Daily Inspiration Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem’s line is a rhetorical judo move: she takes a tired sexist premise and flips it using the opponent’s own “logic.” If the stereotype claims women get irrational when hormones dip, she asks why that dip doesn’t make them more like men - who, in the popular imagination, are treated as the default setting of human reason. The point isn’t biology; it’s how selectively we use biology to excuse power.

The intent is to expose the asymmetry in who gets pathologized. Women’s bodies are treated as a monthly disruption, a defect requiring explanation. Men’s bodies, equally hormonal and equally mood-driven, are treated as neutral infrastructure. Steinem’s question makes that neutrality look absurd. It also does something subtler: it refuses to argue on the terrain of “are women emotional?” and instead interrogates why “emotional” is coded as feminine and inferior in the first place, while male anger, risk-taking, and entitlement get rebranded as leadership or rational self-interest.

Context matters. Second-wave feminism was battling a culture that medicalized women’s lives - from “hysteria” to workplace discrimination justified by menstruation myths. Steinem isn’t offering a scientific claim so much as a cultural one: if we’re going to talk hormones, let’s talk about whose behavior gets explained away and whose gets treated as a standard. The humor lands because it’s sharp, not cute; it forces the listener to hear how ridiculous the original assumption sounds when applied to men.