Daily Inspiration Quote by Mae West

Mae West lands this line like a wink sharpened into a weapon. On the surface it’s a neat little binary - “domestic and foreign” - the language of travel brochures and trade policy repurposed as bedroom taxonomy. The joke works because it steals the vocabulary of public life (nations, borders, categories) and drags it into a space where women, especially in West’s era, were expected to be modest, private, and grateful to be chosen.

Her specific intent isn’t just to flirt; it’s to flip the gaze. Men are typically the ones sorting women into “types,” reducing desire to a menu. West does the sorting instead, with breezy authority. “Personally” matters: she frames sexual preference as casual self-report, not confession. That small word normalizes female appetite as something you can state without apology.

The subtext is a double provocation. First, she’s mocking prudish moralism by treating erotic interest as ordinary taste - like cuisine. Second, she’s teasing nationalism itself: the distinction between “our” men and “their” men becomes absurd when desire ignores passports. It’s a punchline that quietly suggests borders are porous, at least in the places that matter to West.

Context seals it. West’s public persona in the 1930s ran headlong into censorship and “decency” campaigns; her comedy lived in the narrow gap between what could be said and what audiences were already thinking. By wrapping sexuality in the clean, bureaucratic language of “domestic” and “foreign,” she smuggles scandal past the gatekeepers - and makes the gatekeeping look ridiculous.