Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Jealousy, in Greer’s framing, isn’t a lover’s flaw so much as a gendered symptom of how selfhood gets rationed. “Amour propre” is doing loaded work here: it’s not mere vanity, but a socially trained sense of self-worth that demands proof, recognition, and status. Men, she suggests, are jealous because their identity is built to be defended. Their pride is a possession; jealousy is the reflex that guards it.

Women’s jealousy, by contrast, is cast as the anxious politics of scarcity. “Lack of it” implies not that women are naturally deficient, but that they’re denied the cultural scaffolding that produces durable self-regard. If your value is treated as contingent - on youth, desirability, being chosen - jealousy becomes less a personal failing than a rational response to precarity. It’s not that women want what men have; it’s that the rules make them depend on someone else to feel real.

The sharpness of the line is also its provocation: Greer flips a moralizing stereotype (the “jealous woman”) into an indictment of the system that manufactures female insecurity. At the same time, she keeps men on the hook by portraying male jealousy as narcissism in action, not romantic devotion.

Context matters: Greer writes out of second-wave feminism’s impatience with the “personal is private” myth. The quote is a small grenade aimed at heterosexual norms - the idea that jealousy is natural, unavoidable, even flattering. For Greer, it’s not nature. It’s architecture.