Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney Smith

A cleric calling clergymen a third sex is the kind of self-undermining joke that smuggles critique in under the cover of charm. Sydney Smith, an Anglican clergyman with a journalist's ear for hypocrisy, leans on a faux-French aphorism to make the barb feel like worldly wisdom rather than personal grievance. "As the French say" is doing heavy lifting: it flatters the reader with cosmopolitan knowingness while letting Smith dodge direct accusation. If the jab lands too hard, blame the French.

The line works because it treats "clergyman" not as a job but as a social category with its own rules of behavior, desire, and power. Smith is poking at the clerical ideal of being above the body - celibacy, restraint, moral surveillance - and pointing out that this supposed neutrality is its own identity, as constructed as masculinity or femininity. The subtext is less "priests are unmanly" than "priests claim exemption from ordinary human motives, yet still move through society with privileges that shape them". By labeling that exemption a "sex", he exposes it as something embodied, performative, and politically useful.

Context matters: early 19th-century Britain was thick with anti-clerical satire, religious reform debates, and suspicion of institutional piety. Smith writes from inside the system, so the joke doubles as self-protection and reformist pressure. It's a wink that says: we know the clergy aren't angels; let's stop pretending their authority comes from being less human.