Love Quote by Jenifer Lewis

A boundary disguised as common sense, Jenifer Lewis's "If you don't love it, don't touch it" lands like advice your auntie gives you in the kitchen, except it doubles as a survival strategy in public. On the surface it is a neat rule about consent and care: affection is the admission ticket to access. But Lewis, an actress whose career has been built on turning emotional truth into comic steel, is also talking about how people treat other people's bodies, work, and lives as communal property.

The line works because it flips entitlement into embarrassment. "Touch" is a small verb with big reach: it can mean sex, criticism, gossip, meddling, even the casual way an audience or industry "handles" a performer. Lewis is drawing a bright line around what gets to have contact with you. Love here isn't just romance; it's respect, attention, the willingness to be gentle. If you can't offer that, you don't get to participate.

There's also a performer-to-world subtext. Celebrities are expected to accept being pawed at, physically and emotionally: the intrusive question, the hot take, the demand for access. Lewis reduces all that to a child's rule: hands off unless you can be kind. It's a clean rebuke to people who engage only to mock, use, or consume. In an era where everything is "content" to be grabbed and reshaped, she insists that contact should cost something: care.