Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch

Twenty years ago I wrote in the Introduction to The Female Eunuch that I thought that the book should quickly date and disappear. I hoped that a new breed of woman would come upon the earth for whom my analysis of sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century would be utterly irrelevant.

Many new breeds of woman are upon the earth: there are female body builders whose pectorals are as hard as any mans; there are women marathon runners with musculature as stringy and tight as any mans; there are women administrators with as much power as any man; there are women paying alimony and women being paid palimoney; there are up-front lesbians demanding the right to marry and have children by artificial insemination; there are men who mutilate themselves and are given passports as statutory females; there are prostitutes who have combined in highly visible professional organizations; there are armed women in the front line of the most powerful armies on earth; there are full colonels with vivid lipstick and painted nails; there are women who write books about their sexual conquests, naming names and describing positions, sizes of members and so forth. None of these female phenomena was to be observed in any numbers twenty years ago.

Womens magazines are now written for grown-ups, and discuss not only pre-marital sex, contraception and abortion, but venereal disease, incest, sexual perversion, and, even more surprising, finance high and low, politics, conservation, animal rights and consumer power. Contraception having saturated its market and severely curtailed the money to be made out of menstruation, the pharmaceutical multinationals have at last turned their attention to the menopausal and post-menopausal women who represent a new, huge, unexploited market for HRT. Geriatric sex can be seen in every television soap opera. What more could women want?

Freedom, thats what.

Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough. Freedom from the uncomfortable clothes that must be worn to titillate. Freedom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push our buttocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude on Page 3. Freedom from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents; freedom from rape, whether it is by being undressed verbally by the men on the building site, spied on as we go about our daily business, stopped, propositioned or followed on the street, greasily teased by our male workmates, pawed by the boss, used sadistically or against our will by the men we love, or violently terrorized and beaten by a stranger, or a gang of strangers.

Twenty years ago it was important to stress the right to sexual expression and far less important to underline a womans right to reject male advances; now it is even more important to stress the right to reject penetration by the male member, the right to safe sex, the right to chastity, the right to defer physical intimacy until there is irrefutable evidence of commitment, because of the appearance on the earth of AIDS. The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, none the less, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality; which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances. The Female Eunuch argues that the rejection of the concept of female libido as merely responsive is essential to female liberation. This is the proposition that was interpreted by the brain-dead hacks of Fleet Street as telling women to go out and do it.

The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it. Freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. Most of the women in the world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten. The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom.

The sudden death of communism in 198990 catapulted poor women the world over into consumer society, where there is no protection for mothers, for the aged, for the disabled, no commitment to health care or education or raising the standard of living for the whole population. In those two years millions of women saw the bottom fall out of their world; though they lost their child support, their pensions, their hospital benefits, their day care, their protected jobs, and the very schools and hospitals where they worked closed down, there was no outcry. They had freedom to speak but no voice. They had freedom to buy essential services with money that they did not have, freedom to indulge in the oldest form of private enterprise, prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to consumerism, or else freedom to starve, freedom to beg.

You can now see the female Eunuch the world over; all the time we thought we were driving her out of our minds and hearts she was spreading herself wherever blue jeans and Coca-Cola may go. Wherever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres and high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp. You can find her triumphant even under the veil.

This book is a part of the second feminist wave. The old suffragettes, who served their prison term and lived on through the years of gradual admission of women into professions which they declined to follow, into parliamentary freedoms which they declined to exercise, into academies which they used more and more as shops where they could take out degrees while waiting to get married, have seen their spirit revive in younger women with a new and vital cast. Mrs Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, leader of the Six Point Group, welcomed the younger militants and even welcomed their sexual frankness. Theyre young, she said to Irma Kurtz, and utterly unsophisticated politically, but theyre full of beans. The membership of our group until recently has been far too old for my liking. After the ecstasy of direct action, the militant ladies of two generations ago settled down to work of consolidation in hosts of small organizations, while the main force of their energy filtered away in post-war retrenchments and the revival of frills, corsets and femininity after the permissive twenties, through the sexual sell of the fifties, ever dwindling, ever more respectable. Evangelism withered into eccentricity.