Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s barb works because it flatters itself as anthropology while smuggling in a sneer. The sentence is built like a tidy law of nature: “Man is always...” balanced against “woman is always...” The symmetry is the con. By making both halves sound equally “true,” Mencken disguises how lopsided the terms are. Men get an active verb with a public audience - “boast” requires a stage, even a small one. Women get a posture - a head on a shoulder - intimacy reduced to a physical need and a kind of surrender. One half performs; the other reclines.

The intent isn’t to map gender faithfully so much as to puncture romantic pretensions and, in the same motion, reassert a hard-edged, early-20th-century cynicism about motive. Mencken loved stripping people down to appetites and vanity; here he treats masculinity as competitive display and femininity as a search for protection or consolation. The subtext is a double insult: men are insecure peacocks; women are dependents trained to convert emotion into dependence. It’s misanthropy with a gendered edge.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an America enamored of “scientific” generalizations about sex roles and rattled by women’s increasing public power (suffrage, new labor patterns, modern courtship). The line reads like a corrective aimed at the era’s shifting script: you can change the laws, but, Mencken implies, you can’t change the wiring. Its durability comes from the sting of recognition - lots of people have seen these behaviors - and its blindness comes from treating social training as destiny.