Love & Passion Quote by Jackie Collins

Still shocking people today is Collins' sly way of indicting the culture, not herself. The line pretends to be puzzled, but the question is barbed: what, exactly, is so scandalous here - the sex, or the fact that a woman is narrating it with appetite, humor, and control? Collins frames shock as a recurring failure of the audience's imagination, a refusal to grant women the same authorship over desire that men have long enjoyed without penalty.

Her “I don't know why” is performative innocence, a novelist's feint that lets her sharpen the knife. By naming "sex and men", she reverses the usual dynamic: men are not the default narrators of women's bodies; men become material. The subtext is workplace sexism in cultural form - reviews, interviews, and literary gatekeeping that treat erotic confidence as either confession or provocation when it comes from a woman, but as craft when it comes from a man.

Then she delivers the punchline: “the back of a Bentley.” It's decadent, tacky, aspirational - a perfect capsule of Collins' brand and her critics' snobbery. The magazine line is both compliment and caricature, reducing her prose to a luxury set piece while accidentally admitting her technical skill: scene-setting, momentum, and a shrewd understanding of how power and sex travel together. In a single quote, Collins exposes the deal she was offered by the culture: you can be successful, even celebrated, as long as we keep calling you shocking.