Life & Wisdom Quote by Minna Antrim

Antrim’s line lands like a polite parlor joke that turns, suddenly, into an indictment. The rhythm is almost sing-song - “very, very bad,” “correspondingly good” - but the payoff is acid: female wrongdoing is treated as monstrous (“awful”), while male virtue is treated as suspicious (“weird”). It’s not just a complaint about double standards; it’s a diagnosis of what a culture chooses to see as “natural” in each gender.

The subtext is that morality isn’t judged on a single scale. Women are expected to embody restraint, caretaking, and decorum; when they violate that script, they’re read as a threat to the social order itself, not merely a person who did something wrong. Men, by contrast, are granted a wider behavioral range - even permission to be selfish, reckless, or rough around the edges - so “correspondingly good” behavior can look like an affectation. Goodness becomes a costume: performative, maybe manipulative, definitely not to be trusted.

Antrim, writing from a world shaped by rigid gender roles and the performance of respectability, uses humor as cover for a sharper truth: norms don’t just punish women more harshly, they also impoverish men by making decency feel unnatural. The wit works because it flips our expectations twice - first by exaggerating “badness,” then by treating “goodness” as the real social deviance - exposing how power hides inside what we call common sense.