Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.

The line is framed as a deliberately provocative, comic put-down: it reduces lesbian relationships to a pragmatic workaround for heterosexual scarcity rather than a legitimate orientation or love. Read as Ephron-style barbed humor, it relies on shock and incongruity—treating something intimate and identity-defining as mere “trouble” and “invention.” Its significance today is largely as an example of how mainstream late-20th-century wit could trade in casual homophobia for a laugh, and how such quips can age poorly as cultural understandings of sexuality shift. The sentence also reveals a heterosexual, male-centered assumption: men are the default object of desire, and women’s relationships are evaluated relative to men.