Life & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

Gunn’s line lands with the cool candor of someone refusing both prudery and piety. As a poet who moved between mid-century English restraint and the freer, body-forward culture of postwar San Francisco, he’s poking at a shared vanity that polite society pretends not to have. The phrasing matters: “most men” is a sly generalization that invites argument while asserting a pattern; “heterosexual and homosexual” is a deliberate leveling move, stripping away the idea that desire and exhibitionism belong to one “type” of man. Then he drops the real provocation: “enjoy being considered sexual objects.” Not “attractive,” not “desired,” but “objects” - a word usually deployed as an accusation.

The subtext is that objectification isn’t only something done to you; it can be a form of recognition you collaborate with, even seek. Gunn is also quietly gendering the conversation: men like to imagine they’re immune to the vulnerabilities women are forced to navigate, yet they’ll still take the hit of validation when it’s offered. That tension - between control and exposure - is where the sentence does its work.

Contextually, Gunn’s career is steeped in the politics of looking: gay male sexual culture, the aesthetics of the body, the AIDS era’s brutal re-scripting of intimacy and risk. Read against that backdrop, the quote isn’t a celebration of being reduced; it’s a blunt admission that erotic life often runs on a craving to be seen, and that craving doesn’t respect identity labels nearly as much as we pretend.