"The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten"
About this Quote
Curtis is staging a small act of Victorian iconoclasm: he takes the swaggering adolescent certainty of "I like women" and punctures it with a blunt biological correction. The shock value is doing real work. By swapping the polite language of courtship for the unvarnished "horny", he yanks romance out of the parlor and drops it into the body, forcing readers to confront how much of male "preference" is just chemistry plus cultural permission.
The intent is less anti-woman than anti-self-deception. Curtis is pointing at a familiar male alibi: desire gets dressed up as admiration, and then the dressing is mistaken for the thing itself. "Like" becomes a moral claim, a flattering story men tell about their appetites. He refuses that narrative, arguing that puberty doesn't magically produce respect, curiosity, or empathy toward women; it produces heat. If men don't do the work of actually knowing women as people, then the twenty-one-year-old suitor is just a better-funded version of the thirteen-year-old.
The subtext lands as a critique of gender socialization: boys are taught to interpret arousal as entitlement and attention as intimacy. Curtis, writing in an era that sold femininity as refinement and masculinity as impulse, exposes the mismatch: a culture that idealizes women while failing to teach men how to relate to them. The line is also a warning about the politics of desire. When lust masquerades as liking, women become props in a coming-of-age story rather than partners in a relationship. Curtis isn't romantic; he's diagnostic, and the diagnosis still stings because it’s still recognizable.
The intent is less anti-woman than anti-self-deception. Curtis is pointing at a familiar male alibi: desire gets dressed up as admiration, and then the dressing is mistaken for the thing itself. "Like" becomes a moral claim, a flattering story men tell about their appetites. He refuses that narrative, arguing that puberty doesn't magically produce respect, curiosity, or empathy toward women; it produces heat. If men don't do the work of actually knowing women as people, then the twenty-one-year-old suitor is just a better-funded version of the thirteen-year-old.
The subtext lands as a critique of gender socialization: boys are taught to interpret arousal as entitlement and attention as intimacy. Curtis, writing in an era that sold femininity as refinement and masculinity as impulse, exposes the mismatch: a culture that idealizes women while failing to teach men how to relate to them. The line is also a warning about the politics of desire. When lust masquerades as liking, women become props in a coming-of-age story rather than partners in a relationship. Curtis isn't romantic; he's diagnostic, and the diagnosis still stings because it’s still recognizable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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