"Men tend to be selfish"
About this Quote
Caprice Bourret's blunt line lands like a provocation and a weary observation. Coming from a model-turned-entrepreneur who navigated both glossy celebrity culture and male-dominated boardrooms, it reads as the distillation of patterns she has seen in romance, work, and media. The force of the claim lies in how it names a recognizable habit: men are often encouraged to prioritize their desires, goals, and comfort, while women are trained to smooth the edges, absorb the emotion, and keep the machinery of relationships and households running. When those roles harden, the pursuit of individual advantage looks like virtue in men and obligation in women, and the imbalance is felt as selfishness.
The line also speaks the language of tabloid-era soundbites. Bourret became famous in the 1990s and 2000s, when candid, sometimes reductive pronouncements about love and gender were a way to seize attention amid relentless press attention. Yet the simplicity sharpens a truth many recognize: unequal distributions of emotional labor, domestic work, and credit at the office persist, and they shape how generosity or self-interest manifests. In that sense, the statement functions both as social critique and as advice by implication. If men tend to be selfish, women should not over-function to compensate; boundaries, reciprocity, and clearer expectations are necessary.
Still, the generalization invites pushback. Selfishness is not an exclusively male trait, and plenty of men resist the scripts they inherited. The problem is less innate character than incentive structures and socialization that reward autonomy in men and accommodation in women. A growing cultural emphasis on care, co-parenting, and mental health is eroding those old norms, and many relationships today are actively renegotiating the balance.
What lingers is the friction the sentence names. It prods both genders to examine habits, to ask who benefits, and to build arrangements where care and responsibility are shared rather than assumed.
The line also speaks the language of tabloid-era soundbites. Bourret became famous in the 1990s and 2000s, when candid, sometimes reductive pronouncements about love and gender were a way to seize attention amid relentless press attention. Yet the simplicity sharpens a truth many recognize: unequal distributions of emotional labor, domestic work, and credit at the office persist, and they shape how generosity or self-interest manifests. In that sense, the statement functions both as social critique and as advice by implication. If men tend to be selfish, women should not over-function to compensate; boundaries, reciprocity, and clearer expectations are necessary.
Still, the generalization invites pushback. Selfishness is not an exclusively male trait, and plenty of men resist the scripts they inherited. The problem is less innate character than incentive structures and socialization that reward autonomy in men and accommodation in women. A growing cultural emphasis on care, co-parenting, and mental health is eroding those old norms, and many relationships today are actively renegotiating the balance.
What lingers is the friction the sentence names. It prods both genders to examine habits, to ask who benefits, and to build arrangements where care and responsibility are shared rather than assumed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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