Daily Inspiration Quote by Bette Davis

Bette Davis takes a blowtorch to the old Hollywood myth that actresses were simply grateful passengers on men’s sexual adventures. The line is blunt, funny, and strategically unromantic: “plenty of them” reduces would-be lotharios to an interchangeable crowd, while “vying” frames their behavior as a petty sport. She doesn’t even dignify it with seduction; it’s competition, scoreboard logic, the kind of masculinity that needs witnesses. “Famous women” is the tell. The conquest isn’t about desire so much as status theft: if you can get a star “into the hay,” you borrow her shine and turn it into a story about you.

Davis’s specific intent is to reclaim narrative control. By stating she was “never very interested,” she denies these men the central fantasy they depend on: that women, especially celebrated women, are secretly waiting to be claimed. Her phrasing also refuses victimhood. It’s not a confessional about trauma; it’s a dismissal, a veteran’s eye-roll sharpened into a sentence. That’s power in a system built to trade women’s bodies for access and to punish them afterward for the transaction.

Context matters: Davis came up in an industry where publicity machines manufactured romance, studio bosses policed reputations, and “casting couch” dynamics were normalized but rarely named. Her quote works because it names the game without pleading for sympathy, and in doing so, makes the men look small, not dangerous, which is often the most cutting exposure of all.