War & Peace Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek’s line refuses the most convenient version of feminist conflict: the tidy showdown with a villain. “I do not fight against men” is not an olive branch so much as a strategic rerouting of blame. She’s stripping patriarchy of its favorite disguise - individual bad actors - and pointing at the machinery that keeps producing them. The phrase “the system that is sexist” sounds almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point: sexism isn’t just an attitude you argue out of someone; it’s an operating manual embedded in workplaces, art canons, courts, families, pay scales, and the stories a culture tells about what counts as “normal.”

The subtext is sharper than the syntax. By insisting on system over person, she anticipates the predictable backlash: the defensive man who hears critique as indictment, the institution that offers token reforms, the media narrative that frames feminism as a gender war. Jelinek’s sentence tries to make that misreading harder. It says: if you feel personally attacked, look at why the system taught you to interpret accountability as insult.

Context matters because Jelinek’s work has long treated language itself as complicit - slogans, clichés, and “common sense” as delivery systems for domination. Coming from a playwright, the line is also meta-theatrical: she’s rejecting the cheap drama of interpersonal conflict for the more unsettling stage of structure. Systems are harder to boo, harder to punch, harder to resolve in one act. That’s why the sentence lands: it denies catharsis and demands diagnosis.