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Germaine Greer -
The Female Eunuch (1970)
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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.
Germaine Greer
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The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.
Germaine Greer
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Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves
Germaine Greer
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The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.
Germaine Greer
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English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.
Germaine Greer
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Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.
Germaine Greer
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Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.
Germaine Greer
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At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.
Germaine Greer
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If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.
Germaine Greer
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Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
Germaine Greer
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Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Germaine Greer
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If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.
Germaine Greer
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It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
Germaine Greer
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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 rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.
Germaine Greer
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Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.
Germaine Greer
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Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilisation and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
Germaine Greer
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As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.
Germaine Greer
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It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys.
Germaine Greer
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Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
Germaine Greer
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Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him...
Germaine Greer
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Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
Germaine Greer
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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.
Germaine Greer
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War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.
Germaine Greer
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Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Germaine Greer
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The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
Germaine Greer
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Germaine Greer
Creative Commons
Born:
January 29, 1939
(age 85)
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