Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Wood Krutch

A neat little aphorism that smuggles a blame-shift under the guise of gallantry, Krutch’s line punctures the old male fantasy of the “dangerous woman” while quietly preserving the male ego. The target is a familiar cultural script: femme fatales, sirens, temptresses - women cast as moral hazards whose mere presence supposedly topples men into ruin. Krutch flips the causality. If a man collapses, it isn’t because a woman wielded mystical power; it’s because he was already porous, eager to be pushed, ready to outsource his self-control.

The subtext is less feminist liberation than masculine self-indictment. “Susceptible men” implies weakness, projection, and a tendency to narrate desire as victimhood. Calling a woman “dangerous” can be a way to launder guilt, to turn appetite into coercion and responsibility into fate. Krutch’s sentence refuses that exoneration: temptation isn’t an external force, it’s an internal permission slip.

Context matters: Krutch, an environmentalist and public intellectual of the early-to-mid 20th century, often wrote against human self-flattery - the notion that we are rational, autonomous, and in charge. This quip fits that temperament. It’s skepticism applied to gender mythmaking: men invent “danger” to dramatize their own impulses.

Still, the line carries its own blind spot. By centering male susceptibility, it risks keeping women as objects in a male moral drama, even while absolving them of villainy. The wit lands because it exposes a cultural dodge: fear of “dangerous women” often reads like fear of admitting what men want.