Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Adams

Adams frames misogyny as a relic and sells that evolution as a punchline: once upon a time, men used possessions to signal status, women were expected to be impressed, and everyone played along. The joke works by setting up the familiar “hot car = hot guy” shorthand, then yanking the power lever away from the guy. The “less enlightened times” opener is doing a lot of moral laundering: it pre-labels the old dynamic as backward so the audience can laugh without feeling implicated, even if they recognize the trope.

The intent is half cultural critique, half self-protective venting. It flatters women as “wised up,” but only within a narrowly consumerist arena: empowerment is expressed through buying power, not structural change. That’s classic late-20th-century pop feminism filtered through a mall. The subtext is that male posturing is both pathetic and predictable, and the ultimate rebuttal is opting out of proximity to “jerks.” Adams doesn’t argue men should be better; he suggests women should simply route around them.

Context matters: as a newspaper cartoonist, Adams trades in quick, legible social observations that feel like truth because they’re familiar. The line also fits a moment when women’s economic independence was increasingly visible in advertising and workplace culture, making “she bought her own” an easy mic-drop. Still, the joke’s cynicism peeks through: relationships are reduced to transactions and transportation, and the male character isn’t redeemed, just avoided. It’s less a love story than a consumer upgrade path with a moral.