"Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too"
About this Quote
Mencken lands the punchline with a trapdoor: he flatters bachelors as keen-eyed anthropologists of women, then immediately implies that such knowledge is precisely what keeps them single. The line works because it pretends to be a proverb while actually being a self-canceling argument. If bachelors know more, why aren’t they married? Because knowledge, in Mencken’s universe, doesn’t lead to harmony; it leads to avoidance.
The specific intent is twofold: to mock the smug certainty of unmarried men who claim they “understand women,” and to needle married men who talk as if marriage confers wisdom. Mencken offers a third, nastier possibility: neither group possesses superior insight. The bachelor’s “knowledge” may be the defensive intelligence of someone who studies a thing in order to outmaneuver it, not to live with it. The married man’s “knowledge” may be the dull familiarity of daily compromise, which can look like ignorance to outsiders because it refuses grand theories.
Subtextually, it’s Mencken’s wider skepticism about bourgeois institutions doing the work. Marriage, for him, is less a romantic culmination than a social machine that rewards optimism and selective blindness. The quip also plays with early 20th-century gender politics, when “the battle of the sexes” was a salon sport and marriage was treated as both inevitability and entrapment. Mencken’s cynicism isn’t just about women; it’s about the human talent for turning our choices into moral superiority, then calling it insight.
The specific intent is twofold: to mock the smug certainty of unmarried men who claim they “understand women,” and to needle married men who talk as if marriage confers wisdom. Mencken offers a third, nastier possibility: neither group possesses superior insight. The bachelor’s “knowledge” may be the defensive intelligence of someone who studies a thing in order to outmaneuver it, not to live with it. The married man’s “knowledge” may be the dull familiarity of daily compromise, which can look like ignorance to outsiders because it refuses grand theories.
Subtextually, it’s Mencken’s wider skepticism about bourgeois institutions doing the work. Marriage, for him, is less a romantic culmination than a social machine that rewards optimism and selective blindness. The quip also plays with early 20th-century gender politics, when “the battle of the sexes” was a salon sport and marriage was treated as both inevitability and entrapment. Mencken’s cynicism isn’t just about women; it’s about the human talent for turning our choices into moral superiority, then calling it insight.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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