Love & Passion Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash slips a stiletto into a doily. On its face, the line sounds like a gallant reversal: the old chestnut about women being the "weaker sex" gets mocked as laughably wrong. But Nash, a poet who made his living on domestic irony, doesn’t deliver feminist uplift so much as a comic power play. The joke hinges on a bait-and-switch: "weaker" isn’t a description, it’s a strategy. The supposed insult becomes a mask women can choose to wear, a piece of social theater that lowers male defenses right before the ambush.

That framing matters. Written in a 20th-century culture where chivalry and sexism often came bundled together, Nash imagines gender as an arms race fought with manners instead of weapons. Men get saddled with the self-flattering myth of their own strength; women, in Nash’s telling, exploit that vanity. It’s not just that the stereotype is false. It’s that the stereotype is useful - to the people it pretends to diminish.

The subtext is deliciously cynical: power doesn’t always look like power, especially when open dominance is socially punished. Nash also quietly flatters women as clever operators while keeping the battlefield safely comedic, not revolutionary. It’s a joke that punctures male complacency without demanding structural change - which is exactly why it lands: it lets the audience laugh at sexism while still recognizing how gender roles can be performed, negotiated, and weaponized in everyday life.