Review of The Female Eunuch, in parts

Am a fair way through The Female Eunuch now. I am finding it to be a powerful, cogent polemic against the repression of women in 1960s society (a repression which is quite clearly still going on today to a very large extent).

I am finding basically all she is saying to be rather convincing. Nevertheless, she has made some controversial claims in what I’ve read so far and most of them involve homosexuality. The main thrust of her argument throughout the book is that “feminine” women, women who meet the “stereotype” of the passive, placid, perfectly manicured domestic goddess, caked in makeup and bedecked with finery and furs, are castrates – eunuchs. But she has phrased that twice already in as much as the book as I’ve read in a far more inflammatory way: that such women are “transvestites” or “female faggots”. Indeed, in her chapter called “Baby”, she quotes from a Phillip Roth novel called Portnoy’s Complaint to lament how a man’s inability or prevention from detaching from his mother leads him to become a “faggot” and then goes on to say, “What happens to the Jewish boy who never manages to escape the tyranny of his mother is exactly what happens to every girl whose upbringing is ‘normal’. She is a female faggot. Like the male faggots she lives her life in a pet about guest lists and sauce béarnaise, except when she is exercising by divine maternal right the same process that destroyed her lusts and desires upon the lusts and desires of her children.” I imagine that most homosexual men would find that very offensive. However, it does clearly make sense: Germaine Greer is staunchly against the view that the ‘feminine’ is good and such a low assessment of camp homosexual men is a natural extension of that conviction.  

I have identified what seems to me to be a in a contradiction in her view of homosexuality, however. In her chapter called “Girl”, she argues that little girls are equally as erotic and passionate creatures as boys, but that authority figures do their best to repress that, resulting in great anguish (particularly in adolescence, which she also devotes an entire chapter to). Importantly, she claims that “inseparable girls are often fascinated by each other, deeply altruistic and cooperative, and often genuinely spiritual, as well as utterly sexual if not literally genital.” At the end of the chapter, which arrives on the next page, she includes an anecdote from her own childhood, describing the time when her mother discovered a letter written from Germaine’s (female) lover at school and consequently screamed at her that she was “unnatural”. Now what seems odd to me is that at other times Germaine seems rather heteronormative. Certainly when she is denigrating “faggots”, but also in her chapter on “Sex”, when she expatiates on heterosexual sex in great, anatomical detail in order to argue how perverted it has become in the modern world, and doesn’t even mention the other kind of sex. She also hasn’t used the word “lesbian” once so far in the book. I suppose what is doubly confusing is that most of her argument amounts to, “Women should be more like men in a lot of ways because, in general, men are far less repressed.” This argument I totally agree with. But if acting like the stereotype of a woman makes a man a “faggot”, by her logic wouldn’t acting like the stereotype of a man make a woman a butch lesbian?

I suppose her response would be that the modern man is far less of a ‘stereotype’ than the modern woman. She does argue – and I agree with her on this argument – that it is the natural state of women to be energetic and passionate and erotic and intelligent and fierce, to live without her energy becoming “etiolated”. Thus, she would argue that if a woman is to act more like a man in a lot of ways, she is really just acting more like a woman.

But where do gay people fit in then?  

Anyway, it’s a good book and I like it.

I have now read a lot of the sections on “love” and have realised that a lot of what she says about love being a totally egotistical affair in the 1960s due to the deleterious stereotypes we foist on men and women is true today also. She talks about how women are constantly told that their duty is to the man, that they must devote their entirely self to self-abnegation and ‘altruism’, and Germaine argues how this ends up serving no one. The result for the woman is that she sees her entire self-worth in how she pleases the man, fears abandonment, becomes incredibly manipulative on top of her enculturated frigidity, and this ironically only increases the likelihood of abandonment. All this means is that there can never be a strong, mutual love, only an anguished egotism. This lack of mutuality in love is naturally totally unfulfilling for the man, too, and even his stereotypical domain, sex, he can derive no real pleasure from, because the enculturation ensures that it is mechanical and that the woman is often doing it for no other reason than to ‘please’ the man.

These relationships are absolutely still going on today.

(Although, I must say, I’m not entirely sure if Germaine would accept the way I worded my summary.)

I have now finished the book. It was good. There was some great stuff on the misery of the modern, couped-up housewife, resulting from the utter banality and repetitiveness of her life, her unnatural isolation from other women and from the world, the omnipresence of children in her life and her dependence on her rearing of them for any sense of self-worth, and, most importantly, her status as a second-class citizen.

The last two chapters of the book were examining and analysing all the feminist movements that exist and their various stances on men and the like, before, in the end, Germaine herself calls for “Revolution”. It’s a shame it only partly happened, this revolution.