[3 articles]
The Female Eunuch 40 years on
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/oct/27/female-eunuch-40-years-on
Germaine Greer's ferocious polemic remains an inspiration, but should
not be read as holy writ
by Laurie Penny
27 October 2010
Forty years ago this month, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was
published and women's liberation would never be quite the same
again. Generations of feminists have been inspired by Greer's
belligerent, bile-spattered dialectic of rebellion, a 400-page brick
slammed through the screen of male entitlement and female submission.
At the age of 12, I was one of her youngest devotees, and although
today I take issue with many of her conclusions, the book still
thrills me to the core on each rereading.
I spotted a worn copy of The Female Eunuch on my mother's shelf in
1999, and something about the savage cover, showing a hollow female
torso with handles hanging from a clothes-rail, seemed to whisper a
wealth of dangerous secrets. Like a grimoire in a fairytale, I felt
drawn to the book, somehow compelled by it. Leafing through the
yellowing pages I realised, with the righteous rage that only a
preteen can summon, that I had been lied to. There were other ways of
looking at the world. There was more to sex than the sterile,
ritualised commercial play my classmates were already rehearsing,
more to femininity than the smiling servitude that made my mother and
grandmother so unhappy. In later life, I would come to understand
this process as consciousness-raising; at the time, it felt like a
striplight had been switched on in my mind.
Being a conscientious kid, I immediately got out my best pens to
write a letter to Germaine Greer telling her so. Two months later, a
package came through the door, containing a postcard with a pair of
friendly-looking koalas on it. She had replied! I was in raptures,
and vowed to devote my life to feminism. Like any earnest
prepubescent convert, I took my devotional text extremely literally.
Greer advised all women to taste their menstrual blood in order to
combat genital horror so when my first period arrived, I dutifully
did so. It was salty and sour, but not shameful.
Reading The Female Eunuch as a child in the perky "post-feminist"
years of Blair's Babes and Girl Power, I thought I was the only girl
alive who still believed there could be more to womanhood than
wearing a great dress and smiling for the camera. Well almost the only one.
In 2001, on a sweltering, sticky coach trip with the local youth
orchestra, I was fumbling in my rucksack for a packet of Wotsits when
my copy of Greer's book fell out and skidded under the seats. As I
scrambled nauseously on the shaky coach floor, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
"Here's your book," said a girl behind me. "Um, are you a feminist?"
she said. "I am too. I thought there weren't any others our age."
From that moment on, she and I were inseparable. We spent two heady
summers sharing secrets, plotting to overthrow patriarchy and holding
hands shyly whilst listening to riot grrrl punk on a shared Walkman.
By Greer's standards, we were hardly daring, man-eating sexual
revolutionaries, but we wanted to change the world as only teenagers
can. Now that I'm grown up, with my own book coming out next year, I
know that to create an honest, adult politics of change, one must
first interrogate one's idols.
Of course, there are problems. As a child, I thought The Female
Eunuch had been written just for me and as it was targeted at
bourgeois, well-educated white women living in rich western
countries, it practically had. Unlike many middle-class feminists,
Greer never claimed to speak for anyone who did not share her
background. Unfortunately, the more time I spend with feminist
activists, the more I wish she had at least tried. Had strident,
second-wave, sex-positive feminism like that espoused in The Female
Eunuch been more inclusively phrased, the ghettoisation that still
dogs contemporary women's activism might have been avoided.
Another uncomfortable failing of the text is Greer's savage attack on
transsexual women. Greer has long led the radical feminist charge
against trans women, whom she labels "castrates", fifth columnists
mocking real women and invading female space. This is an ugly
untruth, and has directly influenced the bitter, childish rows over
the status of trans women that still scar the modern feminist
movement. Just recently, an angry debate has erupted yet again over
whether or not trans women will be welcome at the annual Reclaim the
Night march against sexual violence, threatening solidarity among the
new generation of activists.
As a child, The Female Eunuch was my bible, but if feminism is to
remain a living, breathing, vital movement, we cannot afford to have
sacred texts. It is vital that every cohort of feminists remains in a
dialogue with its antecedents. Germaine Greer's rage and
revolutionary energy resonate across four decades of feminist
activism but we can still question our foremothers, and we should.
--------
The Female Eunuch -- 40 years on
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-female-eunuch-40-years-on-2409839.html
In the week Stephen Fry incited the rage of feminists across the
globe, edel Coffey revisits Germaine Greer's seminal text
November 06 2010
It seemed fitting that Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch should turn
40 the week before Stephen Fry accused women of not liking sex.
Surprisingly, Greer and Fry share some beliefs on the subject.
Fry said: "Sex is the price women are willing to pay for a
relationship with a man", while in The Female Eunuch, Greer suggested
that romance was the pay-off women took for prostitution and monogamy.
"Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and
cajolery are fools," she said. "It is slavery, to have to adopt such tactics."
As the seminal text of its time, The Female Eunuch should feel
outdated -- but it doesn't. In fact, it is startling how easily it
can be applied to modern life. When Greer writes of unequal pay and
small numbers of women in parliament, it's an unhappy feeling to know
that the same is still true four decades on, despite the fact that
equality laws have been passed in the intervening years.
Greer originally hoped that The Female Eunuch would date quickly and
become irrelevant to the next generation of women, as sexism melted
away, women stopped loathing their bodies, stopped sublimating their
desires in ill-fitting relationships and stopped conforming to
societal expectations of what it was to be a woman.
Forty years on, it remains relevant. Take this from the chapter
'Hair': "While they built up the hair on their heads and festooned
their eyelashes they were resolutely stripping off every blade of
hair on their armpits and on their arms and legs . . . In extreme
cases, women shave or pluck their pubic area so as to seem even more
sexless and infantile."
Greer is referring to her 1970 peers but she could be talking about
modern women, or the contestants of the X Factor who can hardly be
recognised beneath their piles of fake hair and eyelashes.
Greer's description of the fatuousness of female adornment feels
searingly current.
"The sun shines only to burnish her skin," she begins, before quickly
descending into: "Baby seals are battered with staves, unborn lambs
ripped from their mothers' wombs, millions of moles, muskrats,
squirrels, minks, ermines, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, ocelots,
lynxes and other small and lovely creatures die untimely deaths that
she might have furs" and "millions of silkworms offer her their
yellow labours". And on it goes.
The basic argument of The Female Eunuch was a woman's right to
express her sexuality, which Greer claimed was suppressed from birth
through social conditioning.
When it was first published in 1970, Greer was a 31-year-old
academic, transplanted from her native Melbourne via Sydney to the
hallowed world of Cambridge. She was a force to be reckoned with --
her six-foot frame, her caustic outrage and her love of bad language
(including the c-word).
The book became an international bestseller that women hid from their
husbands and wrapped in brown paper to conceal its explosive
contents. It was propelled by her eloquent anger. She described women
as castrates or eunuchs, conditioned to be "cut off from their
capacity for action".
The Female Eunuch was a comprehensive guide to every aspect of
femininity and how it had been conditioned by society, from the
chromosomal differences of gender through our skeletal composition
and the effects on it of unnatural fashions.
It romped through boobs, bums, underarm hair, bodily odours, sex,
genitalia, the clitoris, reproduction, the "wicked womb" as the
source of all evil female ailments and the discouraging of young
girls to explore themselves.
Greer was following in the footsteps of a long line of firebrand
women. In the late 18th century Mary Wollstencroft wrote A
Vindication of The Rights Of Women, lobbying for access for women to
education and work.
Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own spoke of the importance of
financial and physical independence to a woman's contentment, while
in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, which noted how
every aspect of a woman's behaviour was a social construct.
The Female Eunuch was a landmark book in the women's rights movement,
kick-starting the second wave, but it had as much to do with Greer's
irreverent persona as the actual content of the book.
Forty years on, Greer seems to have practised what she preached,
which for the most part was to resist conforming to social pressures
and society's expectation of what a woman should be.
She has never quite conformed. She was raised in Melbourne by a
mother she described as "really weird". Schooled by nuns who awakened
her academic curiosity, she moved to Sydney at 20, where she got
involved with a radical group that rejected monogamy, before going to
Cambridge University to complete her doctorate.
There she delighted and appalled, as she ignored protocol and would
not be hushed from discussing bras and "tits" and much in between.
She has always caused controversy. She wrote a book saying her native
Australia didn't care about Aborigines and much later wrote another
admiring the young male form. She has never mellowed.
She appeared naked in Playboy and was arrested in New Zealand when
she said the word "bullshit" during a speech. She was married for the
princely period of three weeks before getting a divorce.
But Greer was not always an impressive firebrand. The late Nuala
O'Faolain expressed disappointment after a lecture in the 1990s.
"I was hoping to be inspired by her vision of new access to vitality
around the age of 50. The lecture theatre was packed with women just
as eager as I was, I presume, to listen to someone who spoke to our
biological and cultural condition.
But she chose, as prima donnas do, to confound expectation. She gave
a rather dull academic talk. I want a more plausible prophet. I want
to believe that old age is not to be dreaded."
These days, Greer spends her time as an academic, journalist and
independent publisher of female poets. She lives in Essex with her
dogs, geese and doves.
In a revised foreword to The Female Eunuch, written 20 years ago,
Greer said that, since the book was first published, women have
achieved everything but freedom.
"Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person
looking back. Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty
of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast
ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough.
"Freedom from the uncomfortable clothes that must be worn to
titillate. Freedom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push
our buttocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude
on Page 3."
She finishes by saying: "You can now see the female eunuch the world
over . . . wherever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres and
high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp. You can find her
triumphant even under the veil."
Re-reading the book on its 40th anniversary only serves to highlight
how little has changed.
--------
Female Eunuch's gift to men
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/ian-bell/female-eunuch-s-gift-to-men-1.1064866
31 Oct 2010
by Ian Bell
There are, it turns out, 23,000 protein-encoding genes in the laploid
human genome, but only 78 of them separate men from women.
Forty years ago, no-one knew this.
In 2009, for no reason known to genetic science, there was a 16.4%
disparity in the mean full-time earnings of men and women. On
average, the former were getting £12.97 an hour, the latter, £11.39.
This counted as an improvement. Forty years ago, most people would
have wondered why the fact was worth mentioning.
Four decades ago, in fact, more attention was being paid to a group
identified by the Daily Mail as "yelling harpies". In November, they
were throwing flour bombs and leaflets around in the Royal Albert
Hall, and heckling the venerated Bob Hope. A TV audience of 24
million tuning in for Miss World wondered what they were on about.
That year the Equal Pay Act but see above had just been passed,
though it did not limp into law until the end of 1975. David Steel's
Abortion Act had been in force for barely two years. England's
Divorce Reform Act was still moving through the Westminster system,
with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (the province "allowing"
divorce at last) to follow.
The contraceptive pill, in contrast, had been a miracle of the age
for all of nine years. By 1970, even unmarried women were granted its
use, despite claims that civilisation's end was hastened thereby.
Others called "the Pill" liberation.
Forty years on, the National Centre for Social Research reports that
the proportion of women aged 16 to 64 with "common mental disorders"
increased from 19.1% in 1993 to 21.5% in 2007. The largest increase
has been among women aged between 45 and 64. The rate in men has not
altered, say the researchers, "significantly".
A spokeswoman for the mental health charity Mind suggests that one
reason for the increase among middle-aged women "could be the heavy
burden they face as primary carers. Having children later in life
means today's women in their 40s and 50s face numerous
responsibilities, such as caring for elderly relatives, looking after
young children or teenagers, and managing a full-time career". It is,
says the spokeswoman, "very stressful".
Forty years after the unpleasantness in the Albert Hall,
nevertheless, the Fawcett Society claims that two-thirds of the
500,000 people about to lose their jobs in the Coalition's cuts will
be women. Ceri Goddard, the society's chief executive, reminds us
that 65% of public sector workers are women, and that they dominate
if that's the word "low-paid, low-grade and insecure work".
Forty years ago, just before the harpies began to yell, a book had
been published. Its Australian author promised which is to say
promised and demanded "a revolution" in the allocation of such
gender roles. She was angry and funny, sometimes, as she ranged far
and wide over traditional notions of female "normality", the tyranny
of the nuclear family, men's creative way with stereotypes, and the
neutering of women shaped for self-hatred. The Female Eunuch was a big success.
In fact, added to its colossal sales figures was a series of
back-handed (as it were) compliments. As 1970 became 1971, tales were
rife of men demonstrating Germaine Greer's point by "forbidding"
their wives to read her terrible book. Just as common were the people
wondering seriously whether such husbands had the right to protect
women from themselves. The rows were awful, the positions entrenched.
The world was being turned upside down.
Men were nervous, even fearful. Men were, in that newly-arrived word,
insecure. The endless dire, spiteful sit-com jokes told most of the
book's story. For some, though, it wasn't even half funny. In an era
in which the most stubborn enemies of equal pay were male workers, in
which rape was attributed to women's folly and politics remained a
male preserve, Germaine Greer's challenge, feminism's challenge, was explicit.
Forty years after the fact you can ask: what of it? Feminism is on
its "third wave", is it not? Sexual politics is part of the language.
No-one defends the failure to achieve equality, not publicly, but
no-one says that women should get back to the kitchen or any other
"natural", "nurturing" role if they have no interest in kitchens.
The consensus, roughly speaking, is that there is still a long way to
go, but that a lot has been achieved. Two and a bit cheers, then, for
Professor Greer?
Perhaps. If nothing else, she forced an argument. Hers was the right
book in the right place at the right time: no doubt about that. The
thing about traditional sexism another addition to the lexicon
was not its brutal intent, after all, but its assumed good
intentions. Women were treated the way they were treated, in all
seriousness, "for their own good". Men who failed this chivalric test
were despised.
But what transpired? On the face of it, society has been changed
utterly. Yet society, full of noble intentions, also harbours all
those niggling little failures of reform. Equality isn't complicated.
It takes no effort to do the sums for pay and employment. The
researchers can establish the cold facts in all aspects of health,
wealth and prospects. Four decades is long enough, you might have
thought, for any revolution. And yet the failures persist.
This suggests that most men and more than a few women have not
been transformed, exactly. Think only of common reactions to the word
"feminism". For some it's the same joke it always was, especially in
this porn-saturated age of the lads' mag and the Wag. For others, in
all apparent seriousness, it's superfluous. Women may face the odd
difficulty, but liberation is no longer required or, they say,
desired. Instead, we whoever we might be should lay off men.
In the 1970s they could and did oppose equal pay because they thought
it threatened their status as breadwinners. They could rage over
Greer's book because they believed it threatened their marriages, and
their "rights" in marriage. They could tell those cheesy jokes about
dykes, dungarees and haircuts in part because one sort of radical
feminist made the jokes easy, but mostly because an attack on a few
women might just shut up all women. Then the world could return to
the state Greer mocked as "normal".
In the 1970s there were plenty of ways to oppose the ideas contained
in The Female Eunuch. You could say I did that socialism would
make feminism unnecessary. You could object I still would to the
idea that anyone who did not accept the Greer analysis wholesale was
convicted out of his own mouth. But if men were uneasy, as they
certainly were, it was less because they feared for their many
privileges than because they feared a simple, fundamental question.
Why should equality ever be a problem?
They, we, couldn't answer that, and still can't. There is no good
answer. Mockery of feminism never did the trick, nor did scripture,
tradition, female complicity, or the appeal to vague notions of
innate difference or "instinct" that always turned out to be
self-serving. Men knew as much in 1970, and they know it still.
Not that any of this excuses Greer for being a self-advertising old
bore with daft theories about Mrs Shakespeare, you understand. But
that's her right.
.
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