Time & Perspective Quote by Erica Jong

Jong’s line skewers a particularly modern kind of trap: oppression that perfumes itself as praise. “Idealized” sounds like a compliment until it’s welded to “powerlessness,” and that collision is the engine of the quote. She’s pointing to a system that doesn’t merely deny women agency; it markets that denial as virtue. The exploited subject isn’t just controlled, she’s celebrated for being controllable.

The specific intent is to expose how flattering myths do political work. Put women on a pedestal and you’ve still decided where they stand; the pedestal is just a nicer cage. Jong’s phrasing also punctures the lazy assumption that admiration equals respect. Idealization, in her telling, is not love or honor but a cultural technology: it smooths over exploitation by turning submission into an aesthetic and self-sacrifice into a personality type.

The subtext is that “power” can be rhetorical, symbolic, even erotic, without being material. Societies can grant women the glow of moral authority (purity, nurturing, “the fairer sex”) while withholding money, mobility, legal rights, safety. That’s why the word “only” bites. Jong is deliberately provocative, collapsing complicated histories into a blunt instrument to make the pattern unmistakable: other exploited groups are dehumanized; women are often re-humanized into an ideal that still cancels their autonomy.

Context matters: Jong emerges from second-wave feminism and the post-1960s culture wars, when sexual liberation and domestic mythology were colliding in public. The quote reads like a rebuttal to the era’s soft-focus “women have it better because they’re cherished” logic. Cherished, yes. And kept.