Germaine Greer Quotes

Our society is constantly creating this framework for girls to feel that their only worth is their appearance, and it's damaging on so many levels to so many people.

We're always bombarded with images from magazines of what looks cool and sexy.

It's everywhere, constant criticism of women's appearance in magazines and online. It's not easy to navigate.

For girls growing up, sometimes I think they get the wrong idea for what women should look like.

With women, the way they look... it's the core of their self-esteem.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

So many girls only care about guys and looking good all the time.

I hate big models.

I don't agree with beauty contests. I did it one time. It wasn't embarrassing being Wonder Woman; it was embarrassing walking around on stage in a bikini. It was ridiculous, stupid, and humiliating.

A lot of those good-looking girl parts aren't very fun.

There's a lot of amazing women out there. There's a lot of hot models. But models are the worst, because they're models, you have to always step up and always look good.

I often feel like a character actress trapped inside the mean, aging Barbie's body.

Just like any other girl, I felt pressure to look a certain way. Act a certain way.

I think society is so hard on young women. Growing up, the images that I saw, the standards that I had to live up to in terms of how I looked and how I fit into my social groups - it was a lot of pressure.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being 18 years old on the cover of Maxim magazine.

I know I'm not a woman's fantasy man; I don't have to uphold this image of male beauty, so that's kind of a relief in a way.

A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.

American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.

It's sad that people listen to music and decide how the singer should look.

I think it will be helpful to people because I know the expectations that are put on you as a sex symbol, and how Marilyn Monroe suffered and so on, and I was able to get free of that.

I hate being too pretty.

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?

If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.

So many images are saying to girls, 'Show a lot of skin and look gorgeous and sexy.'

It kind of cracks me up when people say I'm hot because I just think that that's a term that I don't have to deal with anymore.