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.
My worth to God in public is what I am in private.
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.
The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Can one alter one´s chief feature?" asked someone else. First it is necessary to know it. If you know it, much will depend on the quality of your knowing. If you know it well, then it is possible to change it.
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.
Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
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