Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

The line lands like a cold splash of theory in the middle of desire: you think you are reacting to a singular person, but you are actually responding to a category. By downgrading "A face" to an almost clerical indefinite article and upgrading "a feminine face" to the real object of excitement, Cohen frames attraction as misrecognition - less about intimacy than pattern-matching.

The specific intent is corrective, even prosecutorial. It aims to puncture the romantic story we tell ourselves ("I like her") and replace it with a more structural claim ("I like femininity as a sign system"). "Feminine" here isn't just descriptive; it's ideological. It points to the curated cues that get rewarded as legible womanhood: softness, symmetry, youth, compliance, whatever a given culture is currently selling as "female". The sentence implies your arousal has been trained by repetition - advertising, porn aesthetics, dating-app economies - until the individual face becomes interchangeable with the template.

Subtext: your excitement isn't innocent. It's a kind of consumption. The phrasing suggests the viewer is not encountering a subject but selecting a product, and the product is gender presentation. That sting is the point. Cohen writes like someone trying to make the reader feel caught in the act: not attracted, but targeted.

Contextually, it fits a modern argument about the "male gaze" and how desire gets standardized. The line works because it's bluntly unromantic, refusing to flatter the reader with uniqueness; it forces a question we avoid because it's embarrassing: how much of what we call taste is just training?