A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the gender double standards in society regarding behavior and mental health.
H. L. Mencken's quote underscores the societal expectations and double standards placed on men and women. It suggests that actions commonly accepted in men might be harshly judged in women, reflecting how societal norms can lead to the stigmatization of women's behavior. The use of 'lunatic asylum' illustrates the extreme consequences faced by women challenging these norms, thus calling attention to the prejudices that persist in the evaluation of gendered behavior.
In practice
In a discussion about gender roles, this quote can illustrate the inequalities in social judgment.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?
We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it
I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that Iβm going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.
Iβve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
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