She’s back, she’s angry and she’s in the Daily Telegraph. The beauty of Germaine Greer’s latest book, The Whole Woman, is less the content than the way it made its appearance. It is billed as The Female Eunuch revisited, 30 years on. And how do we get to read it? Why, by purchasing the Telegraph, where extracts of the book appear in double-page spreads, accompanied by lovely photographs of women in lingerie or tastefully pregnant, usefully juxtaposed with piccies of Germaine being angry – pretending to bite the head off Barbie. If you want a contemporary Female Eunuch, how about the spectacle of Germaine Greer, former scary feminist, castrated and unthreatening enough to fit into the features pages of the Telegraph?
The conservative press, unlike, say, the Guardian, seem to love Germaine, in the way that Tory pundits adore old Labour politicians who are impotent to cause any further harm. The one thing that could and did outshine the serialisation of The Whole Woman was the concurrent serialisation in the Daily Mail of Greer’s unauthorised biography, Untamed Shrew, by Christine Wallace, which put the sentiments expressed in the Telegraph in an interesting focus. The first day of the serialisation of The Whole Woman had Greer opining on marriage and adultery (impeccably sensible on both). In the Mail, the splash went as follows: “Her radical feminism was forged in the heat of predatory love affairs. Germaine Greer mesmerised men, then discarded them . . .” You get the picture.
Greer’s life is even more poignant than her prose, and the inconsistencies between life and art are like those Spot the Difference puzzles in children’s comics, except the differences aren’t as subtle. Still, the coverage was remarkably positive. It’s an interesting phenomenon, how you can pitch something as ostensibly liberal as feminism at the contemporary middle classes and get them to love it. And that is what Germaine Greer has triumphantly accomplished. You can just imagine insurance managers reading the diatribe about the body fascism of the exercise culture, and thinking to themselves that really they can understand every word; and, my goodness, they quite agree with it. It’s not exactly Feminism Lite; it’s feminism that sounds scary and fiery but, unlike The Female Eunuch, poses no danger to society. The injunction to women 30 years ago, simply to dump husband and children if necessary, is replaced with sorrowful musings about how motherhood “is not a career option”. The warnings about cellulite cream pale by comparison with her earlier instructions to women not to sleep with soldiers.
Part of the appeal to conservatives is in the woman herself. You can’t get a picture of Germaine Greer sitting perched on the Aga with a nice mug of tea, or read about her crowing over violets in her country-house garden, without feeling that this is a woman whose prejudices are sound. Forget that appalling injunction in The Female Eunuch: “If women are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it seems obvious that they must refuse to marry.” Forget that terrible, unequivocal lie (which she repeated last year in a seminar at the Festival Hall): “Women have very little idea how much men hate them.” She’s not back to say sorry.
But thank God she’s back. Reading her makes you realise just what dull, impenetrable tripe we’ve been asked to read in the name of feminism from her supposed successors. Tracey Emin, the daring modern artist plucked by the Guardian from the ranks of young feminists, gave some notion of their accomplishments to date: “I’m a strong woman who is free to make her own choices. If I feel like wearing nail varnish, I will.” Feminism has brought forth women who make choices, all right. And look what they’ve chosen.
Cristina Odone is on holiday
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