Greer - The whole woman

RECANTATION

T his 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 thirty years I have done my best to champion all the styles of feminism that came to public attention because I wanted it to be clear that lipstick lesbianism and the prostitutes' union and La Leche and the Women's League for Peace and Freedom and pressure for the ordination of women were aspects of the same struggle towards awareness of oppression and triumph over it. Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been 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. The aim of women's liberation is to do as much for female people as has been done for colonized nations. 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. If femaleness is not to be interpreted as inferiority, it is not to signify anything at all. Even the distinction between the vagina which only women have and the rectum which everybody has has been declared, as it were, unconstitutional. Non-consensual buggery, which can be inflicted on both sexes, has been nonsensically renamed male rape. In June 1998 an overwhelming vote of the British House of Commons recognized the right of sixteen-year-old homosexual men to have sex, by which they meant, apparently, for it was never explained, the right to penetrate and be penetrated anally. This the MPs saw as granting homosexual men the same rights as heterosexuals. For them at least rectum and vagina were equivalent; in many cultures (and increasingly our own) the most desirable vagina is as tight and narrow as a rectum. Post-modernists are proud and pleased that gender now justifies fewer suppositions about an individual than ever before, but for women still wrestling with the same physical realities this new silence about their visceral experiences is the same old rapist's hand clamped across their mouths.

It is invariably the straightest people who speak out against lowering the age of gay consent, paradoxically suggesting that buggery, for a young man, is so bloody enjoyable that just one taste and you're hooked, and women will forever seem to you like pretty small beer.

Julie Burchill

Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete.

In the last thirty years women have come a long, long way; our lives are nobler and richer than they were, but they are also fiendishly difficult. From the beginning feminists have been aware that the causes of female suffering can be grouped under the heading contradictory expectations. The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. 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 organization or knuckle under to it? Is she supposed to endure harassment or kick ass and take names? Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? 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