Life's Pleasures Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein twists the knife by calling “funny” what is really bleak: the male ego inflating itself around achievements that require almost no distinction. Drunkenness is the first target, not as a private vice but as a public performance. Any man can get drunk; the point is that men are “proud” of doing it “in the same way,” turning conformity into camaraderie and self-erasure into status. It’s a critique of masculinity as herd behavior: the less individual the act, the safer it is to boast about.

Then she pairs that with fathering “their son,” a phrase that matters. Not “a child,” not “children,” but the son as trophy, heir, proof. Stein isn’t just poking at male vanity; she’s exposing how patriarchy treats reproduction as ownership and lineage as a kind of masculine authorship. The father “makes” the son, the mother disappears into the background, and biology gets translated into legacy.

Context sharpens the edge. Stein, an avant-garde modernist and an openly queer woman living amid early 20th-century gender scripts, had every reason to notice how conventional masculinity compensates for its narrowness with ritual. Her looping, slightly off-kilter syntax mimics the very repetition she’s indicting: men doing the same things, celebrating the same outcomes, calling it identity. The wit lands because it refuses melodrama; she doesn’t plead for change, she just shows the absurd math of pride built on what’s easiest to replicate.