Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter May/June, 1999, Vol. 6, Number 3. The Whole Woman (Knopf) 373 pp.; $25.00 by Germaine Greer Reviewed by Donna Laframboise

G ermaine Greer became a feminist celebrity when The Female Eunuch appeared in 1970. Thirty years later, its sequel The Whole Woman, is a British bestseller - despite being one of the most disturbing collections of hyperbole, conspiracy theory and zealotry to be assembled between two book covers.

Greer's political analysis has evolved little in recent decades. She still rails against "Anglo-capitalist values," Western "pseudo-democracies," and the "military industrial complex." In her view, the United States is "the superpower that grinds the life out of the world's women, makes war on them and starves their children."

Where men and women are concerned, The Whole Woman proposes a simple rule of thumb: women are kind, selfless and hardworking; men are nasty, mean and lazy.

If she were making such sweepingly negative statements about immigrants or blacks, Greer would be readily denounced as a bigot. But instead, she received a $1 million advance and has been feted on both sides of the Atlantic for having penned such pearls as: "men are freaks of nature, fragile, fantastic, bizarre. To be male is to be a kind of idiot savant, full of queer obsession, doomed to competition and injustice not merely towards females, but towards children, animals and other men."

Elsewhere, she writes: "Men bash women because they enjoy it; they torture women as they might torture an animal "because they get off on it. Better educated men get the same thrill from torturing their partners verbally."

In Greer's view, "Aggression is part of the currency exchanged in all masculine dealings." Men belong to "the ruling class" and therefore "generally get to do whatever they choose." They loathe women, are "afraid of women in groups" and fear "the uterus and menstruation." Men prevent their wives from breast-feeding out of "simple revulsion," are uninterested in accepting responsibility for children. and "would not regret the passing of real" women were it possible to reproduce the human race via test tubes.

When a father drives his teenage daughter to evening engagements and then picks her up again, Greer says he "consciously exercises control over her."

All of this male perfidy contrasts starkly with Greer's angelic females. In her view, "women are built to understand each other, to co-operate, to pull shoulder to shoulder." They "love undaunted by ill-treatment, abandonment or death, returning good for evil."

Women buy less music than men, says Greer, because "even if they consider themselves entitled to spend much money on themselves, [they] do not have the time to listen to CDs." According to her: "One thing is certain: very little of the money that a working mother earns will be spent on herself, and none of it on any form of recreation."

In Greer's view, "Very few women can sit without something in their hands to work on; all men can sit for hours relaxing. "Women are busy; men are idle." Females, she declares, "always did the shit work; now that the only work there is is shit work, men are unemployed."

Yet while Greer fancies herself a champion of "working people," her views profoundly insult the legions of working class men who have toiled in mines, lumber camps and steel mills. Nine out of ten people killed on the job are male, because it's men - not women - who perform the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs.

When Greer claims that housework "would be invested with prestige and value" if it were performed by men, such male-dominated occupations as janitor, garbage collector and sewage treatment worker, were evidently not on her mind.

Greer declares that women "can love animals with such tenderness that they would die for them" - for instance in a house fire. But she neglects to mention that when the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awards medals for bravery to civilians who've jumped into flood waters, burst into burning buildings, and rescued often complete strangers from violent assault (sometimes at the cost of their own lives), more than 90 percent of those selfless souls are male.

But why should she strive for intelligent inquiry when fantastic conspiracies and absurd dogma are themselves sufficient to make her rich?

In Greer's view, retail stores strive to control women's lives. If a woman joins "a retail loyalty scheme," Greer says "she will virtually belong to the company and carry a card to prove it." Larger, one-stop stores are sinister because they allow "the Supermarket to dictate what the shopper can acquire. If she wants something the company has decided not to carry she will be intimidated into buying something it does carry."

Greer declares that women who enjoy shopping have "been programmed to believe that shopping is recreation." What they don't understand, she insists, is that "shopping is actually exhausting work for which women are trained from infancy."

But in the world according to Greer, even retailers get off lightly compared to the health care system. In her view, medicine is a collection of "massive institutional forces concentrated on bringing women under lifelong control." Women, she says, "are the stomping ground of medical technology, routinely monitored, screened and tortured to no purpose."

Greer insists that women who use fertility clinics are treated little better than lab rats, and claims that gynecologists often "despise the womb" and routinely mutilate women for no good reason."

Neither the most innocent nor the most tragic of circumstances escape Greer's paranoid lens. A woman who chooses not to be told the sex of her baby during an ultrasound is castigated by Greer for consenting "to let the technician know more about her baby than she does," for electing "to remain in ignorance."

The fact that a pregnant British woman who "suffered devastating brain-damage in a car-crash" could be placed on life-support and her daughter safely delivered isn't celebrated as a miracle of modern science by Greer.

Instead, she presents this woman as an example of the sort of female she thinks the medical establishment would prefer to deal with: "When her child was laid on her breast she did not react, which makes her much easier to manage than the mother who has her own ideas about whether she wants a Caesarean or not, and when she wants the cord cut and whether she wants to breast-feed."

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that Greer and her book lack even internal coherency.

This is, after all, an English professor who believes literacy is bad for women. According to her, "The preliterate woman lived within a self-validating female culture," and it is not until women learn to read that they internalize the masculine schema."

Throughout The Whole Woman, she repeatedly declares that men are not the standard to which women should aspire - since it's liberation from out-dated values, not equality with men - that she believes women require. On numerous other occasions, however, she undercuts herself by arguing that women needn't take hormones, wear make-up, or participate in routine health screening since men don't do such things.

Depending on which page of the book one consults, Greer either believes housework is mindless drudgery or a creative, feminine undertaking. At one point she declares that, "In a sane world meaningless repetition of non-productive activity would be seen to be a variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder." At another, she laments that housewives no longer "peel potatoes, chip them and them deep-fry them; they buy frozen oven chips instead."

E arly on, Greer says that "When The Female Eunuch was written, our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves." Later, she writes: "It seems that women have always been prone to distorted ingestion -the girls who pined and died for love [in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] would nowadays be thought anorexic." Still later, she returns to her first position: "Thirty years ago we heard nothing about panic attacks, or anorexia."

There is a difference between being provocative and talking gibberish, between challenging sacred cows and casting half the human race as evil.

But members of the public who have made The Whole Woman a bestseller, seem reluctant to draw such distinctions. So, too, do the talk show hosts who fawn over Greer, rather than treating her like an adult who bears responsibility for her views.

But don't be fooled. Rather than being any sort of feminist treasure, The Whole Woman is an embarrassment. With icons such as Greer, it's little wonder the women's movement is now so confused and mean-spirited.