Wit & Attitude Quote by Colleen McCullough

McCullough’s line lands like a blunt instrument wrapped in a smirk: it’s explicitly about sex, but it’s really about the social systems that decide whose desire counts and whose gets managed, delayed, or dismissed. “Horny” is doing strategic work here. It’s unliterary on purpose, yanking libido out of euphemism and marital politeness and putting it in the fluorescent light where it becomes a public fact rather than a private shame. The profanity-flavored “hell of a lot” widens the lens: this isn’t a niche complaint or a sensational confession, it’s a demographic reality.

The kicker is “in the way they should be.” McCullough isn’t simply advocating more sex; she’s calling out bad sex, mismatched sex, coerced sex, duty sex, sex shaped by scripts that prioritize performance over pleasure. “Should” is moral language sneaking into a bodily topic, implying an entitlement not to conquest, but to fulfillment. That’s a sharp pivot: gratification becomes less a guilty indulgence than a quality-of-life issue, like sleep or safety, something a functional culture ought to take seriously.

As a novelist who made careers out of dissecting intimacy, power, and institution, McCullough is also smuggling in a critique of repression-by-design: gender roles that train women to endure, men to chase, and everyone to pretend the resulting frustration is just “normal.” The humor is barbed, but the aim is humane. The sentence dares the reader to admit what gets edited out of polite conversation: desire doesn’t vanish when ignored; it curdles, it distorts, it leaks into everything.