Germaine Greer Quotes

Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite. ~ Germaine Greer

The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges. ~ Germaine Greer

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more. ~ Germaine Greer

No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders. ~ Germaine Greer

Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature. ~ Germaine Greer

There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all. ~ Germaine Greer

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. ~ Germaine Greer

Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off. ~ Germaine Greer

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation. ~ Germaine Greer

Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not. ~ Germaine Greer

Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be. ~ Germaine Greer

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

Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal, and it's gender. ~ Germaine Greer

In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death. ~ Germaine Greer

There is no such thing as security. There never has been. ~ Germaine Greer

My knees have always been ugly. ~ Germaine Greer

A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not. ~ Germaine Greer

It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. ~ Germaine Greer

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

Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight. ~ Germaine Greer

The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all. ~ Germaine Greer

Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane. ~ Germaine Greer

Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize. ~ Germaine Greer

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement. ~ Germaine Greer

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea. ~ Germaine Greer

The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden. ~ Germaine Greer

Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial. ~ Germaine Greer

What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him. ~ Germaine Greer

We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. ~ Germaine Greer

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. ~ Germaine Greer

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother ~ Germaine Greer

Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility. ~ Germaine Greer

Next time round Hitler will be a machine. ~ Germaine Greer

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. ~ Germaine Greer

The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle. ~ Germaine Greer

There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic. ~ Germaine Greer

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world. ~ Germaine Greer

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. ~ Germaine Greer

Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money. ~ Germaine Greer

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. ~ Germaine Greer

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

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. ~ Germaine Greer

The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife. ~ Germaine Greer

Deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun and you will suppress his destructive urges, and he will turn out to be a homosexual - or worse! ~ Germaine Greer

Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained. ~ Germaine Greer

It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground. ~ Germaine Greer

Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking, and cock-sucking are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it. ~ Germaine Greer

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living. ~ Germaine Greer

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them. ~ Germaine Greer

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter. ~ Germaine Greer

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

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests. ~ Germaine Greer

Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws. ~ Germaine Greer

Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor. ~ Germaine Greer

The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. ~ Germaine Greer

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. ~ Germaine Greer

Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require 'educational practices and socializing agents' even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood. ~ Germaine Greer

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory. ~ Germaine Greer

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. ~ Germaine Greer

Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it. ~ Germaine Greer

If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. ~ Germaine Greer

Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the "unworldliness" of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life. ~ Germaine Greer

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. ~ Germaine Greer

We can't change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own. ~ Germaine Greer

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic ... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over. ~ Germaine Greer

I got him' is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is 'I lost him'. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives' bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled. ~ Germaine Greer

In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. ~ Germaine Greer

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

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter. ~ Germaine Greer

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children. ~ Germaine Greer

Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it. ~ Germaine Greer

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it. ~ Germaine Greer

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

Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time. ~ Germaine Greer

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

Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following. ~ Germaine Greer

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home. ~ Germaine Greer

When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff. ~ Germaine Greer

The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of
career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle. ~ Germaine Greer

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them. ~ Germaine Greer

Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. ~ Germaine Greer

Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate. ~ Germaine Greer

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. ~ Germaine Greer

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism. ~ Germaine Greer

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become. ~ Germaine Greer

Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

Security is the denial of life ~ Germaine Greer

It is commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste. ~ Germaine Greer

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
[Still in Melbourne January 1987] ~ Germaine Greer

Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents ... A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives. ~ Germaine Greer

Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. ~ Germaine Greer

Human beings have an unalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing. ~ Germaine Greer

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves. ~ Germaine Greer

I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them. ~ Germaine Greer

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

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. ~ Germaine Greer

How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women? ~ Germaine Greer

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. ~ Germaine Greer

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make? ~ Germaine Greer

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself. ~ Germaine Greer