War & Peace Quote by John Fowles

War, in Fowles's framing, isn’t just policy or tragedy; it’s a costume men put on when everyday masculinity feels flimsy. The line lands because it refuses the usual noble alibis and instead drags war into the social arena: not the battlefield, but the room where status is awarded and revoked. “Look serious” is the tell. Seriousness here isn’t maturity or responsibility; it’s gravitas as performance, a way to demand deference without earning intimacy.

The second sentence sharpens into a cruel little theory of gendered power. Women’s laughter stands in for a specific threat: being seen through. To be laughed at is to have the script rewritten from hero to boy, from commander to pretender. Fowles implies that war offers an escape hatch from that vulnerability, because war sanctifies male posturing. It makes emotional illiteracy read as stoicism, aggression read as duty, and insecurity read as honor.

Context matters: Fowles writes in the long shadow of World War II and alongside the late-20th-century dismantling of traditional male authority. As feminism and postwar skepticism strip away the automatic respect once granted to “men being men,” war becomes, in his cynical diagnosis, the last refuge of unquestioned male significance. It’s not an argument that women cause war; it’s an indictment of a culture that trains men to fear ridicule more than bloodshed, and then hands them a socially approved arena where nobody’s allowed to laugh.