Daily Inspiration Quote by Meryl Streep

Streep’s line flatters obsession, then yanks the rug out with that last clause: “if they’re men.” The sentence performs the bias it’s naming. It starts like a romantic defense of single-minded genius - the kind of intensity we’re trained to read as charisma - then exposes how selectively society hands out that glow. Obsession, in her framing, isn’t inherently “attractive”; it’s attractive when it can be rebranded as ambition rather than pathology. That rebrand has a gender.

The craft here is in the bait-and-switch. “Really, really” has the breathless cadence of someone describing a crush, not a critique. It’s almost gossipy, like she’s letting you in on a secret about what people want. Then the qualifier arrives, small and devastating, turning admiration into an indictment: the very traits coded as magnetic in men often become warning labels in women. A man who’s consumed by the work is “driven.” A woman who’s consumed by the work is “difficult,” “cold,” “unbalanced,” or simply “too much.”

Coming from Streep - a performer whose seriousness has been alternately worshipped and weaponized - the remark reads less like abstract feminism than field notes from an industry built on likability as a job requirement. Hollywood loves the myth of the obsessive male auteur and tolerates his collateral damage; it asks women to be brilliant but also pleasing, intense but never inconvenient. The quote’s sting is that it doesn’t beg for fairness. It just points to the asymmetry and lets it sit there, undeniable.