Germaine Greer Quotes

If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble
the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing
personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly
the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to
limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal
personalities as having a better perception of reality — what Herbert
Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not
seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena
is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited
by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They
have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are
without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are
laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and
envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an
autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not egocentred
and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment
to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared
to the present

The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

L'energia è il potere che guida ogni essere umano. Non viene persa con l'impiego ma mantenuta dallo stesso, perché è una facoltà della psiche.

We still make love to organs and not people.

Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.

In 'The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape', Margaret T Gordon and Stephanie Riger say that fully one-third of the women in their study reported worrying about rape once a month or more. Others said the the fear of rape is just something lives in the back of their minds at all times, even when it wasn't present in conscious thought. Another third of the participants claimed to never worry about rape but even so they took precautions to guard against it.

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.

Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.

With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical.

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women — and has become an option for men — while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

The Great Bitch is the deadly female, a worthy opponent for the omnipotent hero to exercise his powers upon and through. She is desirous, greedy, clever, dishonest, and two jumps ahead all the time. The hero may either have her on his side and like a lion-tamer sool her on to his enemies, or he may have to battle for his life at her hands.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.