Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
Interpretation
The quote highlights society's emphasis on beauty as a defining aspect of a woman's worth, overshadowing her other successes.
In this quote, Germaine Greer expresses a critical view of societal standards that claim a woman’s value is largely tied to her physical appearance. This assertion suggests that, despite her achievements in various fields, if a woman does not conform to conventional beauty standards, society may deem her a failure. Greer challenges the narrow definition of a woman's success, advocating for a broader understanding of worth that encompasses talents and contributions beyond looks.
In practice
In a discussion about body image, you might quote this to emphasize the pressures women face.
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 creature born is the creature dying.
A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.
Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.
Heaven doesn't make this life less important; it makes it more important.
I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Crime is a product of social excess.
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