"Sex hasn't been the same since women started enjoying it"
About this Quote
The joke lands like a wink and a wince: it pretends to mourn a decline in “how things used to be,” while smuggling in a blunt truth about power. Grizzard frames women’s sexual enjoyment as the disruptive event, as if pleasure were an act of rebellion against the old operating system. That inversion is the engine of the line: it’s not really about sex changing, it’s about men losing the monopoly on defining what sex is for.
Grizzard wrote in a late-20th-century American culture still digesting second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the growing mainstream language of female desire. The humor depends on a recognizably dated male complaint: if women want sex on their own terms, the familiar script (male initiation, female gatekeeping, sex as conquest) breaks down. “Hasn’t been the same” codes for “hasn’t been as easy, predictable, or centered on me.” In that sense, the punchline is a defensive maneuver, using comedy as plausible deniability: it’s “just a joke,” yet it sketches a reactionary panic about changing gender norms.
What makes it work is its double address. To sympathetic listeners, it flatters nostalgia and grievance. To more critical ears, it reads as inadvertent confession: the “good old days” being mourned weren’t good sex, they were unchallenged entitlement. Even the structure carries that subtext: women’s enjoyment is treated as an external interruption, not the point of the activity.
Today the line feels like a period artifact of backlash humor, useful less as wisdom than as a snapshot of what some men feared when women stopped performing disinterest and started claiming pleasure.
Grizzard wrote in a late-20th-century American culture still digesting second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the growing mainstream language of female desire. The humor depends on a recognizably dated male complaint: if women want sex on their own terms, the familiar script (male initiation, female gatekeeping, sex as conquest) breaks down. “Hasn’t been the same” codes for “hasn’t been as easy, predictable, or centered on me.” In that sense, the punchline is a defensive maneuver, using comedy as plausible deniability: it’s “just a joke,” yet it sketches a reactionary panic about changing gender norms.
What makes it work is its double address. To sympathetic listeners, it flatters nostalgia and grievance. To more critical ears, it reads as inadvertent confession: the “good old days” being mourned weren’t good sex, they were unchallenged entitlement. Even the structure carries that subtext: women’s enjoyment is treated as an external interruption, not the point of the activity.
Today the line feels like a period artifact of backlash humor, useful less as wisdom than as a snapshot of what some men feared when women stopped performing disinterest and started claiming pleasure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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