Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

A dirty joke dressed as a social indictment, Quentin Crisp's line lands because it flips sexual slang into a thesis about power. "Laid" is passive, almost cozy: something that happens to you, a casual reward. "Screwed" is active, invasive, and punitive. Crisp isn't just contrasting male and female pleasure; he's pointing to the way language itself codes the sexual marketplace as a rigged game. Men "get" sex as a perk. Women "get" consequences.

The intent is characteristically Crisp: weaponized wit that smuggles critique past the bouncers of polite conversation. It's a one-liner that refuses sentimentality about the sexual revolution, insisting that liberation didn't erase asymmetry, it simply changed the costumes. The subtext is transactional: for women, sex is too often bundled with reputational risk, coercion, emotional labor, pregnancy, violence, and the expectation that desire should be managed like a public utility. For men, it remains framed as conquest or entitlement, with failure treated as injury and success treated as status.

Context matters. Crisp built his public persona as an elegant outsider - a gay man who understood, intimately, how "normal" sexuality is policed and how social scripts punish anyone cast in the wrong role. From that vantage, heterosexual norms look less like romance and more like a system of penalties and permissions. The line endures because it's indecent in form but precise in diagnosis: the same act, described differently, reveals who society assumes has agency and who is expected to absorb the fallout.