Life & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

Desire, John Gay suggests, is less a flame you douse than a draft you accidentally feed. "O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed" opens with mock tenderness, the kind that pretends to scold while enjoying the spectacle. Then comes the turn: "by keeping men off, you keep them on" a neat little paradox that doubles as a cultural diagnosis. Refusal doesnt end pursuit; it scripts it.

Gay was writing in an early-18th-century world where courtship was a performance staged in public and policed by reputation. A woman like Polly is expected to guard her virtue, but that very guarding becomes part of the erotic economy. The line is clever because it frames chastity not as pure morality but as strategy, a social technology that intensifies attention. "Keeping men off" reads as physical distance, moral distance, class distance; "keep them on" flips it into fixation. The rhyme-like snap of off/on makes the logic feel inevitable, as if human behavior is a switch you can toggle.

The subtext is sharper, almost cynical: men are energized by the chase, and women are taught that their safest power lies in controlled denial. Gay isnt simply teasing Polly; hes indicting a system that turns intimacy into brinkmanship. The quote works because it compresses the whole flirtation-industrial complex into one tight contradiction: what looks like restraint can be an invitation, and what passes for virtue can function as bait.