"Women are always complaining about men's fascination with breasts. But what if men were absolutely indifferent to breasts? What would women do then with these things that serve one function once or twice in a lifetime, and the rest of the time are just in the way?"
About this Quote
Carroll rigs this as a mischievous thought experiment, but the trick is that it smuggles in a whole architecture of gender power while pretending to talk about anatomy. The opening frames women as nagging (“always complaining”) and men as an embattled bloc with a “fascination” that needs defending. Then he flips the premise: imagine male desire simply opts out. It reads like a joke about how irrational boobs are as equipment, yet it lands as a veiled warning about what happens when the male gaze withdraws.
The subtext is transactional: breasts are cast as social currency whose value depends on being noticed. If men become “absolutely indifferent,” the implication goes, women lose leverage, identity, even purpose. That’s why the line about “one function once or twice” bites; it aggressively narrows motherhood to a brief utilitarian event, then treats everything else as dead weight. It’s not biology, it’s an argument about attention as a resource, and about women being trained to convert their bodies into meaning in a culture that rewards visibility.
Context matters: Carroll is a novelist with a taste for the uncanny and the sideways jab, and this has that smirking, conversational cadence of late-20th-century gender banter. The quote works rhetorically because it disguises a normative claim as playful speculation: men’s desire isn’t the problem, it’s the organizing principle. The “what would women do” isn’t curiosity; it’s the punchline that assumes the answer.
The subtext is transactional: breasts are cast as social currency whose value depends on being noticed. If men become “absolutely indifferent,” the implication goes, women lose leverage, identity, even purpose. That’s why the line about “one function once or twice” bites; it aggressively narrows motherhood to a brief utilitarian event, then treats everything else as dead weight. It’s not biology, it’s an argument about attention as a resource, and about women being trained to convert their bodies into meaning in a culture that rewards visibility.
Context matters: Carroll is a novelist with a taste for the uncanny and the sideways jab, and this has that smirking, conversational cadence of late-20th-century gender banter. The quote works rhetorically because it disguises a normative claim as playful speculation: men’s desire isn’t the problem, it’s the organizing principle. The “what would women do” isn’t curiosity; it’s the punchline that assumes the answer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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