Life & Mortality Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer isn’t praising women so much as indicting what happens when a culture turns “masculine” in the narrow, political sense: conquest over care, status over survival, domination over continuity. The line lands because it sounds like biology while actually being a theory of power. “Masculine” here is shorthand for a society that has made itself top-heavy with aggression and extraction, the kind of social order that burns through people and resources, then calls the wreckage “strength.”

The provocation hinges on asymmetry. “A society can survive with only one man” invokes the cold arithmetic of reproduction, but it’s also a jab at patriarchal mythology: the idea that male leadership is indispensable. Greer flips that script with a brutal, almost clinical reminder that women have historically been treated as infrastructure - the reproductive, domestic, and social labor that keeps communities coherent. If you squander or control that infrastructure, you don’t just harm individuals; you sabotage the future.

Context matters: Greer emerged from second-wave feminism, when women’s liberation was arguing not merely for rights but for a wholesale revaluation of what counts as “serious” social work. Read alongside wars, demographic panics, and state attempts to police fertility, the quote doubles as a warning: when a society treats women as expendable, it’s telegraphing its own death wish.

The subtext is uncomfortable by design. It weaponizes essentialism to expose a system that has long essentialized women anyway - and dares the listener to admit which kind of “masculinity” their society has started to worship.