A woman is, occasionally, quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.

The line is a deliberately abrasive epigram that reduces heterosexual relations to a cynical, solipsistic calculus: sex with a woman is framed not as mutual encounter but as an occasionally “serviceable” alternative to self-gratification. The sting lies in the second sentence—“It takes an abundance of imagination”—which implies that to treat another person as merely an instrument requires self-deception and fantasy, not intimacy. Read in the spirit of Kraus’s satirical moralism, the remark can be taken as an attack on bourgeois hypocrisy and on the commodification of desire: the speaker exposes how easily “love” can become a rhetorical cover for narcissism. Its provocation is part of its function, forcing readers to confront the ugliness of such attitudes.