Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

Analysis, meaning and summary of Dorothy Parker's poem General Review of the Sex Situation

12 Comments

  1. aurora d says:

    from this womans perspective when you love it is everything, it speaks bitterness to me of love unrequited with the same depth and passion. speaks of physical and emotional act of love and how who you love can never give you what you need/want

  2. Melissa says:

    D.Parker at this time was Divorced. She had extra martial affairs herself. So I wonder if this poem was about her or her husband. If you know her work as I am sure a lot of you do. She always looked at love a an disconcerning issue. So maybe this is just an internal interpertation of love. No matter what she did she could not make the man in her life happy. Because deep down she could not make herself happy.

  3. sasha says:

    i love this poem!i always find that women are always quick to fall in love and men are always quick to fall into lust. I think dorothy patker does an excellent job portraying this concept in this poem.

  4. Lynike says:

    well, for me the poem dorothy Parker wrote is that, it tells about how woman gave importance to love…while less men gave importance to it… hmmm.. women are martyrs….

  5. Forenzasha says:

    Ahoy there me mateys! I be doing a project on me lady Dorothy Parker. I have to make a scrapbook about her here life story. Keep talking amongst yourselves! I’m off to find buried treasure in my nose!

  6. Laritza Sanabria Maisonave says:

    I think that author is triyng to say that women are more committed to a relationship than men do. That we women give everything we have for our loved ones. She says too that men get tired of the woman they have and that’s why they have extramarital relationships. That’s the way I see it.

  7. Cynthia Lausell Feliciano says:

    Dorothy Parker obviously feels rebellious toward the men in her life. When she wrote this poem, she was divorced from her husband. The poem clearly states that men and women have different expectations in a marriage. But she was not content to be an object of her man’s physical desires. She wanted emotional commitment from her man not macho ideals. We still want that today.

  8. Yaritza R. says:

    In this poem Dorothy Parker is showing us her perspective about the differences between women’s and men’s feelings in a relationships. We can’t deny that not every man is like she descibe them, but the MAYORITY is like that: the “machos” that can’t see the real beauty of a woman because they’re so occupated watching our external beauty, the one that dessapears with the years.

  9. Zaida Cruz says:

    What the author is saying is that while women are thinking of that special someone to spend the rest of their lives with men are thinking how to spend the rest of their lives playing around adding more women to their lists. Women are more romantic while men are bored easily and don’t like repetitions.

  10. Melissa Torres Arroyo says:

    I think that Dorothy is trying to tell us that for most man women are just a toy that they get tired of it really soon and they have the need to look for a new one because they act like little child. Women dream about that special guy .The one to share her all but guys just go through life thinking about how many women they should have.

  11. Ivette D. says:

    This poem reflects Dorothy Parker’s ever present style. It also relays what women everywhere see in men-women relationships. It is sad that this writer relays in the early 1900’s what is even more evident in the 21st century.

  12. Kate G. says:

    So does anyone else read this and say: “Hey, it’s Anna and Vronsky”? I think D. Parker is saying a lot more bluntly what the perceptive authors of all time have said through tactfully written fiction. But, of course, those such as Tolstoy also include the “Levin and Kitty” stories that show at least a fictional possiblity of another kind of happiness. So is that just Tolstoy’s naive fiction? or does he see possibilities that Dorothy here couldn’t find?

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