Daily Inspiration Quote by Julie Burchill

Burchill takes a scalpel to the feel-good mythology of the Sixties and aims it at a target that still makes people squirm: the way “liberation” can be packaged as progress while quietly preserving old power arrangements. The line works because it’s a bait-and-switch. You expect “freedom” to be framed as expansion of women’s choices; instead she collapses the era’s headline reforms into two technologies that reorganize risk and responsibility around sex. Her cynicism is deliberate: it’s not that contraception and abortion aren’t life-changing for women, but that their social uptake can be structured to serve male convenience first.

The phrasing “supposed to have found” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests an official story, a popular script, something women are told they’ve achieved - and therefore should stop complaining about. “Boiled down” is reductive on purpose, an argument that the movement’s complexity was edited into a digestible product. Then comes the sting: “things to make life easier for men.” She’s pointing at a cultural bargain where men get more access to sex with fewer consequences, while women are expected to manage the logistics, the health costs, the moral scrutiny, and the aftermath. Freedom becomes administrative labor.

Context matters: Burchill writes out of late-20th-century British feminism’s intramural fights, suspicious of male-friendly versions of sexual revolution and of “progress” defined by how frictionless it makes heterosexual life. The subtext isn’t anti-choice; it’s anti-congratulation. She’s warning that a society can adopt feminist tools while keeping feminist power at arm’s length.