Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Armour

A whole creation story gets reduced to a punchline, and the punchline cuts both ways. "Until Eve arrived, this was a man's world" leans on the smugness of a phrase we've heard in boardrooms and barstool chatter, then rewinds it to Genesis to expose how flimsy that smugness is. Armour, a poet with a humorist's timing, borrows the authority of myth to mock the authority of men.

The intent is mischievously corrective: yes, the world is framed as male by default, but only because the narrative starts before the woman shows up. The line’s sly trick is treating "man's world" as a literal scheduling issue, like patriarchy was just a temporary staffing arrangement. That comic understatement is the critique. It suggests that the so-called naturalness of male dominance depends on editing women out of the story, or at least placing them as late additions, disruptions, temptations.

The subtext is sharper than it looks: Eve isn't just "arriving" as a person; she arrives as the explanation men use for everything that goes wrong. Armour taps the cultural habit of blaming women while simultaneously needing them to make the plot move at all. Context matters here: Armour wrote in mid-20th-century America, when domestic ideology still sold the male-as-default model even as women were pushing hard against it. The joke lands because it recognizes the old script, then flips it with a wink that carries an edge.