Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line is designed to sting in two directions at once: it punctures a flattering myth about women’s limitless tolerance while indicting the social machinery that redirects female anger inward. “Women are reputed never to be disgusted” doesn’t read like praise so much as a cultural alibi. If women are imagined as un-disgustable, then men never have to face the consequences of being disgusting; the burden of adjustment quietly falls on women.

The twist is the bleak pivot: women “often are” disgusted, “but not with men.” That’s the subtextual scandal. Disgust, a protective emotion meant to establish boundaries, has been rerouted away from its proper target. Greer frames this as learned behavior: “following the lead of men,” women adopt a male-authored script where the default culprit is the female self. The sentence smuggles in a whole theory of patriarchy’s elegance: it doesn’t only excuse male entitlement; it trains women to police themselves so thoroughly that male behavior rarely needs correction.

Context matters. Greer emerges from second-wave feminism, when consciousness-raising centered on how private feelings (shame, revulsion, self-loathing) are political outcomes. Her provocation is not that women are uniquely self-hating, but that disgust has been weaponized as a disciplinary tool - keeping women busy managing their bodies, desires, and “failures,” rather than directing moral clarity outward.

It works because it’s cruelly diagnostic: the problem isn’t women’s sensitivity; it’s the cultural miseducation that turns a boundary into a mirror.