Love Quote by Ashley Montagu

Montagu’s line wears a lab coat to smuggle in a jab. The setup looks like a tidy binary - girls as romantics, boys as walking hormones - then he spikes it with mock-scientific diction: “chronic irritation,” “gravitate,” “curvilinear properties.” That deadpan physics metaphor is the point. He’s parodying the male habit of treating desire as an external force, as if biology (or geometry) absolves responsibility. The joke isn’t simply that men are shallow; it’s that men like to narrate their shallowness as inevitability.

The subtext is a critique of how “science” can be recruited to launder old gender scripts. Montagu, an anthropologist and public intellectual who spent much of his career attacking biological determinism and racial pseudoscience, knows exactly how authoritative-sounding language can turn prejudice into “nature.” Here he flips that weapon onto masculinity: reduce male marriage motives to a mechanistic itch, and suddenly the grand institution looks like a dressed-up reflex. “Girls marry for love” reads less like a compliment than a cultural assignment: women are expected to provide the emotional alibi that makes the whole arrangement seem noble.

Context matters: mid-century social science was obsessed with sex roles, often describing them with a confidence that exceeded the evidence. Montagu’s irony slices through that confidence. He’s not offering a data-driven claim about men and women; he’s exposing the rhetoric that makes sexism feel objective. The sentence works because it sounds like a finding while acting like a heckle, turning the language of measurement into a mirror for cultural hypocrisy.