BOOK REVIEW (The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer): Into every man’s life must fall a great book about women. One day about 20 years ago, I came across a book that caught my attention and changed my life. Actually, it was the cover that seized my attention. I didn’t know much about Germaine Greer, except her name seemed to ring a bell.
Later I was to learn that she was one of those feminists that most normal men would steer clear of.
I couldn’t resist buying the book. I felt the primordial urge to understand our better-half. Even though there were three girls in my family of five children, the need to fully comprehend woman’s mind was imperative at that time of my life.
So I slowly plodded through what seemed like a book of trying proportions. The gist of what was later termed as a seminal work was about how “women were taught to hate themselves and not realising how much men dislike them”.
Today Germaine Greer is 71 years old. When The Female Eunuch was published, she had just turned 31. The Female Eunuch worked up almost a perfect storm of global proportions.
It was reported that husbands didn’t want their wives to read it because it might give them strange ideas, and boyfriends didn’t want their girlfriends to read it because of “who knows what it may make them do”.
Within a year of its publication, it surpassed its second edition. Before long, it was translated into eight languages.
The “messiah of womanhood” had arrived and her name was Greer. The author proudly proclaimed in New York Times that “Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it.”
In some ways, it was true then but perhaps no longer so in modern times, thanks in a large part to Germaine Greer.
In a nutshell, The Female Eunuch shook me to my roots. I didn’t know that a woman could harbour such thoughts, let alone urge her own kind to break free from those chains, forged in the fires of prejudice by men “to enslave them”.
In a chapter on Womanpower, Greer postulates that “it is true that women often refuse to argue logically. In many cases, they simply do not know how to, and men may dazzle them with a little pompous sophistry. In some cases, they are intimidated and upset before rationalisation begins”.
When I first encountered these words, I felt as if a woman had kicked me hard in the groin. And Greer did, to its maximum and painful effect.
But at the same time, I was mesmerised and befuddled by her exasperatingly logical mind. Greer asserted that women should learn to accept their own bodies and “taste their own menstrual blood”.
Then, she urged them to give up monogamy and celibacy. If those lines were meant to be counter-punches by the champion of the feline species, we men certainly didn’t see that coming.
Those chain-breaking proclamations drew a clear battle line across the sands laid out by time immemorial hunters – that’s us, men.
When I loudly proclaimed one fine day to a female co-worker about this marvellous tome by a very famous feminist, she promptly borrowed it, and never returned it.
I was too cowed by then to ask for it back and had to scour the second-hand book shops in town for a second copy, which I later found and never breathed another word about it to another woman.
Shortly after it became available in book stores, the Guardian (of England) commented “A detailed exposition, of chilling clarity, that guarantees a cosmic persecution complex to any woman reading it.”
From the columns of Newsweek: “A dazzling combination of erudition, eccentricity and eroticism.”
The Listener hammered home its conclusion: “A fine continuous flow of angry power… terrific polemical force… a brilliant attack on marriage.”
Forty years after Greer had put the fear of women in men’s hearts, she continues to fascinate all her admirers and fans. Two years ago (2008) in Australia, she told her radio listeners that she was “an old anarchist”. No argument about that.
Greer was certainly and undisputedly a tour de force in the arena of women’s rights.
If you are a man who feels an inner call to understand modern women in an eclectic way, perhaps you may find some answers in The Female Eunuch.
If you are a woman who believes you have been punished all your life for just being a woman, or being bullied by your male co-workers, this book may be your liberation.
Whatever your cause or reason may be, Germaine Greer is nothing short of astounding in her personal philosophy. The Female Eunuch may not be the answer to all your prayers but you are guaranteed to have a jolly good time on your way to the other side of the mountain.
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