-archy
Posted by admin | Filed under Deep Thoughts
I like having the track “Germaine” from Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother album in random playlists, becuase it’s interesting to juxtapose it against whatever may follow it. It’s a brief spoken segment by Germaine Greer, and it serves as in intro to Sinéad’s album. (It came up twice tonight in my iTunes shuffle, once preceding This Town is Wrong and once preceding The Three Great Stimulants.)
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
— Germaine Greer
I actually frequently quote a part of this out of context, and I feel it’s “only slightly” misrepresentational. It can be hard to explain being a feminist white male, and when I need to reduce it to a sound bite, I cull this sentence:
The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.
— Germaine Greer