Politics & Power Quote by Julie Burchill

Burchill’s line lands like a snapped ruler: brisk, punitive, and designed to make liberal pieties sting. Its intent isn’t to weigh evidence so much as to puncture a feel-good story - the idea that sexual liberation is automatically emancipatory for everyone. She makes that puncture by yoking “better” for men to “duller and more dangerous” for women, a deliberately asymmetrical trade that reframes “progress” as a gendered bargain.

The subtext is pure Burchill: suspicion of male appetite disguised as enlightenment. “Liberal sexual ideas” isn’t a neutral label here; it’s a coded swipe at a politics that treats reduced stigma and expanded choice as the whole ledger, while quietly assuming women will absorb the costs. “Duller” is the slyest word in the sentence. Danger is the obvious charge - harassment, coercion, the pressures of hookup culture, pornography’s influence, the blurred lines of consent when expectations are rewritten. “Duller” suggests something less discussable: the thinning of romance into entitlement, the flattening of courtship into logistics, the way “freedom” can become a script where women are expected to be endlessly game, endlessly cool, endlessly available.

Context matters: Burchill emerged from British tabloid and column culture where provocation is the currency and feminism often battles not only patriarchy but also fashionable orthodoxy. The sentence is engineered to be argued with. It generalizes (“invariably”) to force the reader into a choice: defend the liberal narrative, or concede that the benefits of sexual modernity have been unevenly distributed - and that men have been better positioned to turn “liberation” into leverage.