Aging & Wisdom Quote by John O'Hara

“Little old ladies of both sexes” is O’Hara’s kind of cruelty: a precise insult disguised as an offhand joke, sharpened by the petty miracle that it’s also funny. The line’s engine is its contradiction. “Little old ladies” is already a stereotype of harmless fussiness; “of both sexes” turns it into a category error, implying that the trait isn’t gendered but temperamental. He’s not just mocking women; he’s feminizing a certain kind of man - timid, moralizing, nosy, self-appointed guardian of propriety. That’s the O’Hara milieu: country clubs, small-town hierarchies, people who weaponize manners to police status.

Then comes the real tell: “Why do I let them bother me?” The insult is a defense mechanism, but the question gives away the wound. O’Hara’s characters (and O’Hara himself, often) are obsessed with social ranking, and the most humiliating thing isn’t being judged by serious adversaries. It’s being managed by trivial ones. “Little” matters as much as “old”: these are people he thinks he should be above, yet their disapproval still gets under his skin. That’s the subtext: status anxiety doesn’t care if the status-enforcers are ridiculous.

Contextually, it sits comfortably in mid-century American realism where class is the main religion and gossip is its liturgy. O’Hara’s intent isn’t to deliver a thesis; it’s to expose the narrator’s own vanity. The line lands because it’s a self-own: he’s angry at them, but he’s even angrier that they have access to him at all.