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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.

-Germaine Greer

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The Wedding Is The

Germaine Greer

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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.

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The High-heeled Shoe Is A Marvellously Contradictory Item; It Brings A Woman To A Man's Height But Makes Sure She Cannot Keep Up With Him.

It [childbearing] Was Never Intended To Be As Time-consuming And Self-conscious A Process As It Is. One Of The Deepest Evils In Our Society Is Tyrannical Nurturance.

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.

There Have Been Women In The Past Far More Daring Than We Would Need To Be Now, Who Ventured All And Gained A Little, But Survived After All.

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.

If Women Understand By Emancipation The Adoption Of The Masculine Role Then We Are Lost Indeed.

Supergroupies Don't Have To Hang Around Hotel Corridors. When You Are One, As I Have Been, You Get Invited Backstage.

The Occupational Hazard Of Being A Playboy Bunny Is The Aching Facial Muscles Brought On By Obligatory Smiles.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Perhaps Catastrophe Is The Natural Human Environment, And Even Though We Spend A Good Deal Of Energy Trying To Get Away From It, We Are Programmed For Survival Amid Catastrophe.

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.

It Is In Our Interests To Let The Police And Their Employers Go On Believing That The Underground Is A Conspiracy, Because It Increases Their Paranoia And Their Inability To Deal With What Is Really Happening. As Long As They Look For Ringleaders And Documents They Will Miss Their Mark, Which Is That Proportion Of Every Personality Which Belongs In The Underground.

Our Business In Life Is Not To Get Ahead Of Others, But To Get Ahead Of Ourselves-to Breakour Own Records, To Outstrip Our Yesterday By Our Today."stewart B. Johnson"men Rule Because Women Let Them. Male Misogyny Is Real Enough, And It Has Dreadful Consequences, But Female Misogyny Is What Keeps Women Out Of Power.

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.

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.

It Is Agreed That Little Girls Should Have A Different Physical Education Than Little Boys, But It Is Not Admitted How Much Of The Difference Is Counseled By The Conviction That Little Girls Should Not Look Like Little Boys.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

So Far It Has Been Assumed That The Only Pregnancies Which Are Aborted Are Accidental Ones And The Only Foetuses Destroyed Those Whose Mothers Could Not Bear The Thought Of Their Becoming Children. In A Just World This Would Be The Case, But The World Is Far From Just. Too Many Women Are Forced To Abort By Poverty, By Their Menfolk, By Their Parents. Poverty Has Many Faces; It May Be The Poverty Of The Young, The Unmarried, The Student, The Unemployed, The Female Or A Combination Of These.

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.

Women Over Fifty Already Form One Of The Largest Groups In The Population Structure Of The Western World. As Long As They Like Themselves, They Will Not Be An Oppressed Minority. In Order To Like Themselves They Must Reject Trivialization By Others Of Who And What They Are. A Grown Woman Should Not Have To Masquerade As A Girl In Order To Remain In The Land Of The Living.

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?

Lifelong Monogamy Is A Maniacal Idea.

Freud Is The Father Of Psychoanalysis. It Had No Mother.

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.

Once A Paper Admits Any Principle Of Censorship For Survival, The We-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer Kind Of Censorship, It Jeopardizes The Integrity Of Its Editorial Principle. It's Better To Print And Be Damned, Because You'll Be Damned Anyway.

The Most Powerful Entities On Earth Are Not Governments But The Multi-national Corporations That See Women As Their Territory, Indoctrinating Them With Their Versions Of Beauty, Health And Hygiene, Medicating Them And Cultivating Their Dependency In Order To Medicate Them Some More.

A Woman Might Claim To Retain Some Of The Child's Faculties, Although Very Limited And Defused, Simply Because She Has Not Been Encouraged To Learn Methods Of Thought And Develop A Disciplined Mind. As Long As Education Remains Largely Induction Ignorance Will Retain These Advantages Over Learning And It Is Time That Women Impudently Put Them To Work.

Security Is When Everything Is Settled, When Nothing Can Happen To You; Security Is The Denial Of Life.

A Garden Is The Best Alternative Therapy.

Until Women Themselves Reject Stigma And Refuse To Feel Shame For The Way Others Treat Them, They Have No Hope Of Achieving Full Human Stature.

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

Thought Provoking

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.

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

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.

Men Have Still Not Realized That Letting Women Do So Much Of The Work For So Little Reward Makes A Man In The House An Expensive Luxury Rather Than A Necessity.

Security Is The Denial Of Life

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

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.

The Most Unpardonable Privilege That Men Enjoy Is Their Magnanimity.

People Who Are Really Happy Do Not Concern Themselves With Convincing Others Of The Fact.

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

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

There Is No Such Thing As Security. There Never Has Been.

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.

If A Woman Never Lets Herself Go, How Will She Ever Know How Far She Might Have Got?

Women Are Reputed Never To Be Disgusted. The Sad Fact Is That They Often Are, But Not With Men; Following The Lead Of Men, They Are Most Often Disgusted With Themselves

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

Act Quickly, Think Slowly.

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.

Marriage Cannot Be A Job As It Has Become.

You're Only Young Once, But You Can Be Immature Forever.

Status Ought Not To Be Measured By A Woman's Ability To Attract And Snare A Man.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Tragedy Of Machismo Is That A Man Is Never Quite Man Enough.

I Think That Testosterone Is A Rare Poison.

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

Measure For Measure

After Centuries Of Conditioning Of The Female Into The Condition Of Perpetual Girlishness Called Femininity, We Cannot Remember What Femaleness Is.

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.

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 Real Theater Of The Sex War Is The Domestic Hearth.

Psychoanalysis Is The Confession Without Absolution.

Every Woman Knows That, Regardless Of All Her Other Achievements, She Is A Failure If She Is Not Beautiful.

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

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

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.

Abandonment Of Slavery Is Also The Banishment Of The Chimera Of Security. The World Will Not Change Overnight, And Liberation Will Not Happen Unless Individual Women Agree To Be Outcasts, Eccentrics, Perverts, And Whatever The Powers-that-be Choose To Call Them.

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.

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

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.

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

War Is The Admission Of Defeat In The Face Of Conflicting Interests.

Never Advise Anyone To Go To War Or To Get Married. Write Down The Advice Of Him Who Loves You, Though You Like It Not At Present. He That Has No Children Brings Them Up Well

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

A Garden Is A Kinetic Work Of Art, Not An Object But A Process, Open-ended, Biodegradable, Nurturant, Like All Women's Artistry. A Garden Is The Best Alternative Therapy.

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

The Essence Of Pleasure Is Spontaneity.

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

Revolution Is The Festival Of The Oppressed.

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

Man Made One Grave Mistake: In Answer To Vaguely Reformist And Humanitarian Agitation He Admitted Women To Politics And The Professions. The Conservatives Who Saw This As The Undermining Of Our Civilisation And The End Of The State And Marriage Were Right After All; It Is Time For The Demolition To Begin.

The Most Popular Image Of The Female Despite The Exigencies Of The Clothing Trade Is All Boobs And Buttocks, A Hallucinating Sequence Of Parabolae And Bulges.

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.

I Find That Those Men Who Are Personally Most Polite To Women, Who Call Them Angels And All That, Cherish In Secret The Greatest Contempt For Them.

When I Was A Young Hippy, I Thought Marching Naked Would Be A Strong Protest, But I Don't Think It Would Be As Effective Now.

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.

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

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.

Human Beings Have An Inalienable Right To Invent Themselves.

Inalienable Rights

If You Think You Are Emancipated, You Might Consider The Idea Of Tasting Your Own Menstrual Blood - If It Makes You Sick, You've Got A Long Way To Go, Baby.

The Only Causes Of Regret Are Laziness, Outbursts Of Temper, Hurting Others, Prejudice, Jealousy, And Envy.

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.

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

Next Time Round Hitler Will Be A Machine.

Australia Is A Huge Rest Home, Where No Unwelcome News Is Ever Wafted On To The Pages Of The Worst Newspapers In The World.

English Culture Is Basically Homosexual In The Sense That The Men Only Really Care About Other Men.

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

Great Artists Are Products Of Their Own Time: They Do Not Spring Forth Fully Equipped From The Head Of Jove, But Are Formed By The Circumstances Acting Upon Them Since Birth. These Circumstances Include The Ambiance Created By The Other, Lesser Artists Of Their Own Time, Who Have All Done Their Part In Creating The Pressure That Forces Up An Exceptional Talent. Unjustly, But Unavoidably, The Very Closeness Of A Great Artist To His Colleagues And Contemporaries Leads To Their Eclipse.

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.

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.

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

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.

Energy Is The Power That Drives Every Human Being. It Is Not Lost By Exertion But Maintained By It, For It Is A Faculty Of The Psyche.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Womanpower Means The Self Determination Of Women, And That Means All The Baggage Of Paternalistic Society Will Have To Be Thrown Overboard.

No Sex Is Better Than Bad Sex.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Compelled Mother Loves Her Child As The Caged Bird Sings. The Song Does Not Justify The Cage Nor The Love The Enforcement.

If The Present Economic Structure Can Change Only By Collapsing, Then It Had Better Collapse As Soon As Possible.

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.

Libraries Are Reservoirs Of Strength, Grace And Wit, Reminders Of Order, Calm And Continuity, Lakes Of Mental Energy, Neither Warm Nor Cold, Light Nor Dark.

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.

Continuing Sexual Interest And Perfect Sexual Adjustment Between Partners Who Have Been Together For Thirty Years Is So Difficult And Rare That No One Should Feel Guilty Or Inadequate For Not Having Managed It.

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

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.

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 Hippie Is The Scion Of Surplus Value. The Dropout Can Only Claim Sanctity In A Society Which Offers Something To Be Dropped Out Of--career, Ambition, Conspicuous Consumption. The Effects Of Hippie Sanctimony Can Only Be Felt In The Context Of Others Who Plunder His Lifestyle For What They Find Good Or Profitable, A Process Known As Rip-off By The Hippie, Who Will Not See How Savagely He Has Pillaged Intricate And Demanding Civilizations For His Own Parodic Lifestyle.

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?

Sex For Many Has Become A Sorry Business, A Mechanical Release Involving Neither Discovery Nor Triumph, Stressing Human Isolation More Dishearte-ingly Than Ever Before.

Soccer Is An Art More Central To Our Culture Than Anything The Arts Council Deigns To Recognize.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sex Is More Fun Than Cars But Cars Refuel Quicker Than Men.

The Surest Guide To The Correctness Of The Path That Women Take Is Joy In The Struggle. Revolution Is The Festival Of The Oppressed.

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.

My Knees Have Always Been Ugly.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Drug Which Makes Sexuality Palatable In Popular Mythology.

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.

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

Pigs May Like Honey, But That Doesn't Stop It Being Sweet.

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.

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

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.

I Grew Up Thinking There Was One Unpardonable Sin – To Be Boring.

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

Loneliness Is Never More Cruel Than When It Is Felt In Close Propinquity With Someone Who Has Ceased To Communicate.

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?

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

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

Our Life-style Contains More Thanatos Than Eros, For Egotism, Exploitation, Deception, Obsession And Addiction Have More Place In Us Than Eroticism, Joy, Generosity And Spontaneity.

Despite A Lifetime Of Service To The Cause Of Sexual Liberation, I Have Never Caught Venereal Disease, Which Makes Me Feel Rather Like An Arctic Explorer Who Has Never Had Frostbite.

At The Same Time As Woman Was Becoming The Showcase For Wealth And Caste, While Men Were Slipping Into Relative Anonymity And "handsome Is As Handsome Does," She Was Emerging As The Central Emblem Of Western Art.

Gender Reassignment Is An Exorcism Of The Mother

I Believe In Permanent Revolution.

Yet If A Woman Never Lets Herself Go, How Will She Ever Know How Far She Might Have Got? If She Never Takes Off Her High-heeled Shoes, How Will She Ever Know How Far She Could Walk Or How Fast She Could Run?

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

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.

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

What We Ought To See In The Agonies Of Puberty Is The Result Of The Conditioning That Maims The Female Personality In Creating The Feminine.

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.

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

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.

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

Nature Herself Is Not Always Unambiguous. Sometimes A Girl Child May Have So Well-developed A Clitoris That It Is Assumed She Is A Boy. Likewise, Many Male Children May Be Underdeveloped, Or Their Genitals Deformed Or Hidden And It Is Assumed That They Are Girls.

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Yusef Komunyakaa

Sholom Aleichem

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