The Female Eunuch - by Germaine Greer

**this blog is a slow work in progress (true to form 😏). updates to follow**

"'Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play.'  The alternative to game-playing, to the defensive process which is the game of war, is what every woman must now seek for herself, autonomy." (327)

Every once in a while I find that I'm reading a book just at the time when I need it.  That's what happened with The Female Eunuch, and for that I'm grateful.

Germaine Greer is an honest, forthright author so even if you might not agree with the specifics of what she's saying, I would hope that the reader could appreciate her intentions at the very least.  She is a very intelligent person who supports her arguments with an eye towards the historical context of the facts she uses as support.

I have not visited the realm of Women's Studies since I was an undergraduate in college. I found two issues with the class that I took at the ripe age of 19. First, I perceived that social studies was just the wrong lens with which to examine what it's trying to look at (an admittedly confusing statement, but perhaps you get my gist).  Second (specific to women's studies), is that the discipline is filled with a lot of poor thoughts and strange feminists that I can't relate to.  However, to this day I love when I am able to find common ground in conversation with another woman.  It is a powerful experience.  Feminism has the potential to be great, & to truly improve the condition of the world (for both men and women).  However, it often seems to fall short of that mark.

Germaine Greer seems to share my point of view on that, and I think that's a big part of why I was able to hang in there with this book when I have started and stopped so many feminist works over the years.  She doesn't blindly take up the cause of all women without taking into account our faults and the mistakes we have a tendency to make.  She tries to bring these into the light in The Female Eunuch in order that we can be more effective in seeking out the goals that she suggests we really need to be pursuing.  In fact, Greer goes beyond being an author & really is a revolutionary.  Beyond being a feminist she is a socialist and really argues that we need to pursue both aims in order to change the world.  It's as if, to her mind, the most evolved feminist also has a bit of Marxist in her/him.  She also suggests that women, based on their subservient role in the status quo, make better leaders towards these aims than men simply because men are more deeply embedded in the status quo (as a function of their being its dominant members).  Bottom line, she definitely believes that changing the reality of women and their lives will improve the condition of all humankind.

"The same pressures that bind with briars a woman's joys and desires are the pressures that will destroy the world." (112)  

And she shares her opinions in the hope of guiding all people away from that potential outcome.  It's a very ambitious goal she has set for herself.

I was glad to start thinking in terms of sexual politics again.  I was glad to spend some time musing on what it's like being a woman in this world.  Reading this I felt like I was going into a inner room that I hadn't visited in a long while - and while I'm still mulling this book over (and suspect I will continue to do so for a bit) I am as I say thankful for that much.  I have always thought that gender relations are so inherent in our social fabric that they become a given to us.  It's a given that deep-rooted complacency follows even though it really does not serve us for this to be so.  For now, I'm far from looking to pick a fight with all the men in my life, but I am trying to hold onto that antithesis to complacency, a willingness to think critically about what I am genuinely observing.  And a willingness to follow it wherever it leads me.

Now for some background on what The Female Eunuch was born out of.  The Female Eunuch was written in 1969.  The thing about reading it now is that it will, inevitably, seem as if parts of it are dated.  So, it's tough not to ask that question: why should I read it?  However, the book almost immediately sets out to prove that attitude wrong.  It goes straight into trying to muck up the deeply entrenched attitudes towards women, attitudes amongst women, societal injustices, etc. that affected women then.  And as with most deeply entrenched things, they are still (to varying degrees) relevant to contemporary problems.

Part of what helps The Female Eunuch continue to be relevant 50 years after its publication is that its author cast a very wide net on women's/world issues.  This can be seen in the book's sections which are entitled:

1) Body

2) Soul

3) Love

4) Hate

5) Revolution

To me the central thesis of this book is a strong and simple one.  Women are treated as passive creatures and so are often spoken of in passive terms.  The most striking example is, of course, the role of women in the sexual act.  Women are fucked.  It is a thing that is done to them and they are spoken of as if they lie there, passively, and simply receive all the action that is visited upon them.  Germaine Greer calls this the "spittoon theory" of womanhood.  A spittoon is a round canister that is used for spitting chewing tobacco into.  Check it, it's a thing : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon

It is the male attitude towards sex, and it is perniciously pervasive in so many, many other areas.  Women struggle to actively, intentionally, and vigorously seek after their goals; I think this has a basis in not only what society tells them they should do but also comes inwardly from some part of themselves.  It's not necessarily frowned upon as much as it used to be when a woman is willing to move mountains to get what she wants/needs, however, it's still not something that we associate with femininity.  Femininity - as a concept - remains associated with passivity.  Consequently, if a woman deviates from passivity, she deviates from femininity.

Femininity is something that is in the eye of the beholder.  Not everyone would see things that way.  There are women and men who when faced with a pro-active woman I'm sure would not consider that woman any less feminine for it.  However, on the whole Greer's thesis seems to still hold water.  Women are very oppressed by having to uphold this concept of what it means to be feminine.

I've been thinking that this imperative might not be simply imprinted upon women from societal pressures.  I have a niece and a nephew (fraternal twins) - and so, they are at the same point in their development at all times with the exception of their gender (and, of course, their distinct personalities).  At age 5, it's very interesting to see how they've begun to take different tracks in life.  Consequently, I've been considering how passivity might be to some unknown extent written more into the female biology.

No matter how differently we might begin, we all need to grow into inhabiting the mode of inquiry.  Women may take a different track towards this than men, but a capable adult of either gender must end up in a similar place.  While it seems to me that a man and a woman would get somewhat separate things out of reading this, it is also easy to see that both parties have plenty to learn.

For now, I leave the post with this :

"The acts of sex are themselves forms of inquiry, as the old euphemism 'carnal knowledge' makes clear: it is exactly the element of quest in her sexuality which the female is taught to deny.  She is not only taught to deny it in her sexual contacts, but (for in some subliminal way the connection is understood) in all her contacts, from infancy onward, so that when she becomes aware of her sex the pattern has sufficient force of inertia to prevail over new forms of desire and curiosity.  This is the condition which is meant by the term: female eunuch.  In traditional psychological theory, which is after all only another way of describing and rationalizing the status quo, the de-sexualization of women is illustrated in the Freudian theory of the female sex as lacking a sexual organ.  Freud may not have intended his formulations to have been taken as statements of natural law, but merely as coherent descriptions of contingent facts in a new and valuably revealing terminology; nevertheless he did say: 

'Indeed, if we are able to give a more definite connotation to the concept of 'masculine' and 'feminine,' it would also be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or women, and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.'

If we are to insist on the contingency of feminine characteristics as the product of conditioning, we will have to argue that the masculine-feminine polarity is actual enough, but not necessary.  We will have to reject the polarity of definite terms, which are always artificial, and strive for the freedom to move within indefinite terms.  On these grounds we can, indeed we must reject femininity as meaning without libido, and therefore incomplete, subhuman, a cultural reduction of human possibilities, and rely upon the indefinite term female, which retains the possibility of female libido." (p. 78-79)