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.
Interpretation
Guilt, shame, and stigma form a harmful alliance that leads to victim-blaming, particularly against women.
In this quote, Germaine Greer highlights how guilt, shame, and stigma work together to create a damaging narrative that holds women accountable for the abuse and injustices they face. This 'nasty triangle' reinforces societal attitudes that blame victims for their circumstances, obscuring the true perpetrators and perpetuating a culture of silence and suffering among women.
In practice
This quote can be used during a panel discussion on women's rights.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.
Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.
Faith must be tested, because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict.
Despite the obvious emphasis of Scripture (in regard to suffering), we are bombarded by suggestions that the 'successful' Christian living takes place in the realm of constant victory, health, wholeness, and financial prosperity. In response to this we are not to pretend that suffering doesn’t exist or that it might be instantly cured. Such notions are the product of empty heads and closed Bibles.
Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.
While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.
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