"For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful. Funny. yes. Clever, no"
About this Quote
Sexiness, in Jilly Cooper's hands, is a class weapon disguised as a cocktail-party quip. "For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful" opens with the blunt tyranny of surfaces: desire as something visual, immediate, almost aristocratically curated. Then she flips the blade: "Funny, yes". Humor gets admitted not as a virtue badge but as an aphrodisiac - a live signal of confidence, ease, and social fluency. The punchline is the last turn: "Clever, no". It's not anti-intellectualism so much as a distrust of performative brains. Cleverness can feel managerial; it arrives with the whiff of keeping score. In Cooper's world - the racy, status-soaked ecosystems of Riders and Rivals - "clever" often means strategic, self-protective, capable of turning intimacy into a game of advantage.
The intent is to demote the qualities that read well on paper and elevate the ones that land in a room. Beauty is obvious power. Funny is power that pretends not to be power. Cleverness, by contrast, exposes the machinery: the calculation, the superiority, the sense that someone is always auditioning to be the smartest person at dinner. Cooper isn't arguing men should be dim; she's arguing that erotic charge dies when the mind feels like a spotlight instead of a warm current.
Context matters: Cooper's pop-literary glamour is built on decoding the erotic politics of British privilege. This line works because it's both wickedly reductive and uncomfortably observant - a reminder that desire doesn't always reward what modern meritocracy tells us to prize.
The intent is to demote the qualities that read well on paper and elevate the ones that land in a room. Beauty is obvious power. Funny is power that pretends not to be power. Cleverness, by contrast, exposes the machinery: the calculation, the superiority, the sense that someone is always auditioning to be the smartest person at dinner. Cooper isn't arguing men should be dim; she's arguing that erotic charge dies when the mind feels like a spotlight instead of a warm current.
Context matters: Cooper's pop-literary glamour is built on decoding the erotic politics of British privilege. This line works because it's both wickedly reductive and uncomfortably observant - a reminder that desire doesn't always reward what modern meritocracy tells us to prize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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