Daily Inspiration Quote by David Duchovny

Duchovny is doing something slightly risky here: using a blunt metaphor ("bondage") to smuggle a feminist critique through the mouth of a man best known for playing cool, charismatic outsiders. The shock value isn’t accidental. He’s naming what fashion often refuses to admit out loud: that discomfort can be packaged as desirability, and that the body can be disciplined under the banner of choice.

The mechanics of the line matter. The repeated "we" is a confession and an indictment, collapsing individual men into a collective system. It’s not "they choose" or "society makes them" but "we put them", "we make them", "we say". That grammar turns male gaze from an abstract concept into an active verb. The pivot - "they look sexy. But..". - exposes the bait-and-switch at the heart of a lot of mainstream beauty culture: pain is reframed as polish, restriction as refinement, immobility as allure.

The subtext is less about banning heels than about revealing the bargain. Fashion becomes a socially acceptable way to limit space, speed, and comfort, while still calling it empowerment because it photographs well. The "tied up" ending lands because it’s literal (restricted movement) and symbolic (time, money, attention diverted into maintenance).

Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century moment when men in pop culture started adopting the language of gender critique - sometimes earnestly, sometimes clumsily. Duchovny’s intent reads as earnest, but the framing still centers male agency: even the critique can’t resist making men the authors of the trap. That tension is exactly why it sticks.