Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Wagner

There is a whole era of Hollywood compressed into that breezy, lightly barbed joke: a male actor signaling closeness by teasing another male actor about his appetite, then laundering the creep factor through paternal comedy. Wagner’s line is shaped like a friendly anecdote, but it’s really a little status performance. He’s not just saying he knows Rob Lowe; he’s saying he’s been around long enough to have daughters Lowe would notice, and he’s confident enough to frame it as banter instead of threat.

The phrasing does the work. "Ya know" softens the claim, inviting the listener to treat it as inside-baseball warmth rather than a serious allegation. "Cruising" is the loaded verb: it carries the casual predation of someone scanning for targets, but it’s delivered with a wink, as if predation is an old-school flirtation everyone can laugh off. By calling his daughters "those three girls", Wagner keeps them abstract, props in a story about two men. Their subjectivity vanishes; what matters is the speaker’s paternal proprietorship and Lowe’s reputation.

Context matters because both men are products of the same celebrity ecosystem: Wagner as a classic Hollywood survivor with baggage of his own, Lowe as a star whose public image has long orbited charm and scandal. The line plays like a roast, but it also reveals the industry’s normalized calculus: young women as currency, older men as gatekeepers, and boundary-crossing reframed as charisma. The joke lands because the culture once trained audiences to laugh at exactly what it should interrogate.