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.
If you pay attention, everyone is a novel. The most boring person, if you sit down and really listen, is someone interesting.
I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.
To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily.
You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
I think that a lot of people don't understand how much discrimination transgender people actually face. They think that we're just kind of saying it to put it out there and get sympathy, but that's not true at all.
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