Love & Passion Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

A neat little blade of a line: it pretends to define a medical-sounding label while actually indicting the culture that needs the label in the first place. McLaughlin takes the word "nymphomaniac" - a term historically used to pathologize female desire - and flips it with one deadpan comparison: what gets treated as sickness in a woman is treated as baseline appetite in a man. The joke lands because it’s structured like a dictionary entry, the kind of authoritative voice that smuggles bias under the cover of neutrality.

The specific intent is corrective, but not sermonizing. By tying the supposedly extreme ("obsessed") to the supposedly ordinary ("average"), she exposes the real asymmetry: we normalize male pursuit as natural, even admirable, then medicalize or moralize similar behavior in women. The punchline is that the scandal isn’t the woman’s libido; it’s the standards we pretend are objective.

The subtext carries a sharper implication: language is policy. Labels like "nymphomaniac" don’t just describe; they discipline. They give society permission to shame, contain, or dismiss women who don’t perform the approved version of femininity. That’s why the humor has a sting - it’s the sound of someone refusing the rules of the game.

Context matters. Writing across mid-century America, McLaughlin was watching a culture steeped in Freudian diagnosis, respectability politics, and a booming marketplace of advice about how women should behave. Her line anticipates the later feminist critique of "double standards" by showing how the double standard lives, quietly, inside the dictionary.