THE FEMALE EUNUCH by Germaine Greer

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the first American publication of The Female Eunuch, a book that's still readable, still provocative, still beyond-the-pale outrageous at times. Today it serves as a reminder that once upon a time, not too long ago, feminism was a genuinely revolutionary movement. At the time of Greer's writing, "second wave" feminism had only just emerged from the New Left and had yet to trifurcate into (a) the gender-equity branch of corporate capitalism, (b) an area of specialization for bourgeois careerist academics, and (c) a Victorian anti-sex discourse puritanical enough to warm Jesse Helm's nonexistent heart. If feminism had followed a less careerist and more Greerist path--or, alternatively, if it had returned to its Modernist roots in Simone de Beauvoir's existentialism instead of pretending that Judith Butler and Kate Millet were major and original thinkers--it might've been less 'successful' (as success is measured in corporatist America) but more useful as an ideology of revolutionary change. Feminism would've been less easy to co-opt and de-fang--or to hold in protective custody on the game preserves for radical ideas that America's college campuses have become.

The Female Eunuch is dated, as any 40 year-old topical polemic must be, but my most serious complaint is that the chapters aren't long enough. In a book this radical and important, size does matter, and Greer's chapters aren't big enough to successfully contain their enormous topics. The 'Sex' chapter, for example, a mere eight (!) pages, could and should have been an entire 300-page book (or an even longer and deeper one) with individual chapters on each of the topics briefly discussed here. I would've liked to have seen more of Greer's truly amazing discoveries in 17th- and 18th-century medical books (the quote from Samuel Collins reads like the tip of an iceberg of remarkable medical prose that remains unknown and unread today); the chapter's critique of the technologization of sex (a process synonymous with the names Masters and Johnson, those masters of johnson mastery) is still provocative today; and Greer's criticism of tame, vanilla, popular culture sexual imagery as basically counterrevolutionary is deeply compelling. (Her example--not as dated as we'd like to believe--is a 'sex scene' from an early Jackie Collins novel. Greer's reading of the passage is delightful, like Virginia Woolf with a filthy mouth: "Miss Collins's heroine is prudish, passive, calculating, selfish and dull, despite her miraculous expanding tits.") I could've read a whole book of this sort of stuff, so I was disappointed when this chapter, and most of the others, came to so sudden an end.