FEMALE EUNUCH EB

Germaine Greer

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780007205011
• eBook ISBN: 9780008436186
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Social Sciences

The 50th Anniversary edition of the ground-breaking, worldwide bestselling feminist tract.

'The Female Eunuch retains that power of transformation; it asserts the possibility of creativity within female experience' Guardian

A worldwide bestseller, translated into over twelve languages, The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women's movement.

Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic.

Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.

Love

The Ideal

If the God who is said to be love exists in the imagination of men it is because they have created Him. Certainly they have had a vision of a love that was divine although it would be impossible to point out a paradigm in actuality. The proposition has been repeated like a mantra in hate-filled situations, because it seemed a law of life. ‘God is love.’ Without love there could have been no world. If all were Thanatos and no Eros, nothing could have come into being. Desire is the cause of all movement, and movement is the character of all being. The universe is a process and its method is change. Whether we call it a Heraclitean dance or the music of the spheres or the unending galliard of protons and neutrons we share an idea in all cultures of a creative movement to and from, moved by desire, repressed by death and the second law of thermodynamics. Various methods of formulation approximate knowledge of it at any time because the laws which seek to control and formalize such dynamics for the reasoning mind must be reformulated endlessly. Energy, creation, movement and harmony, development, all happen under the aegis of love, in the domain of Eros. Thanatos trudges behind, setting the house in order, drawing boundaries and contriving to rule. Human beings love despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it, chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.

When mystics say that God is love, or when Aleister Crowley says ‘Love is the law’, they are not referring to the love that is woman’s destiny. Indeed, many Platonists believe that women were not capable of love at all, because they were men’s inferiors physically, socially, intellectually and even in terms of physical beauty. Love is not possible between inferior and superior, because the base cannot free their love from selfish interest, either as the desire for security, or social advantage, and, being lesser, they themselves cannot comprehend the faculties in the superior which are worthy of love. The superior being on the other hand cannot demean himself by love for an inferior; his feeling must be tinged with condescension or else partake of perversion and a deliberate self-abasement. The proper subject for love is one’s equal, seeing as the essence of love is to be mutual, and the lesser cannot produce anything greater than itself. Seeing the image of himself, man recognizes it and loves it, out of fitting and justifiable amour propre; such a love is based upon understanding, trust, and commonalty. It is the love that forms communities, from the smallest groups to the highest.[1] It is the only foundation for viable social structures, because it is the manifestation of common good. Society is founded on love, but the state is not because the state is a collection of minorities with different, even irreconcilable common goods. Like a father controlling siblings of different ages and sexes, the state must bring harmony among the warring groups, not through love, but external discipline. What man feels for the very different from himself is fascination and interest, which fade when the novelty fades, and the incompatibility makes its presence felt. Feminine women chained to men in our society are in this situation. They are formed to be artificially different and fascinating to men and end by being merely different, isolated in the house of a bored and antagonistic being.

From the earliest moments of life, human love is a function of narcissism. The infant who perceives his own self and the external world as the same thing loves everything until he learns to fear harm.[2] So if you pitch him into the sea he will swim, as he floated in his mother’s womb before it grew too confining. The baby accepts reality, because he has no ego.

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said ‘Little creature, form’d of joy and mirth,

Go love without the help of anything on Earth.’[3]

Even when his ego is forming he must learn to understand himself in terms of his relationships to other people and other people in terms of himself. The more his self-esteem is eroded, the lower the opinion that he has of his fellows; the more inflated his self-esteem the more he expects of his friends. This interaction has always been understood, but not always given its proper importance. When Adam saw Eve in the Garden of Eden he loved her because she was of himself, bone of his bone, and more like him than any of the other animals created for his delectation. His movement of desire towards her was an act of love for his own kind. This kind of diffuse narcissism has always been accepted as a basis for love, except in the male–female relationship where it has been assumed that man is inflamed by what is different in women, and therefore the differences have been magnified until men have more in common with other men of different races, creeds and colours than they have with the women of their own environment. The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

The brotherhood of man will only become a reality when the consciousness of alien beings corrects man’s myopia, and he realizes that he has more in common with Eskimoes and Bengali beggars and black faggots than he has with the form of intelligent life on solar system X. Nevertheless, we are discouraged from giving the name of love to relationships between people of common interests, like footballers and musicians, especially if they are of the same sex. In denying such a description we ignore the testimony of bodies and behaviour. If Denis Law hugs Nobby Stiles on the pitch we tolerate it because it is not love. If Kenny Burell blows a kiss to Albert King on stage we congratulate ourselves on knowing how to take it. The housewife whose husband goes to the local every night does not tell herself that he loves his friends more than he loves her, although she resents it despite herself as an infidelity.

The arguments about the compatibility of marriageable people stem from a working understanding of the principle of parity in love, but it is very rarely seen that compatible interests at the level of hobbies and books and cinema do not make up for the enormous gulf which is kept open between the sexes in all other fields. We might note with horror those counsels which advise girls to take up their boyfriends’ hobbies in order to seduce them by a feigned interest in something they like. In any event, the man’s real love remains centred in his male peers, although his sex may be his woman’s prerogative. Male bonding can be explained by this simple principle of harmony between similes inter pares, that is, love. On the other hand, female castration results in concentration of her feelings upon her male companion, and her impotence in confrontations with her own kind. Because all her love is guided by the search for security, if not for her offspring then for her crippled and fearful self, she cannot expect to find it in her own kind, whom she knows to be weak and unsuitable. Women cannot love because, owing to a defect in narcissism, they do not rejoice in seeing their own kind. In fact the operation of female insecurity in undermining natural and proper narcissism is best summed up by their use of make-up and disguise, ruses of which women are infallibly aware. Those women who boast most fulsomely of their love for their own sex (apart from lesbians, who must invent their own ideal of love) usually have curious relations with it, intimate to the most extraordinary degree but disloyal, unreliable and tension-ridden, however close and long-standing they may be.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don’t. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are too well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It’s meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth. Women don’t nip down to the local: they don’t invent, as men do, pretexts like coin-collecting or old-schoolism or half-hearted sporting activities so that they can be together; on ladies’ nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves. What we actually see, sitting at the tables by the wall, is a collection of masked menials, dressed up to avoid scrutiny in the trappings of the status symbol, aprons off, scent on, feigning leisure and relaxation where they feel only fatigue. All that can happen to make the evening for one of them is that she might disrupt the love-affair around her by making her husband lavish attention on her or seeing that somebody else does. Supposing the men do not abandon their women to their own society the conversation is still between man and man with a feminine descant. The jokes are the men’s jokes; the activity and the anecdotes about it belong to the men. If the sex that has been extracted from the homosexual relationship were not exclusively concentrated on her, a woman would consider that she had cause for complaint. Nobody complains that she has sex without love and he has love without sex. It is right that way, appalling any other way.

Hope is not the only thing that springs eternal in the human breast. Love makes its appearance there unbidden from time to time. Feelings of spontaneous benevolence towards one’s own kind still transfigure us now and then – not in relationships with the stakes of security and flattery involved, but in odd incidents of confidence and cooperation in situations where duty and compulsion are not considerations. This extraordinary case of free love appeared in the correspondence of The People:

Eighteen years ago my husband and I moved into our first house. Two weeks later our neighbours arrived next door. We thought they were rather standoffish, and they, in return, were not too keen on us.

But over the years we have blessed the day they came to live next door. We have shared happy times. They were godparents to our daughter. And when trouble was at its worst they were always at hand with help.

Now they have paid us the biggest compliment ever. My husband recently changed his job and we had to move 200 miles. The parting was just too much. Rather than say goodbye, my neighbour’s husband has changed his job, and they have moved with us.

Although we are not neighbours, we are only five minutes away from each other. This is a friendship that really has stood the test of time.[4]

This remarkable situation is rare indeed, for it is the tendency of family relationships to work against this kind of extra-familial affection. Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity. To be sure, he is unpacking his heart with words but at the same time he is encouraged to expect interest and sympathy, and he usually gets it. His interlocutor feels unable to impose his own standards on his confidant’s behaviour; for once he feels how another man feels. It is not always sorrow and squalor that is passed on in this way but sometimes joy and pride. I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. For once we are not contemptuous of Camille or jealous of Juliet we might even understand the regicide or the motherfucker. That is love.

The love of fellows is based upon understanding and therefore upon communication. It was love that taught us to speak, and death that laid its fingers on our lips. All literature, however vituperative, is an act of love, and all forms of electronic communication attest the possibility of understanding. Their actual power in girdling the global village has not been properly understood yet. Beyond the arguments of statisticians and politicians and other professional cynics and death makers, the eyes of a Biafran child have an unmistakable message. But while electronic media feed our love for our own kind, the circumstances of our lives substitute propinquity for passion.

His word pronounced ‘selfishness’ blessed, the wholesome healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul – from a powerful soul to which belongs the high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around which everything becomes a mirror – the supple, persuasive body, the dancer whose parable and epitome is the self-enjoying soul.

Nietzsche, ‘Thus spake Zarathustra’

If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal personalities as having a better perception of reality – what Herbert Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not ego-centred and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared to the present and not to nostalgia or anticipation. Although they do not serve a religion out of guilt or fear or any other sort of compulsion, the religious experience, in Freud’s term, the oceanic feeling, is easier for them to attain than for the conventionally religious. The essential factor in self-realization is independence, resistance to enculturation; the danger inherent in this is that of excessive independence or downright eccentricity; nevertheless, such people are more capable of giving love, if what Rogers said of love is to be believed, that ‘we can love a person only to the extent we are not threatened by him’. Our self-realizing person might claim to be capable of loving everybody because he cannot be threatened by anybody. Of course circumstances will limit the possibility of his loving everybody, but it would certainly be a fluke if such a character were to remain completely monogamous. For those people who wanted to be dominated or exploited or to establish any other sort of compulsive symbiosis, he would be an unsatisfactory mate; as there are many fewer self-realizing personalities than there are other kinds, the self-realizer is usually ill-mated. Maslow has a rather unlooked-for comment on the sexual behaviour of the self-realizer:

Another characteristic I found of love in healthy people is that they have made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes. That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active, whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were so certain of their maleness or femaleness they did not mind taking on some of the aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both passive and active lovers … an instance of the way in which common dichotomies are so often resolved in self-actualization, appearing to be valid dichotomies only because people are not healthy enough.[5]

What Maslow expresses may be little more than a prejudice in favour of a certain kind of personality structure, merely another way of compromising between Eros and civilization, nevertheless we are all involved in some such operative compromise. At least Maslow’s terms indicate a direction in which we could travel and not merely a theoretical account of what personality might be like if psychoanalysis accomplished the aim which it has so far not even clearly declared itself or justified to the waiting world, ‘to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation.’[6]

It is surprising but nevertheless it is true that Maslow included some women in his sample of self-realizing personalities. But after all it is foreseeable, even if my arguments about the enculturation of women are correct. In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who decides to go her own way will find that her conditioning is ineradicable, but at least she can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition
• Introduction
• Summary
• Body
• Soul
• Love
• Hate
• Revolution
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher