Feminism The Female Guru

329 pp., $6.95.

FIRST there was Kate Millett-just a year ago. The Karl Marx of the New Feminism, they all said. She was bright (a professor, yet) and scholarly, but, the reviewers also said, she was too masculine. Then Norman Mailer came along and told us she misquoted Miller, and what's more mysticism is groovy, and everyone cooled off on Millett, although Mailer left a lot more to be desired. And now there's Germaine Greet- "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like," says Life magazine. Well, maybe men do.

I read about Creer in Mailer and loved her; heard about her TV performances and hated her. Now that I've read The Female Eunuch I'm simply disappointed because she had some real fine ideas but blew it in the end.

She's 32, British, a professor of Shakespeare, and has spent much of her adult life as a "super-groupie." This is not to say anything against her sexual lifestyle. Greer has made it in a man's world while remaining sexually active and relatively uncompromised; it has given her a rather large amount of intolerance for those not as fortunate as she.

What she has done better than any of the others who have tried to put all of the women's movement between two covers is an exploration of the irrational and sexual side of woman. And she's done much of it with a welcome sense of humor. When ever she strays over to politics or intellectual dissertation, however, one can only get angry or impatient.

THE BOOK is divided into four parts- Body. Soul, Love and Hate -and a totally inadequate coda: Revolution. Body ("Gender," "Bones," "Curves," "Hair," "Sex," "The Wicked Womb")-is the best section of the four. In it Greer levels some good criticism at those propounding the myth of the vaginal orgasm. "The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading.... Real satisfaction is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person." Recent emotionless emphasis on the clitoral orgasm is, she says, "the index of the desexualization of the whole body, the substitution of genitality for sexuality."

This discussion brings emotions and the whole person back into the picture, which is fine, but also reveals one of her main blind spots. Greer often cannot understand that women who are unhappy may actually be so because of men. She is constantly blaming women, or "society" (not at all synonymous with men) for the problems in women's lives. She propounds this, one of the basic ideas of the book, in the introduction:

To abdicate one's own moral understanding, to tolerate crimes against humanity, to leave everything to someone else, the father-ruler-king-computer, is the only irresponsibility. To deny that a mistake has been made when its results are chaos visible and tangible on all sides, THAT is irresponsibility. What oppression lays upon us is not responsibility but guilt.

I find myself saying to this, as to so many other of her statements, "Yes, but-." But why have we "abdicated responsibility?" We seem to have been trying to win it back for at least the past 100 years with little success, even now. Although she is eloquent on the psychological forces bearing down on women, she never confronts the difficulties of fighting against them.

But back to the body. Menstruation. There are a few times in her book where Greer shines, and this is one of them.

The arrival of the menarche is the more significant than any birthday, but in the Anglo-Saxon households it is ignored and carefully concealed from general awareness. For six months while I was waiting for my first menstruation I toted a paper bag with diapers and pins in my school satchel. When it finally came, I suffered agonies lest anyone should guess or SMELL it or anything.

Sound familiar, girls? She does an excellent job throughout in capturing much of the confusion of becoming aware of one's sexuality in this society. On the argument against employing women in responsible positions because of their menstrual cycle. she says:

Women are not more incapacitated by menstruation than, men are by their drinking habits, their hypertension, their ulcers and their virility fears.... Menstruation does not turn us into raving maniacs or complete invalids; it is just that we would rather do without it.

BECAUSE she is so sensitive about the female body, one wonders why she has chosen a male image for the title. Rather than saying simply that women have too long had to suppress their energy and aggressiveness, she says instead that they've been castrated. Metaphor or not, it's annoying that women must be constantly compared to men. Although it's not, it sounds like penis envy in another form.

The "Eternal Feminine," Greer's term for the stereotype into which society is pushing women, is a passive and pleasing creature. Like the eunuch of the harem, woman must please without being aggressive.

The female's fate is to become deformed and debilitated by the destructive action of energy upon the self, because she is deprived of scope and contacts with external reality upon which to exercise herself.... 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... 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."

She goes on, for the umpteenth time in feminist literature, to trace the step-by-step development of girls into unhappy or "feminized" women ("Baby," "Girl," "Puberty," etc.). Feminist literature, perhaps in an attempt to get away from what has always been female dependence, often ends up repeating itself. Women get too wrapped up in their own way of saying things, trying to prove that they've psyched it out better than the others, and forget that their sisters have said the same thing just as well. Simone DeBeauvoir started this generation's plotting of the course of Where We Were Conditioned, and far too many have repeated it with only minor variations. It's time to get away from the comprehensive, this-says-it-all-book, and on to the specific issues.

Greer paints a bleaker picture of women's consciousness than we have become accustomed to. Several times she asserts that women prefer male doctors, which-at least in this community-is blatantly false. And her view of female friendships is dimmer than reality. "Those women who boast of their love for their own sex," she asserts, "usually have curious relations with it, intimate to the most extraordinary degree but disloyal, unreliable and tension-ridden, however close and longstanding they may be." Perhaps in her situation it's true, but for most of us here, the pattern has changed.

Her discussion of the American feminist movement is contained under the rubric of "bitter women [calling] you to rebellion." And her detailing of it shows little comprehension of the wide popularity of consciousness-raising groups which have done more than anything else to propagate the women's movement.

The most disturbing part of her, book is Greer's vision of the future. She acknowledges that it will be a struggle, but has a rosy vision of the ease with which all will be accomplished. While on one side she can describe the unhappy realities of the individual woman, when Greer looks at them in large numbers she launches into a Consciousness Three rap. "All literature, however vituperative, is an act of love, and all forms of electronic communication attest to the possibility of understanding," she sighs. Her call to revolution at the end of the book ranges from housewives leaving their husbands and children to "(using) even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. ." You too can have fun washing the dishes and cooking the meals-not a word about maybe your husband helping. She hits on women as targets for advertising, and recommends that they form buying cooperatives. That's it on capitalism. She ends on a call to struggle-although heaven knows it's not to arms: "The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed."

What Greer has given us is a good guide to a revolution of our bodies. But beyond the excitement of the first 50 pages, and the repetition of the next 150, she becomes, regrettably, the Charles Reich of the feminist movement.