Love Quote by Cynthia Payne

It lands like a punchline, but the joke is doing legal work. Cynthia Payne, the famously unflappable British madam who kept colliding with the state, frames a lifetime of surveillance and raids as romance: “I always seemed to fall in love with policemen.” The line turns power into flirtation, and in doing so it steals some of that power back. If the police are meant to be the faceless hand of control, Payne recasts them as specific men with faces, bodies, and weaknesses - potential objects of desire rather than unquestionable authority.

The specific intent is disarming: it softens a hard story (criminalization, moral panic, tabloid spectacle) into something you can laugh at over a drink. Payne’s public persona thrived on that tonal judo. She didn’t argue policy; she made enforcement look faintly ridiculous, even a little needy. “Seemed” is the sly hinge. It implies inevitability, as if the attraction isn’t a choice so much as gravity - and it also hints at performance, the self-aware possibility that she’s playing up the coquettishness to control the narrative.

The subtext is darker. Falling for policemen can read as Stockholm-lite: intimacy with the people who can ruin you. It captures the strange, recurring proximity between sex work and policing - not just antagonism, but fascination, hypocrisy, the porous boundary between moral guardian and private consumer. In Payne’s cultural moment (postwar Britain’s crackdowns, then the 70s-80s tabloid era), the line works because it refuses shame. It suggests that even the agents of “respectability” aren’t immune to the world they’re tasked with containing.