War & Peace Quote by Katherine Dunn

The line lands with the cool bluntness of an ethnographic note, and that’s exactly why it unsettles. Dunn frames the scene as an answer to a question - “Asked why” - which signals the usual social script: women fight because they’re provoked, desperate, broken, misled. The reply detonates that script. They “enjoyed it.” No melodrama, no apology, no rehabilitating backstory. Pleasure is the motive, and pleasure is the motive we’re trained to grant men without needing a moral court case.

The subtext is a critique of the gendered bureaucracy around violence. Men and boys are allowed a culturally legible appetite for aggression: sport, sparring, dominance games, “blowing off steam.” When young women claim the same appetite, it reads as aberration, pathology, spectacle. Dunn’s small comparative clause - “just as some men and boys do” - is the knife. It refuses both sensationalism (look at these unfeminine monsters) and sentimentality (look at these victims). It insists on symmetry, and in doing so exposes how thin the supposed moral difference often is.

Contextually, Dunn’s fiction and reportage orbit bodies at the edge of respectable society - people treated as curiosities, then regulated as problems. This sentence acts like a corrective lens: it strips away the audience’s need for an explanatory narrative and replaces it with something more compromising. If they fight for fun, the question isn’t what’s wrong with them. It’s why we’ve made “enjoying it” such a permissible motive only when the subject is male.