Germaine Greer's book, The Whole Woman bites at the heart of
new feminism. But then she has always taken the high ground.
by Kira Cochrane
It
was dubbed the catfight of the year. Having repeated false
allegations that Germaine Greer had had a hysterectomy, feminist
columnist Suzanne Moore (then working for The Guardian) found
herself the target of a stream of vitriol. "So much
lipstick must rot the brain," thundered Greer, describing
Moore's appearance as, "hair birds-nested all over the
place, fuck-me shoes and three fat layers of cleavage." The
less liberal media were ecstatic, falling on the fight like
hounds. With two of Britain's most prominent feminists waging
verbal warfare the papers crowed that any ideals of sisterhood
had finally been proved a sham.
Four years later in 1999 Greer
was still offering no apology. In fact she stated that,
"the chastisement has done [Moore] nothing but good."
For Suzanne Moore's sake it can only be hoped that this was the
case, since Greer made the comment whilst launching another
attack in her latest book The Whole Woman (due out in paperback
this month). This time Moore wasn't the sole target. Instead
Greer aimed her bile at all the new female writers (including
Natasha Walter and Naomi Wolf) she termed 'lifestyle feminists'.
And what bile it was. Whilst Moore had been hit by an untamed
outburst, The Whole Woman saw Greer meld her words into angry,
coherent, often very persuasive arguments. If Greer's earlier
reprimand had done Moore some good, then her book should have
acted as the new feminism's very own Swiss finishing school.
The Whole Woman was the book
Greer determined never to write, a sequel to her ground-breaking
tract The Female Eunuch (1970), which had mobilised a generation
of women into feminist activism. Some years after its
publication she commented that every era should create its own
manifestos, but publicly recanted this after seeing the products
of late Nineties feminism. Reviewing one example, Natasha
Walter's book The New Feminism, with undisguised horror, she
stated that this, "seems above all to reassure the
faint-hearted that there is nothing to fear from feminism. If
the next generation adopts her brand of unenlightened
complacency there will be nothing to hope for either." This
view of the current generation is reasserted in the introduction
to The Whole Woman. In it she fumes, "When the lifestyle
feminists [claimed] that feminism had gone just far enough in
giving them the right to 'have it all', i.e. money, sex and
fashion, it would have been inexcusable [for me] to stay
silent."
Looking back at The Female Eunuch
and other texts of the period, it's easy to see why Greer feels
betrayed. Hers was the most revolutionary voice of a
revolutionary era, which called for female liberation rather
than equality. As she states in The Whole Woman, the movement
was never about women becoming like men, never about seeing
"the female's potential in terms of the male's
actual". Liberationists weren't just fighting for access to
equal pay (although they wanted the right to work). Instead they
aimed to strip away socially constructed femininity (the nail
varnish, heels, cantilevered bras and repression) and expose the
powerful, uncastrated woman underneath. From this freed female
essence would come new social systems, honouring and celebrating
(financially as well as orally) women's distinct qualities and
work, their true creativity and power. In her manifesto Greer
pushed women to abandon their submissive, strait-jacketed,
deforming femininity. "If you think you are
emancipated," she challenged, "you might consider the
idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick,
you've a long way to go baby." It was a cry that stopped
many women in their tracks. Some later spoke of their lives
being split into two halves, BG and AG: Before Greer and After
Greer.
Throughout this period Greer's
outrageous antics gave her a reputation for leading by example,
particularly on her credo that women should, "consciously
refrain from establishing exclusive dependencies", which
was often read more colloquially as "women should sleep
around". Having escaped a miserable childhood in Melbourne
(described evocatively in her book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You)
Greer had gone to college in Sydney where she mixed with a group
known as 'Push', anarchists who practised non-monogamy. On
arriving in England she kept up the same practice. After her
three-week marriage to Paul Le Feu in 1970 she admitted to seven
counts of adultery. She then posed nude for the underground
magazine Suck and invited readers to, "send us a photograph
of your own c**t with your name labelled on." All this from
a serious English literature graduate student at Cambridge's
all-female college, Newnham. Greer's was a persona that enticed
the media as much as it scared them.
Not that Greer's public profile
was all shock and no substance. Her eloquent, triumphal jousting
match with arch-misogynist Norman Mailer, for instance, (as
captured in the documentary Town, Bloody Hall) brought home just
how brilliant she could be. To this day Greer projects a
compelling, argumentative, evangelical presence, wiping the
floor with opponents on any number of TV programmes.
Given
her stridency, intellect and willingness to offend it is little
wonder that Greer remonstrates the new feminists for complacency
and weakness. Rather than the revolutionary zeal that she
brought to the arena, the current crop of feminists bring polite
pleas for equality and the right to fully collude with
capitalism. In this new era, Margaret Thatcher is described (by
NatashaWalter) as "the great unsung heroine of British
feminism" who "normalised female success." This
about a woman who studiously avoided women's issues during her
term and whose poll tax reforms disenfranchised working class
women even further. The socialist feminism of Greer's
contemporaries, the arguments that all women could benefit from
liberation (with traditionally unpaid women's work, particularly
child-rearing, rewarded fiscally) seem to have been forgotten.
The minimum wage struggles of those who uphold the new
feminists' equality - the cleaners who primp their houses, the
minders who watch their children - are largely ignored. As
journalist Mark Steel lampoons them, "one of the campaigns
which launched the movement was that of night cleaners for
decent pay and union rights. The modern feminist, hearing of a
struggle for night cleaners, would probably say: 'I agree. I
find it a terrible struggle to get one who can stay after half
past seven.'"
Given this regressive situation
it's good to have Greer's angry presence back in the ring. Her
book is an attack that bites at the heart of the new feminism.
Whilst Walter and her contemporary, Helen Wilkinson, are
praising Thatcher, Greer charges the capitalist economy the
ex-PM helped create with debilitating women worldwide. She
writes that the strong, self-sufficient 'whole woman' she
glimpsed years ago in segregated societies (Osage women in
Oklahoma, Anmatyerre women in Central Australia) has been phased
out by the onset of western capitalism. "No sooner had I
caught sight of [her] than western marketing came blaring down
upon her strutting and trumpeting the highly seductive gospel of
salvation according to hipless, wombless, hard-titted Barbie. My
strong women thrust their muscular feet into high heels, they
stuffed their useful breasts into brassieres." She then
uses this example of female suppression to assault those
'popular feminists' who ask only for equality. Defining men as
equally repressed, equally unfree ("masculinity is as
partial an account of maleness as femininity is of
femaleness") she berates the egalitarians. "If
equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of
economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation. Freedom
in an unfree world is merely licence to exploit." There is
no point, she argues, in seeking to compete fairly and equally
within an inherently unfair system, a system designed to profit
the few and cripple the many. The only answer is liberation and
a new start, with a new system.
Having
put the lifestyle feminists in their place, Greer continues The
Whole Woman with a march through a series of contemporary
issues. Touching on topics ranging from shopping to soldiers,
abortion to oestrogen, her chapters vary in quality, but (as
with The Female Eunuch) build to a persuasive, compelling whole,
with a revolutionary flourish that pushes her followers out of
the picture. It's good to see her back on form after a period in
the Nineties when many of the media reports surrounding Greer
were negative. Aside from the Moore incident, there were frantic
stories regarding her attitude to rape and transsexuality. The
first of these surfaced in 1995, when Greer stated that she
herself had been raped at the age of nineteen. In a move that
provoked anger from anti-rape protesters she commented that she
"was more afraid of the rapist's fists and his vicious
mind" than his penis. "In a sense the penis came to my
rescue. Does a man begging for mercy as he is being kicked, feel
any less terror and humiliation than I did ? To insist that
outrage by penis is worse than outrage by any other means is to
glorify and magnify the tag of flesh beyond reason."
Reading these lines out of
context as they were quoted in many news articles it's easy to
see why anti-rape protesters were so furious. Having fought to
establish the significance and emotional brutality of rape for
decades, as well as the need to punish the crime (Greer's rape
went unreported) they saw their work being hammered down.
However, reading Greer's full article on rape, the key point
emerges as relevant and prescient. Explaining it later she
commented that, "A man cannot destroy a woman with his
penis. He cannot do it, I think that is an important feminist
point and it is one I will continue to make." Greer wasn't
trying to re-define rape as trivial, but to break down the myth
of the all-powerful phallic universe. After all, whilst women
were in thrall to the mighty penis, they were unlikely to feel
powerful enough to break free. Greer was making a legitimate
point about female survival.
The media storm that accompanied
her rape article is typical of the tide that sweeps around Greer
when she makes a pronouncement on anything. Since she strode
into the public eye 30 years ago, fox furs flying, she has been
expressing anger and provoking it in equal measure. Although she
is often accused of inconsistency in her arguments, this is
really missing the point. Greer's mind is adversarial and
flexible, seizing on ideas and pitching them in a thousand
directions. She is a die-cast intellectual. We desperately need
her talent to shake up the status quo and push us to test our
own mental elasticity. As she has proved once again with The
Whole Woman, her anger is a national asset.
Germaine Greer is appearing at
The Sallis Benney Theatre, Mar 13, see listings.
copyright New Insight 2000
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