Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer is going for the throat of what she sees as England's most polite hypocrisy: a culture that performs heterosexual normalcy while routing its deepest loyalties, admiration, and emotional bandwidth through male-male circuits. "Homosexual" here is less a claim about sex than a deliberately provocative shorthand for homosocial power: the old-boy network, the club, the pub, the Oxbridge tie, the boardroom handshake that matters more than any marriage vow. It’s an insult with a theory inside it.

The line works because it steals a stigmatized label and snaps it onto the supposedly respectable center. Instead of "deviance" being located at the margins, Greer implies the mainstream is the real closed loop: men courting men for status, recognition, and legitimacy, while women are cast as domestic infrastructure. The sly cruelty is that it reframes patriarchy not as men obsessed with women, but as men obsessed with each other, using women as props in a social drama whose audience is other men.

Context matters: Greer emerged in the second-wave feminist moment, when "the personal is political" was a weapon against institutions that hid behind manners. Her provocation also lands in a specifically British landscape of coded intimacy: stoicism in public, tenderness permitted if it’s wrapped in banter, sport, or hierarchy.

The subtext is a dare. If male bonding is the engine of culture, Greer suggests, then equality won’t come from asking men to be nicer to women. It would require dismantling the male-to-male reward system that makes women, at best, an afterthought.