Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn French

French’s line is less a diagnosis than an indictment: it refuses to treat male domination as a timeless “male nature” and instead frames it as a compensatory behavior, a grab for power that hints at an internal deficit. The word “may” is doing strategic work. She’s not pretending to offer a neat origin story; she’s spotlighting how little curiosity the dominant group shows about the psychic costs of dominance - and how that incuriosity becomes part of the system.

The subtext is pointedly political. “Marginality or emptiness” flips the usual script in which women are cast as lacking and men as complete. French suggests patriarchy is not confidence but anxiety with institutional backing. Domination, in this reading, isn’t just control over women; it’s a way to outsource self-definition, to make another person carry the burden of your coherence. That’s why she pairs uncertainty about the “root” with certainty about responsibility: even if causation is murky, accountability isn’t.

Context matters: French wrote out of second-wave feminism’s project of naming structures that had been naturalized - in marriage, work, sex, language. Her critique also lands on the era’s therapeutic turn, when “understanding yourself” became a cultural mantra. She implies men benefit from that language without submitting to it: women are asked to explain, accommodate, heal; men, insulated by default authority, can treat introspection as optional. The sting is in the final clause. The problem isn’t just domination. It’s the refusal to ask what in men requires it.