More book reviews - The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer

 I'm sure many blog followers can remember the first time they read Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. I find this a particularly easy remember as I finished it on Monday, having intended to read it for a long time. And even if you haven't read it you are very likely aware of it, and even if you are not aware of it, you are very likely aware of Germaine Greer. She was described by one critic as a 'Walking Headline' and you can see what they meant. The Female Eunuch is 54 years old this year, and has sold over 30 million copies around the world. So even if you hate it, you cannot deny its influence. 

I really enjoyed the book, because Greer writes with clarity and passion. That doesn't mean that she is right about everything, and many people will say she is wrong about everything. But there are so many things that make it an enjoyable and passionate read and an admirable assault on what she thought was wrong with our whole conception of the sexes, sex, relationships and roles. 

I think the crux of her argument is that we raise our children with exactly the wrong expectations of who they should be, what they should be like, and what they should look for in other people, especially in people that they might have a sexual relationship with. I say this because Greer is pretty firmly agains the whole institution of marriage and the nuclear family, seeing it as the cause of so many problems.

Using lots of contemporary examples and quotations, she shows what people thought of sex and especially what people thought of women in the era in which she grew up (50s and 60s). Novels, popular fiction, advice columns, all of these are raided to give an idea of the expectations that people had of women (and of men, no less). And Greer describes the process by which all these expectations become internalised so that, in her description of it, men might well be severely critical of women but women are even more severely critical of themselves. And they are in an impossible bind, trying to live up to impossible (and undesirable) expectations. 

She ranges widely, from the sacramental prohibitions on women in medieval church laws, to all the writings on witchcraft, through the frankly dotty writings of Freud and contemporaries when they try to describe the 'problem' with women (penis envy? seriously?). Some of the saddest pieces are  contemporary vox pops with young people about their expectations of relationships and marriage. Even before marriage it is clear some see what a trap they could be heading into. 

One particular thing she emphasises is that this is not just a problem of men, and she is not anti-men, because she sees their lives and feelings and libidos being just as spavined by society's expectations and our own expectations. In the socialist spirit of many of her contemporaries, she says the only solution is to try to change the whole social system which benefits from such docile consumers as married couples with children. It's not rebellion that women need, it's revolution that all of us need, men and women. 

Whatever way you understand that revolution to be intended, it is not impossible for individuals to simply stop behaving in the way that they are expected to, and to show that it brings them happiness. That personal revolution would at least be a start. 

There have been many criticisms of The Female Eunuch, and the Wikipedia page for it will list several. It is naive, it is unrealistic, it is perverse, they say. And some of the extremes that Greer reached in other publications, such as the 'European Porn Magazine' Suck, have aged not well at all. But The Female Eunuch has never been out of print, and it has probably been the first text that many people read that made them think 'You know, perhaps I am a feminist then..'

If you haven't read it, give it a go. It is drastic and pulls no punches, but it is sincere and intended to improve our life as full humans, not just to tear things down. Also, she doesn't mind a good swear, but you probably realised that.