A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.

The line is a deliberately abrasive Krausian epigram: it reduces heterosexual relations to a merely functional outlet, mocking romantic idealization and exposing a cynical, instrumental view of sex. Read as satire, it also targets the hypocrisy of bourgeois sexual morality—where public propriety coexists with private appetite—by stating crudely what polite society disguises. The phrasing’s sting depends on reversal: instead of masturbation being a “substitute” for a woman, the woman is demoted to a substitute for masturbation, implying that desire is self-referential and that intimacy can be emptied of mutual recognition. Its shock-value is part of Kraus’s broader strategy of using scandalous wit to indict cultural pretenses.