Daily Inspiration Quote by Julie Burchill

Burchill’s line weaponizes provocation the way a tabloid headline does: with a grin and a sharpened blade. “Frigid” is an old misogynist slur dressed up as diagnosis, and she doesn’t rehabilitate it so much as booby-trap it. By accepting the term for a moment, she flips the charge back onto the accuser. The punchline isn’t the woman’s alleged deficiency; it’s the man’s smallness - emotional, sexual, psychological - made literal in the sneer of “little man.”

The intent is less about female sexuality than about male entitlement. “Nine times out of ten” is doing rhetorical work: it’s not a study, it’s a swaggering refusal to grant “objectivity” to something that’s usually treated as common sense. Burchill implies that the label “frigid” often functions as retaliation when a woman doesn’t perform desire on demand. If she won’t validate him, he diagnoses her. The subtext is a critique of how patriarchy turns rejection into pathology, and how men outsource their insecurity into women’s bodies.

Context matters. Coming out of late-20th-century British media culture - laddishness, tabloid cruelty, second-wave aftershocks - Burchill’s feminism often arrived in barbed, polarizing form. The line courts backlash because it’s built like a dare: it overgeneralizes to expose an overgeneralization. Its cynicism is the point. If “frigid” is a weapon, she’s showing you who usually pulls the trigger, and why.