Creativity Quote by Courtney Love

Courtney Love’s line lands like a thrown microphone: crude, funny, and strategically aimed at the genteel mythology of who “supports women.” By pairing Gloria Steinem, the polished avatar of mainstream feminism, with Larry Flynt, the porn publisher who built a brand on provocation, Love isn’t praising Flynt’s politics so much as indicting the respectability economy around women’s power. It’s a grenade lobbed at the idea that empowerment only counts when it arrives wrapped in the right morals, institutions, and dinner-party language.

The intent is personal, but the subtext is structural. Love is talking about help as material, not symbolic: who returned the call, paid the lawyer, opened a door, vouched when it cost something. Steinem represents prestige and a movement often criticized (fairly or not) for gatekeeping who qualifies as a “good” woman to defend. Flynt represents transactional, messy patronage; he’s the kind of ally you wouldn’t want to cite in a grant proposal, which is exactly why citing him is the point. Love dares the listener to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the culture’s official champions can be absent, while its villains sometimes show up.

Context matters: Love spent the 1990s as a tabloid magnet and a lightning rod for misogyny, treated less like an artist than a public trial. The quote reads as backlash against being moralized at by people who claimed to be on her side. It’s not an argument for porn; it’s a jab at hypocrisy, and a reminder that solidarity without risk is just branding.