Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Paul Smith

A children’s-alphabet cadence becomes a sly little trap: the singsong “B is for” primes innocence, then yanks the reader into adult appraisal. Robert Paul Smith is playing with the friction between pedagogical language (meant to name the world plainly) and the way culture eroticizes and markets bodies. The rhyme is deliberately cheap; it mimics the tinny certainty of a primer while smuggling in a critique that’s hard to miss once it lands.

The pivot is the line break between “function” and “view.” “Once prized for the function” nods to breasts’ biological role, but also to an older, vaguely idealized social script where usefulness could be spoken aloud without embarrassment. “Now for the view” is the modern punch: value as spectacle, as something consumed. Smith compresses a whole mid-century shift - advertising, pin-up culture, mass media’s gaze - into four blunt beats. The word “ladies” matters too; it’s polite, almost old-fashioned, and that politeness sharpens the bite. He isn’t describing people, he’s describing how “ladies” get described.

There’s also a quiet indictment of how early this conditioning starts. Putting this into an alphabet format implies that objectification isn’t just a locker-room habit; it’s taught, normalized, made mnemonic. The joke works because it’s funny in the way a rude limerick is funny, then it keeps working because you can feel the cultural ugliness behind the laugh: anatomy reduced to inventory (“two”), then to scenery (“view”).