Frequently, "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." is seen attributed to Oscar Wilde: e.g., here, here, and here. This seems unlikely to me, for several reasons:
- I can't find any instances of the quote that date from more than about fifteen years ago. The oldest of them already seem to quote it as a well-known dictum, so it's probably older than that, but a hundred years is an awfully long time to go without googleable citations.
- Nobody seems to have any idea where Oscar would have said it, if in fact he did.
- It just sounds wrong: specifically, I would expect a post-Freudian source.
Does anyone know what the actual source of this quote is?