"Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse"
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Joyce is doing what he does best: taking a respectable social “truth” and showing the rot in its logic. The sentence is built like a tidy syllogism, but it’s a trap. Each clause turns on the word “must,” exposing how moral certainty gets smuggled in as inevitability. Men can’t love men because sex is forbidden; men can’t be friends with women because sex is assumed. Either way, the culture’s rulebook leaves no room for a non-panicked, non-instrumental intimacy.
The subtext is less about biology than about policing. Joyce isn’t calmly reporting human nature; he’s satirizing a society that can only imagine relationships through the twin lenses of prohibition and compulsion. Male-male affection is treated as a threat to be quarantined from the body, while male-female friendship is treated as a lie the body will inevitably “correct.” It’s a double bind that keeps everyone in their assigned lanes: men get camaraderie without tenderness; women get desire without uncomplicated fellowship.
In Joyce’s era, this isn’t abstract. Early 20th-century Ireland and Britain were steeped in Catholic sexual ethics and rigid gender roles, with homosexuality criminalized and female autonomy tightly constrained. The line reads like a diagnosis of that world’s anxious metabolism: sex is everywhere, yet unspeakable; friendship is idealized, yet mistrusted. The brilliance is the deadpan extremity. By pushing the “must” to absurdity, Joyce makes the reader hear how absurd it already is.
The subtext is less about biology than about policing. Joyce isn’t calmly reporting human nature; he’s satirizing a society that can only imagine relationships through the twin lenses of prohibition and compulsion. Male-male affection is treated as a threat to be quarantined from the body, while male-female friendship is treated as a lie the body will inevitably “correct.” It’s a double bind that keeps everyone in their assigned lanes: men get camaraderie without tenderness; women get desire without uncomplicated fellowship.
In Joyce’s era, this isn’t abstract. Early 20th-century Ireland and Britain were steeped in Catholic sexual ethics and rigid gender roles, with homosexuality criminalized and female autonomy tightly constrained. The line reads like a diagnosis of that world’s anxious metabolism: sex is everywhere, yet unspeakable; friendship is idealized, yet mistrusted. The brilliance is the deadpan extremity. By pushing the “must” to absurdity, Joyce makes the reader hear how absurd it already is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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