If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the wo... — Germaine Greer

If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring.

Author: Germaine Greer

Insight: There's something sharp here about how we let a single metric narrow our entire sense of self-worth. Greer isn't saying the concerns don't matter—she's pointing out how culturally acceptable it's become to organize huge portions of our identity around one number. For men, it's often net worth. For women, it's often the scale. And both can become equally consuming, equally repetitive, equally limiting. The sting is that we rarely notice this happening to ourselves. We swap stories about our latest diet the way people swap investment tips, and it feels natural, productive, even friendly. But listen to the conversation for what it actually is: the same anxious loop, just in different words. The obsession crowds out other ways of thinking about ourselves—what we're learning, how we're connecting, what we're building. What's non-obvious is that Greer's calling both equally tedious. She's not elevating one concern over the other. She's suggesting that when any single measure—money, weight, status, likes—becomes the primary language we speak about ourselves, we've already lost something. The real problem isn't the concern itself. It's the narrowing, the repetition, the way we've agreed to make it the whole conversation.