The Female Eunuch Turns 40

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/kampmark03192010.html


(Germaine) Greer's Revolutionary Work Savaged, But Still Kicking


Explosive texts tend to get less combustible with time. Calm returns and with it, a degree of disillusionment. What started as unmentionable at first instance becomes palatable and benign. Enraged revolutionaries put down their guns and take up official, often dull positions, wondering if things might have genuinely changed. So, what of Germaine Greer’s feminist spectacular, The Female Eunuch, which turns forty in shops this year?

When it came out, its propositions shook the establishment and dazzled readers. Sex had to be saved from such institutional shackles as monogamy and the enervating nuclear family. ‘If marriage and family depend upon the castration of women let them change or disappear.’ Women had to embrace their humanity in holding out ‘not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.’ Making sex thrive in what Arnold Bennett described as the awful ‘dailiness’ of marriage has been the perennial challenge.

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Nowra’s swipe at Greer is most damning on the issue of women, that most touchy of subjects. And if there is a touchy subject, it is women writing on women, a task that often ends up as a cannibalistic enterprise. Just as war should not be left to generals, Nowra seems to wonder whether Greer should ever have been allowed to be let loose on members of her own sex. Certainly, she should have been prohibited from deeming them ‘castrated’ like eunuchs. The proposition enraged an Australian writer Helen Razer in Crikey (Mar 8): ‘Greer attracts violent spittle of th type not because she is a polemicist, but because she has a cunt.’ But cunt talk is itself dangerous. The line between a vibrant, reflexive feminism, and one that passes into the infirmary, as Camille Paglia so colourfully put it, is a fine one indeed.

The character portrait of Woman, then, is vicious, animated by that ‘demon-figure of the mother’. In The Female Eunuch, we find insecure women, their libido suppressed, their tendencies vicious and destructive. She is on the hunt for the ‘feminine parasites’ lurking within the body of freedom. They were as much the subject of extermination as the most patriarchal of men. Observations by Greer about successful women are given short shrift by Nowra.
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young women of today would do well to read the book

I read it when it first came out and gave it a thumbs up (her other writings need read too)

women of today have little idea of the fights that went on back then.

we didn't give up or back down in getting the freedoms women of today have.

the fight isn't over.

[Warpy]

1. What people don't remember is that these often strident works

were meant to be sensationalistic enough to get people thinking back in the 60s and 70s, and they did that very well.

I loved Greer's work. I loved "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto." There were others, now forgotten, equally shrill and equally thought provoking that I also loved. None of them caused me to abandon my marriage and none of them caused me to get hopped up on weekends and go out to kill anything male. All of them combined to make me the uppity old broad I am today and I'm grateful for them.

I'm also grateful that they all appear dated to younger readers now. It signals that the questions they asked are questions that are now ingrained as part of our culture.