"Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed"
About this Quote
Korda’s line lands like a calm aside, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at a familiar double standard: the idea that “freedom” in public appearance is gendered, policed, and then rationalized as natural. The key word is “naturally,” a sly bit of ventriloquism. It pretends to describe biology while actually indicting culture. Resentment isn’t innate; it’s trained. Korda frames male discomfort as reflexive to expose how quickly social rules get recast as human nature the moment they benefit the people already holding the rules.
“Greater liberties in dress” sounds light, even trivial, until you hear the apparatus behind it: workplace codes, school discipline, public harassment, media outrage cycles. Women’s clothing becomes a battleground where men’s limits are quietly centered. The subtext is not simply that women are judged more harshly, but that men experience women’s autonomy as an affront because it highlights how narrow masculinity’s own allowable range is. If men are boxed into a restrictive uniform of respectability, someone else stepping outside the box can feel like cheating, not liberation.
Korda, writing from within a 20th-century world of class manners and social choreography, understands dress as a visible proxy for power. The quote’s bite comes from its inversion of victimhood: instead of focusing on women “provoking,” he spotlights men “resenting.” It redirects the moral spotlight from women’s hemlines to men’s entitlement to set them.
“Greater liberties in dress” sounds light, even trivial, until you hear the apparatus behind it: workplace codes, school discipline, public harassment, media outrage cycles. Women’s clothing becomes a battleground where men’s limits are quietly centered. The subtext is not simply that women are judged more harshly, but that men experience women’s autonomy as an affront because it highlights how narrow masculinity’s own allowable range is. If men are boxed into a restrictive uniform of respectability, someone else stepping outside the box can feel like cheating, not liberation.
Korda, writing from within a 20th-century world of class manners and social choreography, understands dress as a visible proxy for power. The quote’s bite comes from its inversion of victimhood: instead of focusing on women “provoking,” he spotlights men “resenting.” It redirects the moral spotlight from women’s hemlines to men’s entitlement to set them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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