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" "In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido.
Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian author, academic, critic and journalist.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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The hallmark of egotistical love, even when it masquerades as altruistic
love, is the negative answer to the question ‘Do I want my
love to be happy more than I want him to be with me?’ As soon as
we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a
pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we ought to know that
our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism. Every
wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite
meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense
of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only
friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find
reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops
of steel that will strangle them both. Every time a woman makes
herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks
at his woman and says ‘What would I do without you?’ is already
destroyed. His woman’s victory is complete, but it is Pyrrhic. Both
of them have sacrificed so much of what initially made them lovable
to promote the symbiosis of mutual dependence that they scarcely
make up one human being between them.
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The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. For a long time there may be no perceptible reward for women other than their new sense of purpose and integrity. Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise. It does mean pride and confidence. It does mean communication and cooperation with others based on delight in their company and your own. To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness. To have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve, and at last something genuine to give. To be freed from guilt and shame and the tireless self-discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathize. To claim the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage. It goes much further than equal pay for equal work, for it ought to revolutionise the conditions of work completely. It does not understand the phrase 'equality of opportunity', for it seems that the opportunities will have to be utterly changed and women's souls changed so that they desire opportunity instead of shrinking from it.