Wealth & Money Quote by Penelope Spheeris

Spheeris snaps a crude truth into focus with the timing of a punchline: the confidence of a cultural diagnosis, then the deadpan shrug that mocks anyone pretending to be puzzled. The first two sentences are almost anthropological in their bluntness, reducing a supposedly sophisticated phenomenon - elite entitlement - to animal circuitry. “Money and power” aren’t just resources; they’re aphrodisiacs, permissions slips, accelerants. By the time she lands on “turned on, sexually,” she’s naming what public life likes to euphemize as “charisma,” “virility,” or “appetite.”

The real bite is in the last line. “Can’t imagine why, though” isn’t confusion; it’s sarcasm aimed at the myths that protect powerful men: boys-will-be-boys, stress made him do it, fame is isolating, women tempt, groupies choose. Spheeris implies the cause is obvious because the system makes it obvious. Power rearranges consequences. If your status buys you access, deference, and forgiveness, desire stops being a private feeling and becomes a public weapon - or at least a public expectation.

Coming from a director who’s spent time in male-dominated, status-soaked subcultures (punk scenes, Hollywood sets, music-industry ecosystems), the line reads like field notes from environments where ego and opportunity constantly collide. It’s less about individual libido than about a culture that eroticizes dominance and then acts shocked when dominance expresses itself sexually. The humor is a scalpel: she’s not laughing with the powerful; she’s laughing at the excuses.