Love & Passion Quote by Betty Rollin

Rollin’s line is a scalpel aimed at two caricatures at once: the feminist as prudish scold, and the “sex object” as a woman with no inner life. The provocation is deliberate. “Scratch most feminists” borrows the language of unmasking hypocrisy, baiting readers who expect a takedown of feminism. Then the sentence swerves. The punch isn’t that feminists secretly want attention; it’s that wanting to be desired isn’t incompatible with wanting personhood.

The subtext is a media climate that treated women’s liberation as an attack on men’s desire rather than an argument about power. Rollin, a journalist who reported through the post-1960s culture wars, knows the script: feminists are framed as humorless, unfeminine, anti-sex. She counters with a more destabilizing claim: many women, including feminists, can enjoy the currency of sex appeal. What feminism refuses is the monopoly. “The difference is that is not all she wants to be” turns “object” into a cramped job description, not a moral failing.

There’s an implicit critique of how “choice” gets weaponized. If a woman embraces erotic display, critics read it as capitulation; if she rejects it, she’s cast as bitter. Rollin insists on a third reading: desire can be pleasurable, even strategic, as long as it doesn’t erase agency. It’s also a warning about the male gaze’s lazy bargain: women may be allowed visibility, but only on conditional terms. The feminist demand, in Rollin’s framing, is not to end being seen - it’s to be seen whole.