Wit & Attitude Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line lands because it’s a neat little swap of anxieties: women are said to “lie” about time, men about money. It’s not just a jab at dishonesty; it’s a shorthand diagnosis of what a culture trains each gender to treat as their price tag. Age becomes a proxy for desirability in a marketplace that rewards women for appearing perpetually “in demand.” Income becomes a proxy for competence and status in a system that pressures men to perform security, even when they’re improvising.

The joke’s efficiency is the trick. Feather doesn’t have to say “patriarchy” or “social conditioning”; he lets the audience supply the missing argument: that these are the two scoreboard categories that matter most, and that everyone knows the rules well enough to cheat. Calling it “lying” also smuggles in moral judgment while keeping the tone light, a classic mid-century move: critique disguised as cocktail-party realism.

Context matters. Feather wrote in an era when ads, Hollywood, and workplace norms aggressively codified gender roles: women marketed as youth and beauty, men as providers. So the line reads like observational comedy, but it’s also a tiny record of economic and romantic power dynamics. It tells you what people feared being measured by, and what they believed they had to inflate to stay competitive.

Today, it persists because the punchline still maps onto familiar pressures, even as it oversimplifies. The staying power is less about accuracy than recognition: the uneasy laugh of seeing social expectations reduced to two numbers you’re not supposed to admit you’re tracking.