The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings
Germaine Greer
Language: English
Pages: 305
ISBN: 0871133083
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the youthful liveliness of her sixties pieces, which “got up everybody’s nose,” to the depth and complexity of her later work, The Madwoman’s Underclothes is a reflection both of an era and of the changing ideas and styles of Germaine Greer: “The essays on Brazil, Cuba, and Ethiopia represent my coming of age. Something like a coherent system of values is beginning to emerge after my years of wandering, although I have certainly not arrived at a set of articles of faith, and never will, I hope.”
Greer’s opinions on social, political, and sexual trends and mores are tendered in her unique fashion—outspoken, with rapier wit and no tolerance for narrow-mindedness. But as explosive, angry, and often funny as these essays are, they also reveal tenderness and sadness and that emotion that underlies all of Greer’s work—passionate commitment.
their own spontaneous sexual desire, it is doubtful whether they would ever respond to the servility and insipidity of these images. It will take a good deal of masculinization (which is not the same thing as liberation) to turn women on to the charms of plump boys gazing soulfully through chicken wire, or lying naked in the straw doing a pout directly copied from Jane Russell’s in The Outlaw. Gay pin-ups are on display on all the stands and the chaps, limp or semi-tumescent, are on full-frontal
oddly with the growing peevishness of the Under ground, peevishness now developing into belligerence, with the threat of violence. It is commonplace to remark that a politically decided elite may use the force of this generalized discontent to establish a more repressive system still, but so far the difference between Bolshevik revolution, Maoist revolu tion, Trotskyist revolution and revolution for the hell of it, has only resulted in grotesquely confused skirmishing within the Underground.
ritual execution o f birds on stage. In London he announced his intention to use a chicken in his action Oh Sensibility, but authorities at the NFT (who had already permitted Peter Kochenrath'sfilm ofthe Braunschweig action) prevented it from taking place. Shame to those who stop Otto doing this thing - although presumably he could have gone and done it at home or elsewhere. What one protests against, you see, is enforced assistance as an ignorant and unwitting audi ence is made accomplice to an
forty per cent of the delegates, with thirty-eight per cent of the vote; they had made the McGovem-Fraser guidelines work for them. O f course, some delegations had simply stacked themselves with 131 1970-1979 token females, wives and daughters and whomever, in order to escape a challenge, and for them at least new activism among women had nothing to do with it, but the atmosphere was so electric, the women’s enthusiasm so contagious, that I for one could not keep my heart from beating faster.
it entailed. Sexual intercourse between grown men and little girls is automatically termed rape under most codes of law. It does not matter whether the child invites it or even whether she seduces the adult; he and he only is guilty of a serious felony. From the child’s point of view and from the common sense point of view, there is an enormous difference benveen intercourse with a willing little girl and the forcible penetration of the small vagina of a terrified child. One woman I know enjoyed