Wit & Attitude Quote by Bette Davis

Davis drops this line like a lit cigarette into a champagne glass: glamorous, dangerous, and meant to spoil someone else's party. The shock isn’t just the word "sexy" paired with "six" (a deliberate cultural tripwire); it’s the way she frames sexuality as both identity and sentence. "I felt sexy" claims innate power. "It was hell" admits the cost of living in a body the world reads before it listens.

The intent is classic Bette: to puncture polite narratives about female desirability as a gift bestowed by men or by adulthood. She flips it. Desire arrives early, uninvited, and the real agony is not wanting too much but being forced to wait for permission - permission from age, from morality, from the industry, from the censor. "Waiting to do something about it" lands as a double-edged punchline: it’s about sexual agency, but also about work. Davis understood that Hollywood trafficked in sex appeal while policing women who acknowledged it. You could be made into an object; you just couldn’t narrate yourself as a subject.

In context, it’s also a veteran actress wielding provocation as armor. Davis came up in a studio system that prized youth, punished "difficult" women, and required actresses to turn longing into marketable mystique. By calling that waiting "sheer hell", she exposes the cruelty under the sheen: the gap between what a woman feels and what she’s allowed to be. The wit is the weapon; the bitterness is the receipt.