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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.

-Germaine Greer

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The Fear Of Freedom

Germaine Greer

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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.

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Brotherhood Of Man

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Security Is The Denial Of Life

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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.

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Sadness Is The Matrix From Which Wit And Irony Spring; Sadness Is Uncomfortable And Creative, Which Is Why Consumer Society Cannot Tolerate It.

All That Remains To The Mother In Modern Consumer Society Is The Role Of Scapegoat; Psychoanalysis Uses Huge Amounts Of Money And Time To Persuade Analysis And To Foist Their Problems On To The Absent Mother, Who Has No Opportunity To Utter A Word In Her Own Defence. Hostility To The Mother In Our Societies Is An Index Of Mental Health.

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We Live In A True Chaos Of Contradicting Authorities, An Age Of Conformism Without Community, Of Proximity Without Communication.

My Knees Have Always Been Ugly.

Love, Love, Love - All The Wretched Cant Of It, Masking Egotism, Lust, Masochism, Fantasy Under A Mythology Of Sentimental Postures.

Every Human Body Has Its Optimum Weight And Contour, Which Only Health And Efficiency Can Establish. Whenever We Treat Women's Bodies As Aesthetic Objects Without Function We Deform Them.

I Believe In Permanent Revolution.

Reading Was My First Solitary Vice (and Led To All Others). I Read While I Ate, I Read In The Loo, I Read In The Bath. When I Was Supposed To Be Sleeping, I Was Reading.

There Are Poems About The Internet And About The Shipping Forecast But Very Few By Women Celebrating Men.

In Modern Consumer Society, The Attack On Mother-child Eroticism Took Its Total Form; Breastfeeding Was Proscribed And The Breasts Reserved For The Husband's Fetishistic Delectation. At The Same Time, Babies Were Segregated, Put Into Cold Beds Alone And Not Picked Up If They Cried.

Older Women Can Afford To Agree That Femininity Is A Charade, A Matter Of Colored Hair, Ecru Lace And Whalebones, The Kind Of Slap And Tat That Transvestites Are In Love With, And No More.

The Housewife Is An Unpaid Worker In Her Husband's House In Return For The Security Of Being A Permanent Employee: Hers Is The Reductio Ad Absurdum Of The Employee Who Accepts A Lower Wage In Return For Permanence Of His Employment. But The Lowest Paid Employees Can Be And Are Laid Off, And So Are Wives. They Have No Savings, No Skills Which They Can Bargain With Elsewhere, And They Must Bear The Stigma Of Having Been Sacked.

Every Time A Man Unburdens His Heart To A Stranger He Reaffirms The Love That Unites Humanity.

Women Have Very Little Idea Of How Much Men Hate Them.

Unless The Concepts Of Work And Play And Reward For Work Change Absolutely, Women Must Continue To Provide Cheap Labor, And Even More, Free Labor Exacted Of Right By An Employer Possessed Of A Contract For Life, Made Out In His Favor.

We Can't Change The Moon But We Can Live In Harmony With Its Tides, And We Can Make Some Ripples Of Our Own.

English Children Have Lost Their Innocence, For Their First Lessons Have Been In The Exploitation Of Their Adult Slave.

If Women Understand By Emancipation The Adoption Of The Masculine Role Then We Are Lost Indeed. If Women Can Supply No Counterbalance To The Blindness Of Male Drive The Aggressive Society Will Run To Its Lunatic Extremes At Ever-escalating Speed. Who Will Safeguard The Despised Animal Faculties Of Compassion, Empathy, Innocence And Sensuality?

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.

The Real Theater Of The Sex War Is The Domestic Hearth.

Gillard Is As Likeable As Rudd Is Charmless. She Is Self-deprecating; He Is Ludicrously Vainglorious. She Is A Mistress Of Understatement; He Is A Ranter.

Every Wife Who Slaves To Keep Herself Pretty, To Cook Her Husband's Favourite Meals, To Build Up His Pride And Confidence In Himself At The Expense Of His Sense Of Reality, To Be His Closest And Effectively His Only Friend, To Encourage Him To Rejectthe Consensus Of Opinionand Find Reassurance Only In Her Arms Is Binding Her Mate To Her With Hoops Of Steel That Will Strangle Them Both.

Many A Housewife Staring At The Back Of Her Husband's Newspaper, Or Listening To His Breathing In Bed Is Lonelier Than Any Spinster In A Rented Room.

Is It Too Much To Ask That Women Be Spared The Daily Struggle For Superhuman Beauty In Order To Offer It To The Caresses Of A Subhumanly Ugly Mate?

Most People Die In Improvised Circumstances Of Harassment And Confusion, Whether In Hospital Or Out Of It.

War Is The Admission Of Defeat In The Face Of Conflicting Interests: By War The Issue Is Left To Chance, And The Tacit Assumption That The Best Man Will Win Is Not At All Justified. It Might Equally Be Argued That The Worst, The Most Unscrupulous Man Will Win, Although History Will Continue The Absurd Game By Finding Him After All The Best Man.

The Essence Of Pleasure Is Spontaneity.

No One Goes To The Toilet In Novels. You'd Think None Of Us Had Bladders.

Probably The Only Place Where A Man Can Feel Really Secure Is In A Maximum Security Prison, Except For The Imminent Threat Of Release.

Only One Thing Is Certain: If Pot Is Legalized, It Won't Be For Our Benefit But For The Authorities. To Have It Legalized Will Also Be To Lose Control Of It.

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?

As Soon As We Find Ourselves Working At Being Indispensable, Rigging Up A Pattern Of Vulnerability In Our Loved Ones, We Know That Our Love Has Taken The Socially Sanctioned Form Of Egotism.

The Few Men Who Do A Hand's Turn Around The House Expect Gratitude And Recognition, So Sure Are They That, Though It Is Their Dirt, It Is Not Their Job.

I Have Always Been Principally Interested In Men For Sex. I've Always Thought Any Sane Woman Would Be A Lover Of Women Because Loving Men Is Such A Mess. I Have Always Wished I'd Fall In Love With A Woman. Damn.

Falling In Love

The Older Woman's Love Is Not Love Of Herself, Nor Of Herself Mirrored In A Lover's Eyes, Nor Is It Corrupted By Need. It Is A Feeling Of Tenderness So Still And Deep And Warm That It Gilds Every Grass Blade And Blesses Every Fly. It Includes The Ones Who Have A Claim On It, And A Great Deal Else Besides. I Wouldn't Have Missed It For The World.

Developing The Muscles Of The Soul Demands No Competitive Spirit, No Killer Instinct, Although It May Erect Pain Barriers That The Spiritual Athlete Must Crash Through.

Marriage Made More Sense When It Was Indissoluble. It's The Woman Trying To Cope With The Strains Of A One-parent Family Who Will Suffer Most From The Relaxation Of The Divorce Laws.

I Didn't Fight To Get Women Out From Behind Vacuum Cleaners To Get Them Onto The Board Of Hoover.

Man Is Jealous Because Of His Amour Propre; Woman Is Jealous Because Of Her Lack Of It.

All Societies On The Verge Of Death Are Masculine. A Society Can Survive With Only One Man; No Society Will Survive A Shortage Of Women.

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.

We Still Make Love To Organs And Not People; That So Far From Realising That People Are Never More Idiosyncratic, Never More Totally There When They Make Love, We Re Never More Incommunicative, Never More Alone.

Rescuing Women From Their Burden Of Unwarranted Guilt Is Going To Require "educational Practices And Socializing Agents" Even More Effective Than The Ones That Have Been Relentlessly Loading Female Humans With Responsibility For Other People's Behavior From Their Earliest Childhood.

The First Kiss Ideally Signals Rapture, Exchange Of Hearts, And Imminent Marriage. Otherwise It Is A Kiss That Lies. All Very Crude And Nonsensical, And Yet It Is The Staple Myth Of Hundreds Of Comics Called 'sweethearts,' 'romantic Secrets' And So Forth. The State Induced By The Kiss Is Actually Self-induced, Of Course, For Few Lips Are So Gifted With Electric And Psychedelic Possibilities.

There Has Come Into Existence, Chiefly In America, A Breed Of Men Who Claim To Be Feminists. They Imagine That They Have Understood What Women Want And That They Are Capable Of Giving It To Them. They Help With The Dishes At Home And Make Their Own Coffee In The Office, Basking The While In The Refulgent Consciousness Of Virtue. Such Men Are Apt To Think Of The True Male Feminists As Utterly Chauvinistic.

As Angelo Discovered In Measure For Measure, Nothing Corrupts Like Virtue.

Measure For Measure

In Any Library In The World, I Am At Home, Unselfconscious, Still And Absorbed.

Bras Are A Ludicrous Invention; But If You Make Bralessness A Rule, You're Just Subjecting Yourself To Yet Another Repression.

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.

Bollocks Have Never Frightened Me. I'll Eat A Bollock Any Time.

Lovers Who Are Free To Go When They Are Restless Always Come Back; Lovers Who Are Free To Change Remain Interesting. The Bitter Animosity And Obscenity Of Divorce Is Unknown Where Individuals Have Not Become Siamese Twins.

Marriage Cannot Be A Job As It Has Become.

The Blind Conviction That We Have To Do Something About Other People's Reproductive Behavior, 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.

One May Not Reach The Dawn Save By The Path Of The Night.

Common Morality Now Treats Childbearing As An Aberration. There Are Practically No Good Reasons Left For Exercising One's Fertility.

Every Time A Woman Makes Herself Laugh At Her Husband's Often-told Jokes She Betrays Him. The Man Who Looks At His Woman And Says 'what Would I Do Without You?' Is Already Destroyed.

The Goal Was 'every Child A Wanted Child'; It Should Also Have Been 'every Abortion A Wanted Abortion', But The Two Sides Of The Phony Debate Were Never To Meet.

Perhaps Women Have Always Been In Closer Contact With Reality Than Men: It Would Seem To Be The Just Recompense For Being Deprived Of Idealism.

Rather Than Seek To Be Squired And Dated By Their Rivals Why Should It Not Be Possible For Women To Find Relaxation And Pleasure In The Company Of Their 'inferiors'? They Would Need To Shed Their Desperate Need To Admire A Man, And Accept The Gentler Role Of Loving Him. A Learned Woman Cannot Castrate A Truck-driver Like She Can Her Intellectual Rival, Because He Has No Exaggerated Respect For Her Bookish Capacities. The Alternative To Conventional Education Is Not Stupidity, And Many A Clever Girl Needs The Corrective Of A Humbler Soul's Genuine Wisdom.

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.

The Castration Of Women Has Been Carried Out In Terms Of A Masculine-feminine Polarity, In Which Men Have Commandeered All The Energy And Streamlined It Into An Aggressive Conquistadorial Power, Reducing All Heterosexual Contact To A Sadomasochistic Pattern.

Because Love Has Been So Perverted, It Has In Many Cases Come To Involve A Measure Of Hatred.

The Drug Which Makes Sexuality Palatable In Popular Mythology.

Bringing Up Children Is Not A Real Occupation, Because Children Come Up Just The Same, Brought Or Not.

The Management Of Fertility Is One Of The Most Important Functions Of Adulthood.

The Treatment For Jaded Sensibilities Is Not To Shatter Them, After All.

Women Have Been Charged With Deviousness And Duplicity Since The Dawn Of Civilization So They Have Never Been Able To Pretend That Their Masks Were Anything But Masks. It Is A Slender Case But Perhaps It Does Mean That Women Have Always Been In Closer Contact With Reality Than Men: It Would Seem To Be The Just Recompense For Being Deprived Of Idealism.

Human Beings Have An Unalienable Right To Invent Themselves; When That Right Is Pre-empted It Is Called Brain-washing.

Freedom Is Fragile And Must Be Protected. To Sacrifice It, Even As A Temporary Measure, Is To Betray It.

Most Women Still Need A Room Of Their Own And The Only Way To Find It May Be Outside Their Own Home.

It Strikes Me As Very Strange That Whereas Tennyson Could Support Most Of Mr. Buckley's Propositions About Free Trade, And The Private Sector, And Private Enterprise, Tennyson Found No Difficulty Also In Lending Intellectual Support To The Idea Of Women's Liberation.

Lifelong Monogamy Is A Maniacal Idea.

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.

The Crowning Insult [of Abortion] Is That This Ordeal Is Represented To Her As Some Kind Of A Privilege.her Sad And Onerous Duty Is Garbed In The Rhetoric Of A Civil Right.

The Most Unpardonable Privilege That Men Enjoy Is Their Magnanimity.

The Consequences Of Militancy Do Not Disappear When The Need For Militancy Is Over.

A Woman Is Never So Happy As When She Is Being Wooed. Then She Is Mistress Of All She Surveys, The Cynosure Of All Eyes, Until That Day Of Days When She Sails Down The Aisle, A Vision In White, Lovely As The Stefanotis She Carries, Borne Translucent On Her Father's Manly Arm To Be Handed Over To Her New Father-surrogate. If She Is Clever, And If Her Husband Has The Time And The Resources, She Will Insist On Being Wooed All Her Life; More Likely She Will Discover That Marriage Is Not Romantic, That Husbands Forget Birthdays And Aniversaries And Seldom Pay Compliments, Are Often Perfunctory.

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