Germaine Greer quotes

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

"The Female Eunuch" is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive — which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time.
So was Greer. ... If Greer were a bit more honest and had a bit more perspective, she'd have a useful message to relay to young women about the perils of confusing sexual autonomy with the real but ephemeral ability to manipulate men. She could elucidate the difference between a sexual freedom that abuses body and soul and a sexual freedom that cherishes and respects them. But Greer has always spoken directly from the tangles of her personal experience, shamelessly extrapolating from her own condition to the rest of womankind and seemingly unaware of her presumption. ... In the '70s, she admonished women who lacked her confidence, stylishness and libido for their timorousness. Today, feeling betrayed, she's become grim and hectoring, a feminist more cartoonishly man-hating than the ones she supposedly defied in the '70s, nattering on about body hair and bras.

Women who were housewives, who were pretty miserable ... felt inspired by her book and their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but better lives.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (she was married for three weeks to a construction worker in the 1960s) and menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory ... In part, her ability to remain so prominently in the public consciousness comes from an astute understanding and well-established symbiotic relationship with a media as eager to be shocked as she is to shock.

Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.

Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?

Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women.