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Germaine Greer page 1, 2 Greer truly believed all of this -- that's the only explanation for her current bitterness. In "The Whole Woman" she blithely writes, "We were sold sexual 'freedom'" and "the lie of the sexual revolution," breezing past the fact that she was one of the preeminent hucksters for this particular brand of snake oil. Ideologically speaking, as a feminist, that is, as a thinker who specializes in advocating the improvement of women's lives, she's made a 180-degree switcheroo. But Greer's writing is only ostensibly about women; at its palpitating heart it's really just about her. (The veneer of universality wears comically thin at times, as in the supermarket rant from "The Whole Woman," in which Greer describes the generalized indignities suffered by a typical Everyshopper. This generic woman suddenly embarks on a hypothetical search for "a jar of pimentos." She searches the Tex-Mex section, then "among the pickles" and finally resorts to asking "a man in a suit with a company pin," who tells her he never heard of them, implying that "the customer is mad ... She shows him fresh red peppers and explains that she wants skinned, seeded peppers in brine ..." and so on. Gee, that happens to me all the time!) Greer doesn't feel she's been inconsistent because her method -- inflating her own personal trials into theories about the condition of women -- remains the same. When it comes to sex, she genuinely feels swindled. During her years among the Push crowd in Sydney, the ethic of free love got her into numerous "scrapes" (the group's term for unwanted pregnancies), which ended in several abortions accompanied by other undefined gynecological problems. As a result, in her late 30s, when she desperately wanted a child, Greer was unable to conceive and turned to expensive and difficult medical interventions, all of which failed. Greer's resentment of the sexual utopianism she once so avidly championed springs in large part from this misfortune -- she describes sex in the late 1950s and early '60s as "a bloodsport." Her denunciation of elaborate fertility treatments as causing untold "damage" to desperate women only makes sense when you understand that the process raised her hopes only to trample them -- and finally broke her heart. In the 1980s Greer suffered another rude awakening: She got older. The young Shelley Winters once chirped that in Hollywood a pretty face is just like a passport, to which the British journalist Julie Burchill later rejoined that beauty is indeed very much like a passport: It runs out. Greer ought to have seen it coming, but her sense of herself as exempt from the ordinary limits on human existence was part of what made her a quintessential figure of the '60s and '70s. Middle age altered the dynamics of Greer's sex life in a way she couldn't countenance. "She enjoys what most women do not enjoy, and therefore it's valuable, which is going out and doing battle with men," Steinem notes about Greer as a political animal, but the observation applies to her personal life as well. Wallace's biography is studded with anecdotes about Greer's sexual aggression -- approaching an open-shirted stranger at a party and theatrically pinching his nipple is only one example -- all incidents in which flirtation is laced with domination. "I owe it to my poor brothers not to get too uptight," she smugly told Screw when explaining why she didn't object to street harassment. "I am a woman they could never hope to ball." Greer, in the manner of most free-love proselytizers, preached eroticism as pure, innocent, loving joy, but she practiced it as an exercise of power, and as her youth faded, so did the edge she had long maintained over her lovers. By the time she'd reached her late 40s she'd embraced celibacy and claimed to have realized that sex wasn't that important after all.
If Greer were a bit more honest and had a bit more perspective, she'd have a useful message to relay to young women about the perils of confusing sexual autonomy with the real but ephemeral ability to manipulate men. She could elucidate the difference between a sexual freedom that abuses body and soul and a sexual freedom that cherishes and respects them. But Greer has always spoken directly from the tangles of her personal experience, shamelessly extrapolating from her own condition to the rest of womankind and seemingly unaware of her presumption. ("She's about as introspective as a sweet potato," Barbara Grizzuti Harrison once observed.) In the '70s, she admonished women who lacked her confidence, stylishness and libido for their timorousness. Today, feeling betrayed, she's become grim and hectoring, a feminist more cartoonishly man-hating than the ones she supposedly defied in the '70s, nattering on about body hair and bras. It's ironic, then, that a portrait as unflattering as Wallace's should come along to remind us of what is valuable about Germaine Greer. She has never been much of a thinker, but her ideas weren't what really mattered to people. As much as I admired "The Female Eunuch" the first time I read it, I could never quite recall what, beyond heterosexual intercourse, Greer actually advocated. What I did take from the book was an ethic of adventure and courage, of a zest for taking on the world. Her challenge to women who called themselves emancipated -- "consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood" -- didn't really mean anything, but it was thrilling just to know that somebody had traveled that far out into the territory of acceptable female behavior and planted her flag there. It created more room for the rest of us. Like most divas
-- for that's what she is, a glorious, melodramatic, chaos-making
performer -- Greer has made a mess of her life. She believes she has
suffered greatly, but she has engineered plenty of misery for others:
Wallace's biography is a veritable catalog of bad behavior, blatant
hypocrisy and double-crossed friends and family. Yet few of her
associates hold this against her. "The curious thing is how Germaine
can say the most unjust things, yet be so compelling, even winning,"
Wallace writes. A special grace is reserved for the rare person who can
cast this kind of spell. In many cases, they produce great art, but in
Greer's the accomplishment is less tangible. In her prime, in the
ripeness of her cultural moment, Greer worked a kind of magic, even if
in retrospect it seems concocted from pure illusion. An Australian
contemporary of hers, Susan Ryan, reminded Wallace that "women who were
housewives, who were pretty miserable ... felt inspired by her book and
their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a
librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the
subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the
better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but
better lives." Women entirely unlike Germaine Greer, the feminist who
improved the world in spite of herself. - - - - - - - - - - - -
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