The Female Eunuch

1970, 1972 Bantam edition
Germaine Greer
The Female Eunuch
Original price $1.95, purchase price $1.35
Very worn paperback
C


With thinking as muddled in its own way as Lederer in The Fear of Women, this "pioneering, feminist" work has never been a favorite of mine but only on this, the second or third reading, have I realized why.  There is constant dissonance between how Greer perceives the world, including herself, and how it comes across in the text.  For instance, I can shake my head at quotes from Freud and the unfortunately named Karen Horney on women's minds and bodies, and then a paragraph later shake my head at Greer's take.  Greer thinks she's celebrating women's sexuality, but then she says that concern for the clitoral orgasm over the vaginal orgasm* will lead to women wanting to "score" like men stereotypically do. 

She thinks that men using sheaths (condoms) is regrettable, as is family planning in general, since no one should say they can only afford two children, when that's actually a perfectly reasonable decision.  She criticises birth control more specifically in 1984's Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, which I haven't read beyond quotes in Backlash (coming up in 1991), but it's worth noting that she here seems to have never heard of Margaret Sanger, or any other socialist feminist, since she acts as if the first wave was all genteel ladies in hats and bustles, and "edgier" feminism was an offshoot of '60s left-wing politics.

Often throughout the book I found myself thinking, But that's not what I've observed.  True, I'm almost three decades younger than Greer and have spent most of my life on the West Coast of the U.S., rather than Australia and Britain, so I've seen little of, for instance, wives resenting their husbands going down to the pub to be with their mates.  (If anything, pubs I've gone to and have seen in British movies and television have been for both sexes and sometimes all ages.)  But Greer makes sweeping statements that are based on selective anecdotes.  Her conclusions even within the book are contradictory.  For example, she tells of her horribly abusive mother, and then many pages later claims that wife- or girlfriend-beating is rare and can be avoided if the man just understands that the woman won't put up with it.  If it's that simple, why didn't her father put a stop to her mother hitting their son?

Lederer gets a C rather than a C- because of the wonderful illustrations.  Greer gets a similar promotion because she has a sense of humour, especially in the section on romance novels and comics.  Ironically, she takes those on face value, when anyone who knows much about comic books knows that they're much more complex than they seem (I can't speak to romance novels, not having read enough), while believing that the "insane hyperbole" of Norman Mailer proves he can't be serious.  "The context and the understatement [sic, this is right after she's said "insane hyperbole," so which is it, understatement or overstatement?] ought to give the game away, although feminists like Kate Millett persist in assuming that Mailer is a cretin." 

Millett had published an article in New American Review the previous year, called "Sexual Politics: Miller, Mailer and Genet."  She expanded this into Sexual Politics, which is coming up next.  You only have to read a few pages of Millett to see that she doesn't regard any of those authors (or D. H. Lawrence, whom she also analyzes) as stupid, and in fact says that her point is not that they are inept writers.  Greer is not a cretin either, but she is sloppy and illogical, and her greatest blind spot is she thinks she's the voice of reason.** 

Oddly enough, what Eunuch most reminded me of was Right Turns by Michael Medved, where his very unique life experiences lead him to conclusions that he assumes most people would draw but which don't make sense even for him.  "My parents are non-practicing Jews, and they don't like my wife because she's not Jewish, so after my divorce I think I'll become more religious, and in a conservative way."  And so on, but as I don't own the book, I won't be reviewing it.

Oh, and welcome to the 1970s.  We'll be here a long, crazy while.



*This isn't the place to go into detail on that very dated controversy, but briefly it was a matter in the '60s and '70s of orgasms with a penis inside the vagina vs. orgasms produced by stimulation of the clitoris, as if these are mutually exclusive.  Because I once had an orgasm produced only by the beauty of a forest, I find the whole subject ridiculous.  Greer is right that sexuality is complex, but valuing one way of "getting off" over another is hardly an attitude she's free from.

**Lest I be accused of similar faults, let me state here that this blog is only my take on my book collection, with personal observations on the world mixed in where appropriate.  These are not meticulously thought out book reviews, and I don't expect anyone to agree with me, on the books or the world.  You should be reading the posts to be entertained, and if disagreeing with me is part of your entertainment, that's part of what the Internet is for.  If something I say resonates with you, that's wonderful for you, but I probably will never know.