Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Carter lands the line like a cocktail thrown in the face of polite hypocrisy: if society is going to treat sex as the whole moral résumé for women, then “virtue” becomes less an ethical practice than a strategic abstinence plan. The joke is barbed because it mimics the smug simplicity of conventional moral advice while exposing how laughably narrow that advice is when aimed at women.

The intent is not to praise chastity; it’s to indict the rigged scoreboard. “Blameless” reads like an official stamp issued by a culture that polices female sexuality as if it were public property. Carter’s subtext is that women are offered an absurd bargain: you can be declared good, but only by making yourself absent from desire, risk, and bodily autonomy. “Like the plague” spikes the line with historical panic. Sex isn’t framed as pleasure or intimacy; it’s framed as contamination, the kind of fear that justifies surveillance and punishment.

The comparison with men matters. Men, in Carter’s framing, are allowed complexity: moral failure is dispersed across a whole range of behaviors. Women get one primary tripwire. That asymmetry is the point, and it’s why the line works as feminist satire rather than moral instruction. Coming from a novelist who specialized in rewriting fairy tales and stripping the varnish off sexual politics, the quote sits in a broader Carter context: exposing how “purity” is less a personal choice than a cultural technology, designed to keep women legible, controllable, and blame-ready.