Daily Inspiration Quote by Fay Weldon

"Men are irrelevant" lands like a thrown glass in a polite room: crisp, loud, and impossible to ignore. Coming from Fay Weldon, a novelist who made a career out of anatomizing domestic power with a cool, almost mischievous bite, the line reads less as a policy platform than as a provocation engineered to expose nerves. Weldon isn’t offering a calm ontological claim about half the species; she’s stress-testing the social script that assumes men are automatically central.

The specific intent is partly rhetorical revenge: a compact reversal of centuries of women being treated as ornamental, secondary, disposable. By flipping the default setting, Weldon forces readers to feel how casual, how culturally authorized, that kind of erasure can sound. The subtext is also novelistic: in many of her stories, men are catalysts rather than destinations - sources of desire, danger, or disappointment, but rarely the final authority. Irrelevance here is not biological; it’s narrative. Who gets to be the protagonist? Who gets interiority? Who is allowed to be “the point”?

Context matters: Weldon emerged from a Britain where second-wave feminism was colliding with cozy myths about marriage, motherhood, and “having it all.” Her work treats romance as a marketplace and the home as a battleground, so “irrelevant” reads like a refusal to keep negotiating with the old terms. It’s also a warning shot at male entitlement: if women can build lives, money, art, and solidarity without male permission, then the cultural premium on masculinity starts to look less like nature and more like branding.