Daily Inspiration Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Luce’s line snaps like a cocktail-party epigram and lands like a critique of hoarded power. By twisting the old axiom “Nature abhors a vacuum” into “Nature abhors a virgin,” she weaponizes purity as a kind of social and economic dead weight. The kicker, “a frozen asset,” drags the joke out of the bedroom and into the ledger: virginity becomes not a moral badge but idle capital, value withheld from circulation. It’s a cold, modern metaphor that treats desire, status, and opportunity as things that either move or congeal.

The specific intent is less erotic than surgical. Luce is puncturing a culture that romanticizes untouched women while simultaneously fearing what female autonomy might do once it’s “unfrozen.” The subtext is transactional and ruthless: in a world governed by exchange, refusing to be “spent” reads as both defiance and waste. That tension is where the line gets its bite. She’s not simply mocking chastity; she’s exposing how patriarchal expectations turn women into investments managed by families, churches, and suitors, with “virtue” functioning like a bank vault.

Context matters: Luce wrote in mid-century American high society, where sexual respectability, marriage markets, and public reputation were intertwined with class and ambition. As a dramatist with a politician’s ear for provocation, she compresses a whole social order into a single witticism: purity isn’t sacred; it’s a strategy. The humor is the scalpel that makes the incision painless enough to laugh at, then memorable enough to sting.