"Men would find it much harder because men have such odd personal relationships with each other. They don't really emotionally connect, whereas women do. I think women become very close"
About this Quote
Saunders is doing what good comedians do: turning a social “truth” into a slightly wicked mirror, then holding it up long enough for everyone to recognize themselves and squirm. On the surface, she’s making a gendered claim about friendship: men are “odd” with each other, women get “close.” The phrasing is the tell. “Odd personal relationships” is deliberately vague, the kind of shorthand that lets the audience fill in the blanks with their own experiences of stoic mateship, banter-as-intimacy, and the awkwardness that appears the moment feelings are named.
The subtext isn’t simply “women are better at emotions.” It’s that masculinity often forces relationships into narrow, performative lanes: connection must be disguised as humor, competition, or shared activity. Saunders’ “don’t really emotionally connect” lands as both jab and lament. The joke has teeth because it’s built on a recognizable cultural script: men are socialized to treat vulnerability as suspicious, even slightly indecent, while women are permitted - expected, even - to do the relational labor of checking in, escalating intimacy, making closeness legible.
Context matters: Saunders comes out of a British comedy tradition (and her own work, from Absolutely Fabulous onward) that thrives on puncturing polite fictions about gender and friendship. She’s not delivering sociology; she’s isolating an everyday tension and compressing it into a punchy generalization. It works because it flatters nobody. Women’s closeness reads as strength, but also as obligation; men’s distance reads as “odd,” but also as a cage they helped build.
The subtext isn’t simply “women are better at emotions.” It’s that masculinity often forces relationships into narrow, performative lanes: connection must be disguised as humor, competition, or shared activity. Saunders’ “don’t really emotionally connect” lands as both jab and lament. The joke has teeth because it’s built on a recognizable cultural script: men are socialized to treat vulnerability as suspicious, even slightly indecent, while women are permitted - expected, even - to do the relational labor of checking in, escalating intimacy, making closeness legible.
Context matters: Saunders comes out of a British comedy tradition (and her own work, from Absolutely Fabulous onward) that thrives on puncturing polite fictions about gender and friendship. She’s not delivering sociology; she’s isolating an everyday tension and compressing it into a punchy generalization. It works because it flatters nobody. Women’s closeness reads as strength, but also as obligation; men’s distance reads as “odd,” but also as a cage they helped build.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
|---|
More Quotes by Jennifer
Add to List
