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.
enjoyment like the naïve pride of the Wife of Bath in the way that she made her husbands swink. For many humanists the pleasure itself became dubious, and the chase after the sexual object was seen as delusive, even when the lady proved complaisant, for the pleasure was not equal to the fantasms of the lust-stirred brain. But the more the neo-platonists sought to devalue sex, sense and sensory information, the more empiricism flourished, and the more sexual desire, distorted, sublimated, or
the definition of history and society.5 A much more naïve attempt to prove that the struggle of women against oppression was a part of the class struggle had been made as early as 1954, by Evelyn Reed, in the October Discussion Bulletin of the Socialist Workers’ Party, in which she attempts to prove that sex rivalry and the emergence of women as sexual objects were the results exclusively of bourgeois capitalism. She invoked the notion of a primitive society free from any form of sex
aching facial muscles brought on by the obligatory smiles. Discretion is the better part of Valerie though all of her is nice lips as warm as strawberries eyes as cold as ice the very best of everything only will suffice not for her potatoes and puddings made of rice Roger McGough, ‘Discretion’ So what is the beef? Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and
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
advise the love-lorn, a term which has sinister connotations if only anyone ever understood it, what love is not, which is no guide to what it is. Love is not mere thrill or passing pleasure. It is not escape from loneliness or boredom, nor is it a comfortable adjustment for practical convenience or mutual benefit. It is not a one-way feeling, and it can’t be made two-way by wishing or willing it so. The adolescent lover following this rule of thumb may be excused for feeling a little