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.
Interpretation
Designing your own identity requires bravery and self-reliance, but it becomes easier with practice.
This quote by Germaine Greer emphasizes the importance of courage and independence in forging one's own identity in a world that often imposes societal images and expectations. It acknowledges the challenges faced when resisting conformity, but reassures that with persistence, this personal journey becomes less daunting over time.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-acceptance and authenticity.
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.
I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.
I used to get bullied by the popular girls at school. Today, I am the popular girl, and the bullies come to my shows.
If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me - I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.
The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
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