The Female Eunuch was published in 1970 when Germaine
Greer was thirty or thirty one. I forget whether I read it at the time, though
I was reading other Second Wave feminist work, and I decided to (re-?) read it
now partly because she is someone who quite a lot of people now hate and want
to No Platform.
The book starts a bit uncertainly as
Greer tries to behave like a proper scientist, adducing and evaluating
evidence. Some of this discussion seems a bit quaint because science has moved
on – for example, DNA testing did not exist in 1970. But it also feels quaint
when it engages the literature which the Discovery of Sex in the 1960s spawned,
a literature in which it is very easy to get lost as it searches, sometimes
blindly, for the location of the female orgasm. Greer has a Queen Victoria
moment when she writes of female ejaculation that it is “utterly fanciful” (page 44). Then the book moves into sections where
I felt that the text was probably being eked out with material from Greer’s
Cambridge doctoral researches. Finally, Greer finds her own voice in the last
hundred pages and lets rip.
A few things struck me. This is a
book about relations between men and women. Lesbians get a few mentions and gay
men barely any (and the ones I noticed were not sympathetic). It’s not Greer’s
scene and she isn’t really very interested. You could say that the whole book
is about Greer’s own dilemmas. She is a heterosexual woman who wants to relate
to men (and probably in the plural rather than the singular) but where the ways
available for doing so are profoundly unattractive, unlike individual men. She
is beautiful, clever, loud and likes relationships and sex - none of which
taken singly may sound particularly off-putting but which offered as a package
seem to have nowhere to go. Beautiful on its own allows you to be some man’s
trophy. Clever on its own allows you to be a blue stocking but after the
experience of Cambridge, No Thank You. Loud is more difficult thanks to polite
society and likewise sex, which doesn’t seem to go with being someone’s wife
and having children. In the last hundred pages, Greer decides that marriage is
the main enemy and comprehensively trashes it. On all fronts, she does
not want to be a eunuch and, to a greater or lesser extent, that is
the deal she feels she is being offered. Why would anyone want to be a eunuch?
You can see where this might later
lead her and I was looking out for signs of attitudes which have made her the
focus of so much anger and it was there in the odd cutting remark.
In 1968-70 I was a graduate student
in London and hung out with second wave feminists who gravitated into things
like the London Women’s Liberation Workshops. They appear at page 349:
When these worthy ladies appeared at
the Miss World Contest with their banners saying “We are not sexual objects” (a
proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were horrified to find
that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting and dancing
around the police…
The parenthesis did make me smile,
for a moment, but immediately it's obvious that it manages to be both a
masculine unchivalrous remark and an unsisterly aside, the offence compounded
by the acid contrast of “worthy ladies” and “girls”. But behind the cutting
remark there is a coherent and worthy intellectual position: Greer is quite
clear that for her feminism is not an Anti-Sex League and that sexual desire
when not corrupted by patriarchy and capitalist advertising is indeed prompted
and sustained by individuals in all their individuality and not by persons as
objects – something she acknowledges in a very nice, single sentence about a
truck driver and his wife:
I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and
clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her
and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a
woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. (page 162)
So you might say she lands herself in
hot water unnecessarily, carried away by irritation and frustration. But if we
made that a No Platform offence, we would not need any platforms at all.
