself” sensibility lingers here: she’s baiting the reader into either applauding the stereotype or recoiling from it, then forcing the uncomfortable question of which part is nature and which part is the price of surviving gendered rules. It’s less a theory of men and women than a snapshot of how belief gets manufactured when power distributes consequences unevenly.