Marriage Quote by Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr’s line lands like a scalpel because it refuses to treat “old Hollywood” sexism as quaint background noise. She’s talking about Cecil B. DeMille, a kingmaker whose biblical epics sold authority, purity, and spectacle with the confidence of scripture. By calling his views a “theory,” she’s not granting him intellectual credit; she’s mocking the way misogyny dresses itself up as philosophy. It’s a neat, brutal demotion: not wisdom, not tradition, just a self-serving hypothesis that conveniently absolves men of responsibility.

The sentence structure does the work of exposure. “Marriage is an artificial state for women” sounds like a production note, something engineered on a soundstage. Then she detonates the polite veneer: “taken, ruled, raped.” The escalation is intentional. She drags the underlying logic of DeMille’s paternalism to its endpoint: if women “want” domination, coercion becomes romance, and violence becomes destiny. Lamarr isn’t only criticizing a man; she’s indicting an industry that turned female submission into narrative common sense, then sold it back to audiences as moral order.

Context matters: Lamarr was both objectified and unusually clear-eyed about power, a star marketed as a visual commodity who also understood systems (including, famously, technical ones). Her quote reads like a survivor’s cultural review: the camera may have loved women, but the mythology running the set often insisted women loved being overruled. Calling it out in plain language is the point. It punctures the glamour and leaves the mechanism exposed.