The Female Eunuch
Germaine Greer
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 006157953X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.
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Like the motive force that drives the car along the highway, when it meets with an obstacle it turns to destructive force and shakes its source to pieces. It is not too hard to point out to the averagely perceptive human being that women have plenty of the destructive kind of energy, but far fewer people see that women’s destructiveness is creativity turned in upon itself by constant frustration. Nervous diseases, painful menstruation, unwanted pregnancies, accidents of all kinds, are all
adult women other alternatives besides home and children and all that. The adult woman has already established a pattern of perversity in the expression of her desires and motives which ought to fit her for the distorted version of motherhood: it will not disappear if she is allowed alternatives. Any substituted aim is likely to be followed in a ‘feminine’ way, that is, servilely, dishonestly, inefficiently, inconsistently. In most cases women are not offered a genuine alternative to repressive
themselves forms of inquiry, as the old euphemism ‘carnal knowledge’ makes clear: 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 (for in some subliminal way the connection is understood) 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
commandment of Aleister Crowley to do as thou wilt is a warning not to delude yourself that you can do otherwise, and to take full responsibility to yourself for what you do. When one has genuinely chosen a course for oneself it cannot be possible to hold another responsible for it. The altruism of women is merely the inauthenticity of the feminine person carried over into behaviour. It is another function of the defect in female narcissism. Egotism But a pebble of the brook Warbled
playboys of the western world, she had been my entry to the big league.5 The physical attributes of this creature are those of the opulent tigresses of thriller literature. Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer would not recognize the lithe, full-breasted, very tall, amazing-haired female toughs who blast the heroes at a mere flash. Mailer is less stilted but the attributes are typical. She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She
