The Female Eunuch Turns 40
http://www.counterpunch.org/kampmark03192010.html
By BINOY KAMPMARK
March 19 - 21, 2010
If the most successful feminine parasites do not find [The Female
Eunuch] offensive, then it is innocuous. -- Germaine Greer, The
Female Eunuch, 1970
--
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.
Others can't forgive Greer for being an astonishing publicity
machine, one who steps into the limelight with repetitive
predictability. Particularly jarring was that tasteless but
lucrative stint in Celebrity Big Brother, a brief venture that netted
her both income and the usual write-ups. 'Snapped on the set, she
looks like a befuddled and exhausted old woman,' wrote the dismissive
playwright Louis Nowra in the Australian magazine, The Monthly. From
being an unsettling, moving provocateur, Greer had become 'pathetic',
lounging about 'a cheap, often-degrading reality TV show.' Yet those
who condemn Greer for such acts surely never understood her ability
to farm publicity and nurture it for her own ends. Polemics and play
matter above all else.
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[is] 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.
Nowra is not alone in this attack. We need merely go to an issue of
the International Socialist Review in the summer of 1971, featuring
an assessment by an unimpressed Evelyn Reed. For Reed, the
patriarchy was left swooning at The Female Eunuch, but left reeling
from the assault by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, out at the end of
the 1960s. Millett was the militant feminist foot soldier, while
Greer was a mere poseur in ideological drag, 'catering' to men as a
feminist Life Magazine described as 'saucy'. 'Greer,' wrote Reed,
'is a model for those men who want more sex and less politics from
women writers in the feminist movement.' Sally Kempton of the New
York Radical Feminists, writing in the New York Times Book Review
(Apr 25, 1971), found Greer's work brilliantly scripted but
speculative, a 'polemic which is almost completely devoid of policy
proposals for the feminist movement.' The cannibals were already
getting their cutlery ready.
--
Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University,
Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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