Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the often false and complicated nature of love, suggesting it hides deeper issues like egotism and fantasy.
Germaine Greer's quote presents a cynical view of love, suggesting that the romantic gestures and rituals often associated with it are merely superficial masks that conceal deeper human issues such as egotism and desire. Greer argues that these actions, including courtship, dating, and even the conflicts that arise within relationships, distract from the true complexities of human personality, portraying love as a collection of performative acts rather than a genuine emotional connection.
In practice
Discussing the complexities of relationships in a psychology lecture.
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.
Dating a new man is like holding a strawberry milkshake; first the taste, then the pleasure.
Everyone is welcome in drag. Everyone is important and valuable.
That's the very reason why love is eternal, because it is forever renewed. Passions die, love remains.
She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.
The tears that kept Buttercup company the remainder of the day were not at all like those that had blinded her into the tree trunk. Those were noisy and hot; they pulsed. These were silent and steady and all they did was remind her that she wasn’t good enough. She was seventeen, and every male she’d ever known had crumbled at her feet and it meant nothing. The one time it really mattered, she wasn’t good enough.
No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.
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