Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Graves

Graves lands the line like a courteous insult: a chivalric premise ("If I were a girl...") that pivots into a bleak market report on masculinity. The wit is in the false generosity. He frames despair as empathy for women, but the real target is men, demoted to a scarce resource not of bodies but of merit. "Supply" and "deserve" do the heavy lifting; romance is recast as economics and ethics, implying that the problem isn't compatibility, it's character.

The subtext is both protective and faintly proprietary. Women appear as "good" en masse, a flattering generalization that still boxes them into virtue as their primary credential. Men, meanwhile, are measured by whether they "deserve" women, not whether they can meet them as equals. It's an old-fashioned moral scale: women as prizes, men as applicants, the judge's gavel in the author's hand.

Context matters because Graves is a writer shaped by early-20th-century upheaval and its hangover of disillusionment. After the war shredded the era's ideas of honor, confidence in male leadership and decency took a public beating. This line reads like that damage distilled into social commentary: the modern man has not kept up with the ideals he still expects women to embody. The sentence works because it flatters and indicts at once, offering women sympathy while quietly admitting the speaker's world is structured so that "goodness" is demanded of women and "deserving" is too often optional for men.