Daily Inspiration Quote by Marlo Thomas

Marlo Thomas lands this line like a well-timed punchline: casual, a little mischievous, and dead serious about what it’s puncturing. “Nothing is either all masculine or all feminine” doesn’t read like a manifesto; it reads like someone finally saying out loud what most people quietly live. The kicker - “except having sex” - is doing two jobs at once. It acknowledges the one arena where “masculine” and “feminine” have historically been treated as fixed, opposite roles, while also exposing how absurd it is to force that binary onto everything else: careers, emotions, clothes, ambition, caretaking, authority.

The intent is less to erase difference than to demote it. Thomas isn’t arguing that gender doesn’t exist; she’s arguing that gender is a lousy filing system for personality. The subtext is aimed at the everyday policing that tells women they’re “too much” (too loud, too assertive, too sexually forward) and tells men they’re “not enough” (not tough, not stoic, not dominant). By narrowing the binary to the literal mechanics of sex, she treats the rest of gender performance as optional styling - a set of habits we can keep, remix, or ditch.

Context matters: Thomas came up in mid-century American show business, a culture built on tightly managed femininity. Her career, activism, and public persona pushed against that packaging. This quote feels like an actress’s distillation of a lifetime watching “masculine” and “feminine” used as casting notes for real life - and deciding to rewrite the script.