Misunderstanding The Female Eunuch
In the long stretches of a pre-internet childhood you would occasionally be driven by boredom or scarcity to try something off-beam. Which is how, at the age of 11 in 1982, I came to read The Female Eunuch (1970). I had found it on my mother’s bookshelf and was fascinated by the cover: a woman’s naked torso, empty and limbless, hanging from a pole. My mother shrugged, and said ‘why not?’
I found most of it baffling. Housewives on Valium, temporary secretaries with no career progression, clitoral orgasms; barely any of it made any sense to me. I persisted, though, because a lot of it was about sex, and because every now and then a sentence would hit you between the eyes: a sentence like ‘No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse collar.’ It was the first time I’d come across the word ‘twat’, but I was a studious type and could work out its meaning from the context.
I began to feel towards an idea: are big twats… bad? Why? Is it like big bums? I already knew that big bums were bad; early ’80s imagery was lousy with thonged lycra leotards and teeny exposed bums. I felt deeply embarrassed about my own. Actually, more than embarrassed, I felt apologetic. I was miserable about the distress that my arse must be causing to passers-by, as though it were a pile of vomit, or a pneumatic drill.
I had thought big bums were bad because they were visible, like dandruff or pimples, but if big twats were bad too then that couldn’t be the explanation. Most people saw no trace of your twat. It didn’t push out your skirt or hang low in your jeans or escape your swimming costume. There was no way it could upset your neighbours. Even I – a girl, at an all-girls school, with an exclusively female friendship group – had no idea how big other girls’ twats were. Reading this passage in Eunuch prompted me to realise that it was about sexuality and power: or, to put it another way, the problem was the bigness, not the bum. Women had to be tiny so that men could be huge. It was a trap.
I’ve read hundreds of feminist commentaries about body image since, but Greer’s is the only one that lodged itself in my memory like a song lyric. It didn’t cure my self-loathing, but it did make me analyse it. In the middle of early ’90s lad culture, when I shoved and yelled at a small-time rock star who groped my bum while commenting on its size, I did it because of Germaine.
And so, when I pulled the 1993 reissue of Eunuch off my shelf recently to re-read it for the first time in nearly 40 years, I was expecting an entertaining comfort read. I was expecting to recognise and congratulate myself: we’ve achieved this and this and this, tick tick tick. Instead, the experience was alienating and uncomfortable. This is partly because it’s so deeply of its time: it’s filled with mystical noodlings about self-actualisation, neuroticism, archetypes (‘The Ultra-Feminine’, ‘The Powerful Computer’), and exhortations to let your essential energy flow freely. I hadn’t really thought of Eunuch as a product of the ’60s but of course it is; in parts it’s like stumbling through a bead curtain into the back room of a head shop.
If you needed any further reminders that 1970 was a different universe, astonishing data points are scattered throughout the text. The proportion of Westminster MPs who were women was 4%; it had hovered at around that level throughout the ’60s. Women in administrative roles earned £12 per week compared to £28 for men. Of the 9 million women in employment in the UK, 5% were in professional fields. Three times as many girls as boys left school at 15; one third of A-level students and one quarter of university students were women. A married woman's wages were considered to be part of her husband’s income and were taxed at his rate, meaning that married women with jobs had almost no net wages to put in the bank accounts that they needed their husbands’ consent to open.
To be female was to have your head held under water. The oppression was all-encompassing, almost literally totalitarian; it was equally powerful at work (which you were expected to leave when you got married) and at home (where your husband could legally rape you), on the television (where women were mindless dolly birds) and in the pub (where you might not be allowed to stand at the bar). Climbing out of the sea you swim in, seeing the things around you and analysing them at length is an act of genius in any age, and Greer’s perception, clarity and total absence of fear – her intellect and her ego – make her writing thrilling. The bit that everyone knows from The Female Eunuch – ‘women have very little idea how much men hate them’ – is still laconically explosive after all these years.
But I came away from my re-read of Eunuch realising she would hate me, too. She is fond of men, but she’s furious with women. They are fools and drabs, servile and conformist, cringing and credulous; unlike her they have not been clever and special enough to think their way out of the trap. Her 1995 rant about Suzanne Moore (‘hair bird’s-nested all over the place and fuck-me shoes’) is foreshadowed by her attitude towards the wives of her academic colleagues (‘I have to tolerate the antics of faculty wives, but they are fairly easy to ignore’) and the groundbreaking Labour politician Barbara Castle, whom she singles out for ‘the deep unattractiveness of [her] seamed face’.
Greer unleashes this bitchiness (I’m sorry, but there really isn’t a better word for it) on Castle because - well, because she’s a bitch and she disdains self-censorship; but she believes she is justified because Castle was a believer in gradual, democratically mandated reform. One of the big reveals, re-reading Eunuch, is its Marxism: capitalism must be overthrown before women can be free, and Greer reserves her greatest contempt for leftist women who work within the system: splitters! Castle gave us the Equal Pay Act, Carers’ Allowance and compulsory seatbelts, and there’s not much more infuriating for a communist than an effective Labour cabinet minister.
The Female Eunuch has nothing but contempt for women who are largely content with their spouses, homes, jobs and kids, but would like their lives to be a bit easier and a bit less punctuated by abuse. In its yearning for a literal revolution, its dreamy invocation of a post-capitalist utopia, its belief that the nuclear family is a tool of oppression and its contempt for the workaday concerns of female drones - better maternity leave, ugh - Eunuch is not so much a feminist manifesto as a libertarian one. (Greer has been rejected by modern intersectional feminists because of her stance on trans women, but many of her positions precisely prefigured the contemporary radical left.) Her writing shakes with loathing when she addresses motherhood; the vulnerability and interdependency of infants and their caregivers cannot be slotted in to her ideal society, which is basically an endless festival of zipless fucking and self-actualisation. After a brief, confused tangent in which she imagines how she might organise a childcare commune, even Greer loses faith in her own nonsense and moves briskly onwards with barely a backwards glance. Postnatal mums and newborn babies, people who are tired, people who are old, people with dependencies and needs, people who make decisions driven by love: what a bore they all are.
When Greer is annoyed by another woman’s political disagreement, she points out that the other woman is old and unfuckable. At 83, Greer is both of these things, and I’m not too far off either. I’d like this to mean we are in this together, but we aren’t. Greer wouldn’t recognise sisterly solidarity if it sat down beside her and started plaiting her hair. She would have despised me when I was a conscientious schoolgirl reading her book on the school field (she writes that such girls, anxious to stick to the rules and perform well at school, display ‘meaningless assiduity’). She would despise me now. The oddest thing about The Female Eunuch is that she’s not actually interested in women at all; she’s interested in brilliant provocateurs and their freedom to behave exactly as they please. I’d understood it even less than I realised.
Next week: Accio AOL Messenger!