-Caveat Lector- >From The Age http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990220/books/books2.html Saturday 20 February 1999 The whole Greer By: Stephanie Bunbury <Picture>WOMEN of a certain age, Germaine Greer wrote in The Change, become invisible. ``I walk the same paths now that I walked 25 years ago, but now I am not aware of the figure I am cutting,'' she wrote. ``I neither expect nor hope to be noticed.'' So this was maturity: Greer, who once upstaged Norman Mailer at the New York Town Hall with a combination of wit and second-hand fox fur, serenely walking the fens in her woollies and thanking Mother Nature for every bird and bee. Somehow, it didn't ring quite true. Greer, all six feet of her dazzlingly leonine feminism, has always rejoiced in being noticed. We're certainly noticing her now that her new book, The Whole Woman, is due to slam its way into the world. As everyone now knows, she has written the ``book she said she would never write'', reconsidering feminism in the light of the 30 years that have passed since The Female Eunuch. Nobody could have failed to notice her, in fact. For the past few months she has been everywhere, rubbishing the Booker short list on television, testing the Internet for literary sites in the newspapers, having her few bobs' worth on the life of Maria Callas, writing in defence of pheasant shooting, pouring cold water on Viagra. Since she has something incendiary to say about everything, she is still the media's favorite polymath. Greer has always been a creature of the media. A monstrous creature, come to that. In an age of litigation, Greer doesn't sue. She just talks. That's much more scary. None of the friends she has pulped from her address book will speak on the record for fear of her tongue. ``She's just so vindictive,'' they whisper. Kate Fitzpatrick, whose three days in the Cambridge Greer residence became one of the star stories in Christine Wallace's unauthorised biography of Greer, Untamed Shrew, said she never wanted to think about her again. Stories abound of her arriving eight months pregnant to be presented with a list of strenuous household tasks she was supposed to complete each day, of the looming prospect of her benefactor presiding over the birth, and of the invective when she left. She is still afraid of what might be said. It is remarkable, really, that mere words can inspire such widespread terror. But what words! Greer is a wordsmith in the ribald, orotund Jacobean tradition, a muscular mistress of insult. Wallace, who dared to make free with her life story, was a ``dung-beetle'', a ``flesh-eating bacterium''. Suzanne Moore, a feminist columnist in The Guardian newspaper, was similarly sprayed when she dared discuss a (false) allegation that Greer had had a hysterectomy. Such disloyalty, thundered Greer, always reflected low self-esteem, especially in women with ``their hair birds-nested all over the place, f----me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage.'' The gorgon had spoken. ``So much lipstick,'' she added, referring to Moore's dark-mouthed column logo, ``must rot the brain.'' Without even trying, she had managed to stage the catfight of the decade. The battle between Greer and Moore was also read, rightly or wrongly, as a clash of old and new feminisms. This clash of styles has become something of a motif in Greer's latter-day career - indeed, she has made it her stamping ground. As usual, she stamps hard. ``Life is more difficult than these new feminists suggest,'' she has said. ``We're not all young career girls who are pleased to wear strappy little sandals.'' Or aspire to be Spice Girls, for that matter, like some of the fairyfloss heroines thrown up by Natasha Walter's The New Feminism. Greer reviewed this book in something of a fury. ``Walter's book seems above all to reassure the faint-hearted that there is nothing to fear from feminism. If the next generation of feminists adopts her brand of unenlightened complacency, there will be nothing to hope for either.'' Walter is one of those who has responded to a Greer serve with restraint. Greer had been hoping for a big revolution that hadn't happened, she wrote kindly. ``Whereas we can say as young women that it is possible to be optimistic ... the personal and the political are not identical any more, and the site of action is out there in the public sphere, trying to get political and economic equality.'' Greer would certainly never buy that. Nor, it must be said, would the millions of women who watch Oprah Winfrey and her ilk. The personal is always, if nothing else, personal; it is always the site of action. This supposed new feminism is largely new, in fact, only in that it is obsessed with youth, according to other feminist writers such as Joan Smith. Greer, by contrast, has rushed to embrace old age. Proud to be a crone: that was her line at the beginning of this decade. In The Change, she called on women to acknowledge their age. The fake homeless who answered her advertisement in a street paper offering accommodation - they were actually reporters, aching for a look at Greer's private life - had abused the goodwill, she said plaintively, of an old lady. Of course she was not old, but to be an old woman, she has clearly concluded, is to take on the last good fight. The aged can be despised with impunity. Even the hostility to Margaret Thatcher's iron regime, Greer has suggested, may have drawn much of its force from hostility to her as an elderly woman. Perhaps all this abrasive oldsterism has added fuel to the fire of Greer's hip young critics. <Picture>Perhaps they would have the same questions about the new book anyway. Perhaps it is simply as Greer says: the thoughts of old women are assumed to be worthless. Whatever, the most common reaction to the announcement of The Whole Woman has been an airy bit of journalese: does Dr Germaine Greer, at the great age of 60, ``have anything to say to today's woman''? Many of today's women, of course, are over 60 themselves. But what this objection really tells us that the past, and the experience of the past, doesn't matter. For those with a past to remember, like Greer, this must chafe hard, although she never invokes the authority of the '60s, as some of her more tiresome contemporaries do, never says ``but we did that already'' or that the fight was purer in the good old days. This courtesy to youth, however, goes unmarked. Walter patronised her; other young women write her off completely. ``In the not-too-distant future,'' wrote Katie Roiphe, in an article that suggested that feminism had become obsolete, ``we will look back at the feminists of the 1970s warmly, like yellowing pictures of the suffragettes. We owe them everything ... and yet they cannot speak to us. Germaine Greer's colorful, apocalyptic tone ... seems out of place in the world she now describes.'' Yet Greer is the first to agree that the world has changed. That is why, she says, she has written The Whole Woman: because nothing is as it was. As for her tone being out of date, The Female Eunuch has sold more than a million copies, has never been out of print and - unlike, it must be said, Greer's own more recent books - is still available in any London bookshop. Not all its readers can be historians. It is Roiphe's own tone that is curious; less that of the youthful idealist overthrowing the elders than of a kind of academic Saffy, exasperated yet again with silly old Edina. Certainly, the current tendency to discard the views of anyone over 45 affects men, too, but there are few men, old or young, as fiery as Greer. Her greatest kinship these days, perhaps, is with the unrepentant old socialists in the Government back benches at Westminster, railing fruitlessly against cuts in the single mothers' allowance and the ruin of the railways. Greer has noted this herself, without satisfaction. ``Just what the f--- are all these women doing in f---ing Parliament?'' Still as strident as ever, then, however old she wants to be. This, too, can tell against her, especially as she is rarely consistent in the detail. Lipstick, for example, has become one of her bugbears, even though she is seemingly never photographed without it herself and has never supported the dungaree tendency in feminism, even at its '70s zenith. She likes clothes; she certainly wasn't going to give that pleasure up for the sisterhood. In an issue of the now defunct Pol magazine I bought, as I recall, in 1971, the guest editor, Germaine Greer, modelled a series of her own dresses, a mixture of the op-shop chic and floating, flowery numbers then in vogue, and had herself made up as her dream doppelganger, an Italian marchesa. It was a remarkable show of unabashed vanity. She wrote blithely that there was nothing wrong with decorating oneself with colors. It was the use of cosmetics as disguise that was to be deplored. Clearly, she never suffered from acne, or disguise, too, would certainly have been excused. For all her breadth of reading and powers of analysis, Greer's ideology has always been guided by her own idiosyncratic inclinations. You can almost get away with this as a feminist; the personal is still, after all, political. Women's own stories count. This has proved fertile ground for Greer, who could thus legitimately include a lot about Shakespeare, the subject of her PhD thesis, in The Female Eunuch, while giving rather short shrift to lesbians, the fat, the nervous and the happily partnered. None of these categories featured greatly in her universe. These inclinations have changed over time. She is quite portly herself these days, for a start. But The Female Eunuch's main focus was on sex: vigorous sex, sex with many partners, and almost always assumed to be hetero. Penetration? She was for it. Contraception? Of course. The young Germaine was incensed by, among many other things, the prevalence of coitus interruptus as a contraceptive method in Britain, even at the end of the decade of the pill. This, she clearly felt, was a miserable hangover from an unpleasured past. But by the time she came to write Sex and Destiny, when she wanted a child, she found that surgery had left her unable to conceive, the cheap and harmless coitus interruptus - contraception of choice among the peasants in rural Italy, her personal arcadia - was the best thing going. Now, her be{ACI}tes noires were the campaigners for contraception, women such as Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, whom she damned as a string of self-seekers playing into the hands of medical suppliers. Contraception, she argued, was irrelevant to a balmy world of arranged marriage and prenuptial virginity. Sex and Destiny shocked feminists, old and new. This new, loud chastity in a woman who had admitted to seven counts of adultery during her one marriage - a marriage that lasted three weeks - was confounding. With The Change, she was back on a course that feminists could at least recognise, championing an undervalued female caste. At the same time, she seemed to have acquired a conventionally middle-aged resentment of the young. A teenager who was frightened by the change in his mother at menopause ``may have behaved in such a way as to provoke his mother's rejection, (as) 14 year olds often do''. His young kind is selfish and demanding. Women, on the other hand, have every right to be querulous after all those years of service. This is the flipside of Greer's lifelong vilification of her own mother. Peggy Greer, The Female Eunuch records, drove her to run away from home with a thousand small cruelties. This woman, we knew, had beaten Greer's little brother's face with her fists when he was only three. This woman was so flighty she could not run the house properly; interestingly, feminist Greer's greatest admiration is reserved for hard-working women who can get the cows milked and the men breakfasted before 6.30. Her mother was not one of those. Her mother did evening classes in accountancy, but was too silly to pass the exams. Her mother, I would guess, was the original female eunuch. For years, Greer did not speak to her mother. But times have changed there, too. One of Christine Wallace's supposed outrages was to have approached Peggy Greer. To be fair, Greer can be criticised the more easily for her vacillations simply because she lays her own oddities out on display, to be picked over at our leisure. Some of her most consistent arguments, in fact, are among the odds. The great advocate of ``c--- power'' and ``no hands masturbation'' to strengthen the vaginal muscles has, on closer reading, always regarded masturbation as a poor substitute for sex. By The Change it has become a ``humiliation''. She has also been consistently squeamish about the so-called perversions. Anything disciplinary is abhorrent. So, for that matter, is frilly underwear. A LOT OF these little horrors are quite wacky, but Greer's oddball prejudices can be corrosive when harnessed to her twin draught horses of anger and articulacy. One of her apparent distastes, it emerges, is drag, and, more particularly, transexuality. When it emerged that Cambridge's last all-women college, Newnham, had a transexual among its fellows - the Australian-born Rachel Padman - old Newnham girl and now resident teacher Germaine Greer reared in fury. She might have detested the single-sex college when she was first there in her ``c--- power'' days, but Dr Greer was several books down the track. Now she was very much in favor of all-women institutions, from the nuns who had taught her at Star of the Sea in Melbourne to the jolly coven at Newnham's high table. She was not going to sit by knowing that a rejigged man had taken a woman's place. As a result of her sound and fury, the unfortunate Dr Padman's identity was deconstructed by newspapers all over the country. She became an unwilling cause celebre. Greer was branded a spiteful conservative, but what of that? It was a tremendous spat. Spiteful, perhaps; conservative, sometimes; eccentric, certainly. These days, it comes as no real surprise to know that the core of Greer's new book is her opposition to something she has branded a ``penetration culture'' in which sex is, more or less, compulsory. The substance of The Whole Woman was flagged during her last tour of Australia. Women, she said, once had no right to say yes; now there was no room to say no. They were obliged to perform and could ``no longer admit to feeling disgust ... whatever their partners may desire, no holds are barred. Women cannot admit to not enjoying the stuff that is going on - not if they want to seem cool, even if they have to take muscle relaxants to do it.'' Greer has never baulked at hyperbole. Still horrified by any hint of the perverse, she paints a spectral vision of the nation's bedrooms, all with handcuffs on the bedheads and giant dildos ready to wreak all sorts of damage. This is tosh, of course, but outrage has always been her style. Fay Weldon says she has always got along with Greer - one of the few, it seems - because they both like to argue from the insupportably wild assertion back to something within reason. Given that Greer says she wrote the book in only a few weeks, ``white-hot and quivering'', The Whole Woman should have plenty of wildness in there. Its 35 short chapters will deal with breasts, girlpower, mutilation, sex and sorrow, according to the flyleaf, which is all we have so far been allowed to see. The contents of these chapters are a secret, but given that her other books - apart from her studies of women's art and poetry, The Obstacle Race and Slipshod Sibyls - have mirrored her own life, they will presumably reflect her current persona as a mother superior, albeit one forever scaling the convent walls to chuck bricks at the faithful. Camille Paglia has publicly bemoaned Greer's decline into ``this drone, this whining `Woe is me, all the problems of the world' betrayal of her former sophisticated self. British feminism hasn't produced a single original voice except Germaine Greer,'' she said recently on the BBC. ``She was Australian. And the longer she's been with you, the duller she's become.'' Well, not lately, she hasn't. ``If anyone tells you that women have it all,'' said the doughty Greer at a literary reading late last year, ``slug 'em.'' Meanwhile, her talent for publicity, if nothing else, seems to be shared by at least one of her compatriots. Greer: Untamed Shrew is to be published in Britain to coincide with the release of The Whole Woman and Christine Wallace is flying over to promote it. That should make for some very interesting talk radio. The Whole Woman will be published early next month by Doubleday. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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