Politics & Power Quote by Marya Mannes

Mannes lands the punchline like a columnist who’s tired of watching the same national psychodrama rerun with different props. She sets up a neat parallelism - gain versus loss - then punctures it with the most cutting insult in American social criticism: you’re boring. That last clause is the twist. She’s not primarily moralizing about greed or vanity; she’s diagnosing how obsession flattens human conversation into a single, repetitive metric.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a gendered jab: men perform status through accumulation, women through subtraction. Underneath, Mannes is pointing at a culture that turns identity into accounting, where the body and the bankbook become competing ledgers of worth. “Obsessed” does heavy lifting: it implies compulsion, not preference, a social script so internalized it passes for personality.

The subtext also carries a quiet indictment of constraint. Men are allowed to desire “more” openly - more money, more power - while women are trained to desire less space, less appetite, less visible presence. When she pairs these fixations, she shows they’re not opposites but complementary gears in the same machine: consumption and control, capitalism and self-policing, each producing endless talk that never reaches intimacy.

Context matters. Writing in mid-century America, Mannes is watching postwar prosperity and the rise of mass advertising normalize both the breadwinner’s chase and the woman’s body discipline. Her cynicism isn’t detached; it’s weary. The line refuses to grant either obsession the dignity of tragedy. They’re not grand sins. They’re deadening habits sold as destiny.