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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the societal expectations placed on women to apologize and internalize blame for their circumstances and treatment.
Germaine Greer's quote captures the painful reality of how women are often socialized to accept responsibility for the actions and opinions of others, leading them to a life of perpetual apology. It critiques the damaging belief that women's worth is contingent on being desired and respected by those around them, suggesting that their feelings of inadequacy often stem from external judgments rather than their true value.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about gender roles in a seminar on feminism.
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.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realising you were the prisoner!
While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many.
If anything happens to me, tell every woman I've ever gone with I was talking about her at the end. That way, they'll have to reevaluate me.
If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.
The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us.
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