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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.

-Germaine Greer

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The First Kiss Ideally

Germaine Greer

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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.

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Falling In Love

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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.

Too Many Women Are Forced To Abort By Poverty, By Their Menfolk, By Their Parents. A Choice Is Only Possible If There Are Genuine Alternatives.

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.

Men Ought To Become More Conscious Of Their Bodies As Objects Of Delight.

The Struggle Which Is Not Joyous Is The Wrong Struggle. The Joy Of The Struggle Is Not Hedonism And Hilarity, But The Sense Of Purpose, Achievement And Dignity.

Women's Liberation, If It Abolishes The Patriarchal Family, Will Abolish A Necessary Substructure Of The Authoritarian State, And Once That Withers Away Marx Will Have Come True Willy-nilly, So Let's Get On With It.

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Next Time Round Hitler Will Be A Machine.

My Knees Have Always Been Ugly.

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.

We In The West Do Not Refrain From Childbirth Because We Are Concerned About The Population Explosion Or Because We Feel We Cannot Afford Children, But Because We Do Not Like Children.

Two-up Is Australia's Very Own Way Of Parting A Fool And His Money.

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.

A Full Bosom Is Actually A Millstone Around A Woman's Neck.

The Most Highly Prized Curve Of All Is That Of The Bosom.

I'm Passionately Opposed To The Nuclear Family, With Its Mom And Dad And Their 2.4 Children. I Think It's The Most Neurotic Life-style Ever Developed.

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

I Do Think That Women Could Make Politics Irrelevant; By A Kind Of Spontaneous Cooperative Action The Like Of Which We Have Never Seen; Which Is So Far From People’s Ideas Of State Structure Or Viable Social Structure That It Seems To Them Like Total Anarchy — When What It Really Is, Is Very Subtle Forms Of Interrelation That Do Not Follow Some Heirarchal Pattern Which Is Fundamentally Patriarchal. The Opposite To Patriarchy Is Not Matriarchy But Fraternity, Yet I Think It’s Women Who Are Going To Have To Break This Spiral Of Power And Find The Trick Of Cooperation.

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

Poetry Exists Partly To Undermine The Certainties Of An Accepted Intellectual System, By Opening A Fissure Of Awareness At Which The Reality Of The Unconquered World May Enter.

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.

Now As Before, Women Must Refuse To Be Meek And Guileful, For Truth Cannot Be Served By Dissimulation. Women Who Fancy That They Manipulate The World By Pussy Power And Gentle Cajolery Are Fools. It Is Slavery To Have To Adopt Such Tactics.

The Principle Of The Brotherhood Of Man Is Narcissistic... For The Grounds For That Love Have Always Been The Assumption That We Ought To Realize That We Are The Same The Whole World Over.

Brotherhood Of Man

Mother Is The Dead Heart Of The Family Spending Father's Earnings On Consumer Goods To Enhance The Environment In Which He Eats, Sleeps, And Watches The Television.

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.

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

A Garden Is The Best Alternative Therapy.

Evolution Is What It Is. The Upper Classes Have Always Died Out; It's One Of The Most Charming Things About Them.

The Pain Of Sexual Frustration, Of Repressed Tenderness, Of Denied Curiosity, Of Isolation In The Ego, Of Greed, Suppressed Rebellion, Of Hatred Poisoning All Love And Generosity, Permeates Our Sexuality. What We Love We Destroy.

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.

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.

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.

It Takes A Great Deal Of Courage And Independence To Decide To Design Your Own Image Instead Of The One That Society Rewards, But It Gets Easier As You Go Along.

The House Wife Is An Unpaid Employee In Her Husband's House In Return For The Security Of Being A Permanent Employee.

How You Answer The Question, Whether Individuals Should Be Persuaded To Live Their Whole Lives In A State Of Chemical Dependency, First Upon Contraceptive Steroids And Then On Replacement Therapy, Depends Upon Your Regard For The Autonomy Of The Individual. If Men Would Not Live Their Lives This Way, Why Should Women?

Human Beings Have An Inalienable Right To Invent Themselves.

Inalienable Rights

The Most Unpardonable Privilege That Men Enjoy Is Their Magnanimity.

It's Absolutely Philistine Not To Recognize What A Great Book 'an American Dream' Is. Norman Mailer Is His Own Worst Enemy, And If You Don't Catch Him In A Defensive Position, He'll Admit It. I'd Really Like To Help That Man.

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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?

Even Crushed Against His Brother In The Tube The Average Englishman Pretends Desperately That He Is Alone.

If Female Liberation Is To Happen, If The Reservoir Of Real Female Love Is To Be Tapped, This Sterile Self-deception Must Be Counteracted. The Only Literary Form Which Could Outsell Romantic Trash On The Female Market Is Hard-core Pornography.

The Element Of Heroic Maleness Had Always Been Present In The Concept Of The Artist As One Who Rides The Winged Horse Above The Clouds Beyond The Sight Of Lesser Men, A Concept Seldom Applied To Those Who Worked With Colours Until The Nineteenth Century. When The Inevitable Question Is Asked, "why Are There No Great Women Artists?" It Is This Dimension Of Art That Is Implied. The Askers Know Little Of Art, But They Know The Seven Wonders Of The Painting World.

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 Essence Of Pleasure Is Spontaneity.

The Sight Of Women Talking Together Has Always Made Men Uneasy; Nowadays It Means Rank Subversion.

Awareness Of Time As Flying Has Some Advantages; It Precludes Boredom, For One Thing. It Matters Little That Younger People Find Older People Boring Or Slow. Older People Have A Right To Resist Being Rushed, To Stand And Stare At The Fragile World That Has Become So Unspeakably Dear To Them. For The Lucky Ones, Who Will Not Have To Leave While They Are Still In Love With Life, There Will Come A Later Time When That Passion Too Will Fade, But While One Is Still Possessed By That Great Tenderness, It Must Be Yielded To.

Kinkiness Comes From Low Energy. It's The Substitution Of Lechery For Lust.

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.

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

In A Sane Society No Woman Would Be Left To Struggle On Her Own With The Huge Transformation That Is Motherhood, When A Single Individual Finds Herself Joined By An Invisible Umbilical Cord To Another Person From Whom She Will Never Be Separated, Even By Death.

A Library Is A Place Where You Can Lose Your Innocence Without Losing Your Virginity.

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