Whole Woman - Softcover

"IT'S TIME TO GET ANGRY AGAIN"

This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write. I believed that each generation should produce its own statement of problems and priorities, and that I had no special authority or vocation to speak on behalf of women of any but my own age, class, background and education.

For 30 years, I have done my best to champion all the styles of feminism that came to public attention. Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was troubled by some of the more fundamental conflicts, it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.

When the lifestyle feminists chimed in 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 to remain silent.

In 1970, the movement was called "women's liberation" or, contemptuously, "Women's Lib." When the name "libbers" was dropped for "feminists," we were all relieved. What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality.

Liberation struggles are not about assimilation, but about asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination.

Women's liberation did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.

Seekers after equality clamoured to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts. Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women's lives could be like if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate.

The Female Eunuch was one feminist text that did not argue for equality. At a debate in Oxford, one William J. Clinton heard me arguing that equality legislation could not give me the right to have broad hips or hairy thighs, to be at ease in my woman's body.

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women--and has become an option for men--while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

In the last 30 years, women have come a long, long way; our lives are nobler and richer than they were, but they are also fiendishly difficult.

The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man, or like herself. Is she supposed to change the organisation, or knuckle under to it? Is she supposed to endure harassment, or kick ass and take names? Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment?

It is now understood that women can do anything that men can do: anyone who tries to stop them will be breaking the law. Even the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, can be called to account by a female nobody who accuses him of asking her to fellate him.

Power indeed! The future is female, we are told. Feminism has served its purpose and should now eff off. Feminism was long hair, dungarees and dangling earrings; post-feminism was business suits, big hair and lipstick; post-post-feminism was ostentatious sluttishness and disorderly behaviour.

We all agree that women should have equal pay for equal work, be equal before the law, do no more housework than men do, spend no more time with children than men do. Or do we? If the future is men and women dwelling as images of each other in a world unchanged, it is a nightmare.

In The Female Eunuch, I argued that every girl child is conceived as a whole woman but, from the time of her birth to her death, she is progressively disabled. A woman's first duty to herself is to survive this process, then to recognise it, then to take measures to defend herself against it.

For years after The Female Eunuch was written, I travelled the earth to see if I could glimpse a surviving whole woman. She would be a woman who did not exist to embody male sexual fantasies or rely upon a man to endow her with identity and social status; a woman who did not have to be beautiful, who could be clever, who would grow in authority as she aged.

I gazed at women in segregated societies and found them in many ways stronger than women who would not go into a theatre or a restaurant without a man. Osage women in Oklahoma, and Anmatyerre and Pitjantjatara women in Central Australia, taught me about survival.

No sooner had I caught sight of the whole woman than western marketing came blaring down upon her with its vast panoply of spectacular effects, 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 and learned to totter; they stuffed their useful breasts into brassieres and, instead of mothers' milk, fed commercial formulae made up with dirty water to their children; they spent their tiny store of cash on lipstick and nail varnish, and were made modern. While western feminists were valiantly contending for a key to the executive washroom, the feminine stereotype was completing her conquest of the world.

This insidious process was floated on the lie of the sexual revolution. Along with spurious equality and flirty femininity, we were sold sexual "freedom." One man's sexual freedom is another man's--or woman's or child's--sexual thraldom.

In February 1997, a National Opinion Poll found that "nearly seven out of 10 women feel political parties do not pay sufficient attention to issues of importance to women." These women would not answer to the description of feminist, but if feminism is the consciousness of women's oppression, they were not afraid to display it.

Even now, women may enter political institutions only after those institutions have formed them in the institutional mould; the more female politicians a parliament may boast, the less likely it is to address women's issues.

Prime Minister Blair has less trouble keeping his party under an unprecedented degree of central control because so many of the Labour MPs are inexperienced, young and female. A male Labour MP called them the Stepford Wives "with a chip inserted in their brain to keep them on message"; the media call them "Blair's babes."

Few of the silly rituals of the House have been abolished, nor has the parliamentary timetable been modified. After a year in the rowdy bear-garden that is the British House of Commons, and many weeks without seeing their families for more than a few minutes at a time, the new women MPs were reporting levels of stress approaching the unbearable.

Changes in British legislation have been slow and tentative, commitment to the economic enfranchisement of women more apparent than real. A woman is now slightly more likely to find a job than a man, entirely because of the restructuring of the job market in the employer's favour.

The workers who will accept a zero-hours contract, which means that they are only called upon if business is brisk and then paid an hourly rate, who will carry pagers and mobile phones and be at the employer's beck and call 24 hours a day, who take work home every night, who have no job protection or guarantee of safe and hygienic conditions or insurance against work-related injury, are women.

Prestige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rock-bottom; medicine is sliding fast.

Though they are close to parity in numbers, the total earned by British women is only 60 percent of what men earn; their pay hour by hour is 79 pence for every pound earned by a man.

The differential between women's pay and men's pay has now been enshrined. A woman who brings a case before an employment tribunal will wait for years before a decision will be reached; a decision in a single case is simply that. British equal pay legislation is legislation meant to be ineffective, designed to be ineffective.

Women are discriminated against by building societies, who treat maternity leave as long-term sick leave and will not lend to couples with both partners in work if the woman is pregnant. Women pay 50 percent more for medical insurance.

Women are the stomping ground of medical technology, routinely monitored, screened and tortured, to no purpose except the enactment of control. They have been punished for their acquisition of a modicum of economic independence by being left with virtually total responsibility for the welfare of children, while gangs of professionals perpetually assess and record their inadequacies. Idealisation of the mother has been driven out by criminalisation of the mother.

Our culture is far more masculinist than it was thirty years ago. Movies deal with male obsessions. Soccer is Britain's most significant cultural activity. Computer use is spreading into every home, but more than 80 percent of Internet users are male.

Women are ignored by manufacturers of video games, which are mostly war games of one sort or another. Popular music is split as never before; the consumers of commercial pop are female; the rock music that appeals to men is deliberately, unbelievably and outrageously misogynist. While women were struggling to live as responsible dignified adults, men have retreated into extravagantly masculinist fantasies and behaviours.

Every day, terrible revenges are enacted on women who have dared to use their new privileges. Female military recruits are sexually abused and harassed, young policewomen subjected to degrading ordeals, and hideous brutality inflicted on women apparently simply because they are female.

On every side, we see women troubled, exhausted, lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few. The reality of women's lives is work--most of it unpaid and, what is worse, unappreciated. Every day, we hear of women abused; every day, we hear of new kinds of atrocities perpetrated on the minds and bodies of women; yet every day, we are told that there is nothing left to fight for.

Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking.

When The Female Eunuch was written, our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side, speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners.

It's time to get angry again.                                

GREER ON ADULTERY

It seems there is never any shortage of women who will commit adultery with married men, and that even women who call themselves feminist are perfectly willing to marry a man who has already rendered a wife or two acutely miserable.

Women are all too ready still to accept a man's view of his relations with women, and to understand men whose wives, with much longer and closer experience, don't understand them.

When women are ready to believe that a man's saying "My wife doesn't understand me" means "I behave unreasonably towards my wife," feminism will have got to first base.

One wife is all any man deserves.

GREER ON THE TYRANNY OF HOUSEWORK

By the millennium, housework should have been abolished. In a sane world, meaningless repetition of non-productive activity would be seen to be a variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

People who said that they enjoyed doing housework, or needed to do it, or that doing it made them feel good would be known as addicts. Once the word got out that a person was cleaning her toilet every day, therapists would come to her house and reclaim her for rationality and the pleasure principle.

Instead, we have Professor Jean-Claude Kaufman of the Sorbonne telling us that housework is a deeply sensual experience--for women, that is, not for himself. Women do menial work because it turns them on; it doesn't turn men on, therefore they should not be expected to do it.

Strange, isn't it, how much men know about sensations they have never had?

Kaufman knows a woman in whom dish-washing produces explosions of joy. According to him, rhythmic, repetitive, mindless tasks function as sexual anticipation, building up pleasurable tension until it climaxes in conjugal relations. Faking it in bed has clearly not been enough; now women are having to fake sexual arousal even when they are cleaning the toilet.

These days, housework doesn't just use people; it requires a gang of machines: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dishwashers, driers, food processors, microwave ovens, refrigerators and freezers, immense quantities of water, power and detergent to feed into them, and an army of technicians who treat them when they malfunction--and charge more than doctors do for a home visit.

Though the houseworker doesn't now scrub and polish floors or pound clothes on a washboard or put aside an evening for ironing, she is equally busy Hoovering, spraying-and-wiping and stuffing clothes in washing machines. As more and more home appliances have appeared in more and more homes, they have brought anything but increased leisure for the houseworker (who probably also has to earn the money to pay for them).

Changing standards and notions of cleanliness have made cleaning more time-consuming than ever before. Kitchen worktops need to be constantly wiped; kitchen floors need to be mopped whenever a footprint or a pawprint appears; the bath has to be cleaned between baths; once a day is not often enough for the toilet.

Every few minutes, a television commercial illustrates the standard and shows a way of achieving it, tightening the headlock on the "housewife." A recent television commercial for Bold laundry detergent opened with a mid-shot of a slender, good-looking, but not too good-looking, woman.

A door opens behind her and a schoolboy rushes in. "Hi, Darren," she says. He does not answer. She answers herself, "Hi, Mum." Darren enters bedroom, looks surprised.

She says, "Thanks for tidying my room, Mum." He rips off his school shirt, grabs a fresh shirt from neatly folded pile (the inference being that he is immediately going out again). As the neatly ironed shirt billows out, a special effect signifies the effects of Bold.

Mum says, "Thanks for washing my shirt, Mum." No response. Then she says, "I know you appreciate me, really." Darren smirks at himself in mirror, like any snotnose git with a doormat mother.

This commercial would have been shown to a focus group of "housewives" at the story-board stage, and again before it was transmitted. They must have responded positively to this version of doting motherhood as the train...

Thirty years after the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer is back with the sequel she vowed never to write.

"A marvelous performance--. No feminist writer can match her for eloquence or energy; none makes [us] laugh the way she does."--The Washington Post

In this thoroughly engaging new book, the fervent, rollicking, straight-shooting Greer, is, as ever, "the ultimate agent provocateur" (Mirabella).  With passionate rhetoric, outrageous humor, and the authority of a lifetime of thought and observation, she trains a sharp eye on the issues women face at the turn of the century.

From the workplace to the kitchen, from the supermarket to the bedroom, Greer exposes the innumerable forms of insidious discrimination and exploitation that continue to plague women around the globe.  She mordantly attacks "lifestyle feminists" who blithely believe they can have it all, and argues for a fuller, more organic idea of womanhood.  Whether it's liposuction or abortion, Barbie or Lady Diana, housework or sex work, Greer always has an opinion, and as one of the most brilliant, glamorous, and dynamic feminists of all time, her opinions matter.  For anyone interested in the future of womanhood, The Whole Woman is a must-read.