War & Peace Quote by Shana Alexander

A neat little switchblade of a line: it starts by rejecting the cheap battle-of-the-sexes premise, then pivots to where the real bruising often happens - the bureaucratic, billable world that monetizes intimacy when it breaks. Shana Alexander, a journalist who made a career out of parsing public drama with private stakes, knows exactly what she is doing here. The first sentence performs reasonableness: no, men are not biologically destined to be women's antagonists. The second sentence lands the joke, but the joke is also an accusation.

“Perhaps his lawyer is” targets an institution more than an individual. It implies that conflict between men and women is frequently manufactured, amplified, or at least profitably managed by the legal system - especially in divorce, custody fights, workplace disputes, and the whole ecosystem where gendered power gets translated into paperwork. The humor depends on that recognition: the lawyer stands in for a professional class that benefits from turning messy human relationships into adversarial narratives, complete with winners, losers, and invoices.

The subtext is feminist without being slogan-y. Alexander isn’t romanticizing men; she’s refusing a simplistic villain and pointing at structure: incentives, representation, and the way “his” resources and “her” vulnerability can be negotiated by proxies who speak fluent procedure. As a journalist in the postwar-to-second-wave era, she’s writing into a culture that increasingly routed personal liberation through courts and contracts. The line works because it’s witty, but also because it’s cynical about how modern society handles gender conflict: outsource it, litigate it, and call the paperwork justice.