Love & Passion Quote by Heywood Broun

Broun’s line lands like a debunking done with a smirk: take even a lazy look, he says, and you’ll notice the authorship behind the punchlines. The target isn’t cooking or sewing; it’s the machinery that turns “common sense” into “common jokes.” By calling it a “casual examination,” he frames sexism not as a subtle ideology requiring specialist tools, but as a cheap trick you can spot in daylight if you bother to check who’s holding the pen.

The rhetorical move is slyly journalistic. Broun isn’t arguing abstractly about gender roles; he’s following the byline. Humor becomes evidence. If the jokes about men’s incompetence at domestic labor are “written by men,” then the joke isn’t self-deprecation so much as a controlled burn: men get to laugh at their own supposed uselessness in the kitchen while quietly preserving the division of labor that keeps them out of it. “See? We’d only ruin it.” The gag functions as an alibi.

“Sex propaganda” is the sharpest phrase here because it widens the frame from individual bias to a coordinated cultural project. Broun is naming what we’d now call a feedback loop: media repeats a stereotype, the stereotype rationalizes a social arrangement, and the arrangement supplies more material for the stereotype. In early 20th-century America, as women pushed for political rights and expanded public presence, those “harmless” domestic jokes did real work: they fortified masculinity as public, femininity as private, and made that boundary feel like comedy rather than coercion.