Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.
Interpretation
This quote critiques societal norms regarding women's attire, highlighting the paradox of rejecting one form of repression only to embrace another.
Germaine Greer’s quote addresses the absurdity surrounding the invention of bras and the pressures women face regarding their bodies and clothing. She argues that while bras are seen as a ridiculous contraption, choosing to reject them entirely can also represent a form of self-imposed limitation, indicating that the struggle against societal expectations of appearance can lead to further repression in different forms. It reflects a nuanced view on the complexities of freedom and conformity in relation to women's choices.
In practice
In a speech about body positivity, one might use this quote to highlight the contradictions in societal pressures on women's dress.
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
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
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.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
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.
The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.
It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.
I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are
Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.
I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.
Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.
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