THE FEMALE EUNUCH. GERMAINE GREER. 1970.
'To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power… to be freed from guilt and shame and the tireless self discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathise. To claim the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage' (p370).
The core premise of The Female Eunuch1 is that femininity is an artificial construct that “castrates” women, sapping their energy and ambition. In each chapter Greer considers one harmful aspect of femininity, and makes suggestions about what we should do and be instead. The focus of the book is gender stereotypes, not the other, concrete mechanisms of women's oppression such as laws, economics, or physical force. When Greer wrote, women had already achieved the legal right to more freedoms than they cared to utilise. 'The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out' (p14). Greer believes women's emancipation failed because of feminine socialisation and the resulting choices women made. So her focus is on the cultural and social factors that shape women. She says in the foreword that she didn't focus on poor women because she didn't know them at the time she wrote. So the book will not describe the experiences of all women, only those of Greer's social class. But I believe it can still usefully illustrate how artificial, man-made notions of femininity can limit us, and reveal what alternatives we might choose instead.
The book proceeds in five sections, and so shall we: body, soul, love, hate, and revolution.
BODY female, exaggerated
Greer examines the meanings we impose on the body. It is true that men and women are different, but Greer believes we exaggerate the differences and falsely attribute superiority and inferiority to them. She proposes that sedentariness and excess nutrition influence women's bone structure and body fat, creating artificial difference from men. She says women are expected to remove body hair in order to downplay their sexuality and exaggerate their difference from men. And society exaggerates the difficulties of menstruation when it comes to determining women's fitness for public life, but downplays them when asked to take women's pain seriously.
I don't quite agree with Greer on this section. I did briefly research bones and discover that, as one example, pelvic structure indeed owes some variation to environment. But likewise, some of the variation is genetic. Other important differences are entirely prior to culture. For one, men can never conceive, gestate, deliver babies or breastfeed them. That is something only women do, and this fact is profoundly personally and socially significant to us, whether or not we choose childbearing for ourselves. In addition, as we discover more about the body, it seems there are a multitude of minor differences, for example in join laxity, immune function, metabolism, and susceptibility to various diseases. In Invisible Women2 Criado-Perez describes some of these differences and explains why they matter for medical research and treatment. Lastly, although we exaggerate women's smaller size and weakness, there is a relevant average sex difference in strength and aggression. Ignoring it won't help us create a society that's safe for women, any more than exaggerating it ensures our freedom.
SOUL beauty and passivity
Greer's central hypothesis is that women are castrated by their socialisation into femininity. Feminine socialisation renders women inauthentic and impotent, crushes their natural passions and ambitions, and teaches them to deflect their energy, which results in destructive behaviour. Femininity is not womanhood; it is a sexless, inhuman impersonation. As such, Greer says women who do femininity successfully are similar to drag queens or transvestites—all are donning a costume of femininity. In fact, she writes that, as long as womanhood is defined by stereotypes of femininity, male transsexuals are our sisters and 'a casualty of the polarity of the sexes as we all are' (p72). This strikes me as inconsistent, since it is a core part of Greer's project to separate women from man-made femininity. Women would then be defined, presumably, as female people, rather than as feminine people. It is incongruent, then, to suggest that any male person is a woman just because he is (or longs to be) very feminine. In fact, Greer's more recent statements indicate that she either changed or clarified her views, and she very evidently does not believe male people can be women.
Greer focuses on two main feminine stereotypes; beauty and passivity.
beauty obligatory
'Her dominion must not be thought to entail the rule of women, for she is not a woman' (p68).
Greer says the image of beauty we see in the media is not human, nor female, and as such does not represent women's power in the world. Rather, it represents 'the inhuman triumph of cosmetics, lighting, focusing and printing, cropping and composition' (p68-69). The stereotypical beauty object is castrated because she has no desires, only existing to provoke desire in others. She is hairless, poreless, passive, pouting. She is created with expensive products and great effort; with cosmetics, undergarments, foundation garments, outer garments, hair products and styling, wigs, stockings, shoes and jewellery. I think Greer makes an excellent point here. Our cultural images of beauty (which blanket public spaces and our online environments) have little to do with flesh and blood women. In fact, beauty seems to be in many ways a rejection of our female bodies; think of the implants, false eyelashes, dyes, paints, surgeries to scoop out fat, shoes to alter the natural gait, and so on. And indeed, our cultural images of ideal feminine beauty now include cartoon women, CGI women, photoshopped women and male women (drag queens). Actual women don't seem to be necessary or sufficient for feminine beauty, so what are we really admiring and aspiring to when we worship and pursue this ideal?
As an aside, it’s worth noting that the media has recently become more diverse in its depictions of beauty. (Not out of the goodness of its golden heart, but because diversity is becoming profitable, I assume). We can now see a few black women and some older women and some women with different body types portrayed as beautiful in film and advertisements. But they still meet a quite narrow standard of beauty with the help of products, effort and digital image manipulation. The standards are somewhat broadened, but they are still presented as obligatory in order for us to have worth. More diverse standards are better then very narrow ones, but I hope one day we will redefine beauty on our own terms, rejecting the mass media and beauty companies entirely. More importantly, I hope our societies will develop love and admiration for women based on their achievements and character virtues, not merely their beauty. At present, it feels as though there is hardly any cultural space for old women, plain women, average women, or undecorated women, let alone ugly women, to be respected and to enjoy self respect.
passivity: energy destroyed
Greer believes girls and women are taught to deflect, repress, and subvert their natural energies. Instead of being encouraged in curiosity and passion, girls and women are taught to please and support others. This means that, even when women pursue career and education, the “feminine” pattern is already set and they tend to fall into supporting roles for men. Mere formal equality won't bring about women's liberation as long as women are taught passivity and choose to spend their energy on men rather than their own ambitions.
The crushing of women's energy starts young. Greer believes we deliberately increase babies' dependence on their mothers, and instil rules and fears that act as an “internal monitor” in their minds. We treat girls and boys similarly up to a certain age, then begin crushing the “psychic energy” of girls more intensely. Girls haemorrhage their energy at school in trying to stay still and quiet. We set up rewards and punishments that train girls to use their cuteness to manipulate others, instead of teaching them independence. Girls are supervised more, and taught to fear the world and think of themselves as victims. We rarely teach them to fight and defend themselves, however. There are many “tomboys” who rebel against feminine socialisation, until puberty thwarts them. But Greer thinks the girls most likely to submit early to their socialisation are those who are spoiled and flattered the most.
'What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine' (p102).
Greer says adolescent girls are passionate and idealistic, but are gradually taught to conceal or disown their feelings, especially girls who have sexual and love feelings for other girls. Girls are taught to become sexually passive and objectify themselves. Their childhood adventure fantasies fade and are replaced with fantasies of being the passive object in a romance story. Girls' sexual interactions with males are based on their attractiveness as sexual objects, and since their own sexual desires would interfere with these interactions, girls suppress them. 'It is not uncommon for a girl seeking 'popularity' or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself' (p98).
Greer argues that adult women are taught to rely on others instead of seeking autonomy. The fact that femininity requires so much guidance proves it is artificial. It is also a terrible guide to a good life. The Freudian ideal in particular—woman as a lovely helpmeet to her man—doesn't allow a woman to be fully human, because her significance and life's meaning depend entirely on her husband and children.'Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice' (p109).
Greer's account of crushed energy and internal monitoring resonates with me. I feel that modern schooling may crush the energies of many children, including boys. But I think feminine socialisation can be especially limiting because, at worst, it encourages selflessness and humility to a pathological degree, while sexual objectification and everyday disrespect rob us of self esteem. And while I feel that partnerships and childrearing can be parts of a good life for those who desire them, I agree with Greer that they should not be treated as a complete replacement for all other interests and ambitions.
LOVE and other substitutes
Real love, says Greer, emerges from narcissism. She doesn't mean the personality disorder. She means that we recognise sameness in others, something that makes them a reflection or extension of ourselves. We love what is alike to ourselves, and this has been understood as the basis for love when it comes to “the brotherhood of man” but not when it comes to love between men and women, where we assume the opposite; that opposites attract. But in fact, when the novelty wears off, difference becomes incompatibility: 'Feminine women… 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' (p158). Meanwhile, women are crippled in their ability to love other women, because they are socialised out of this healthy “narcissism”. 'They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves' (p161).
Greer says young women cannot get enough of romantic fiction, in which they invent the male who is tender, masterful, and totally devoted. But romance is not love, and the romantic hero is not like real men. Infatuation and obsession are also not love. Greer argues that the myth of “falling in love” (i.e. developing an obsession) is used to rush women into marriage. Despite the evidence that so many women are unhappy in marriage, women cling to the myth and hope that their marriage will be the happy exception, just as some people hope to win the lottery. It doesn't occur to women to 'seek the cause of their unhappiness in the myth itself' (p242). Together with our cultural fantasies of romance, the false portrayal of love as obsession creates expectations in women that will be disappointed when they are actually settled in their marriages, and their husbands’ motivation for adulation and flattery is gone. 'Romance had been the one adventure open to her and now it is over…Romance is now her private dream' (p209-210). Greer's solution is that we must give up the fantasy of romance, and stop pinning our hopes for happiness on marriage. We must choose liberty and real love.
I found this section thought-provoking. Many 'romance' stories depict two people falling in love as an entire plot, but rarely do we see what happens afterwards. The book or film ends when the lovers get together, presumably because having a mate, even one you love, is not a life or a story by itself. Girls and women definitely need other stories, other pursuits and interests, as well.
egotism and altruism
Greer says men and women treat each other as extensions of their egos within relationships. Men jealously demand fidelity from women, since infidelity threatens their egos. Women are jealous because they fear abandonment. Both men and women like to show off a desirable partner to others, since they feel it reflects their own worthiness. But this is not love.
Altruism is also not love. Greer writes that women are encouraged to sacrifice themselves for others, but this can only ever be inauthentic and motivated by ulterior purposes: 'it is unfortunately chimeric. We cannot be liberated from ourselves, and we cannot act in defiance of our own motivations' (p169). Women who seem to be altruistic actually expect something in return. Mothers use it to guilt children and control them. And wives expect security and monogamy. 'It cannot properly speaking be called self-sacrifice at all. It is in fact a kind of commerce, and one in which the female must always be the creditor' (p171). In other words, women self-sacrifice with the specific hope that it will bind men to them and ensure their security. Greer says this will be a part of female behaviour as long as women are non-reciprocally dependent on men. Personally, I think this need to be the emotional “creditor” and not the debtor will be familiar to women, many of whom are trained into an intense fear of being deemed selfish or a “taker” rather than a “giver”.
family and security
Greer says that in the past, women's movement was restricted and they were carefully guarded in order to prevent infidelity and ensure paternity (at least when there was private wealth to bequeath to heirs). Greer says modern women make voluntary promises of fidelity as part of a contract exchanging assurance of paternity for economic support.
I don't think this is the whole story, though. Don't both parties to a marriage expect fidelity, emotional support and companionship? It's not immediately obvious to me that jealousy and monogamy are unnatural or socialised—after all, fidelity and promiscuity are both found in animal species, which suggests neither is a human invention. Greer says that we should learn from older women's experiences that marriage doesn't work. I wonder if she is only opposed to traditional, inegalitarian marriages, or to all long term partnerships between men and women? The practice of marriage seems to have changed over the last decades, while the word has remained the same. So I can’t know if second wave feminists would object to, say, the most egalitarian of today’s sexual partnerships. Personally, I think finding a long term mate is important to many people, and I don't see this changing any time soon. I do think women should be picky and develop other aspects of their lives instead of placing their hopes for happiness solely on another person, however. If women and girls are unhappy and unwilling to be alone, then they will not be in a strong position to refuse bad partnerships.
Greer thinks the nuclear family is isolating, and locks couples into a pattern of household spending and consumption that makes them conservative and reliant on their employers. She thinks we could arrange things differently. Not all women must have children, and not all mothers must be the primary caretakers of the children they do have: 'Most societies countenance the deputizing of nurses to bring up the children of women with state duties. The practice… did not result in a race of psychopaths. A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual' (p262-63).
Greer says women try to attain security through marriage. By trying to fix everything in its place we instead achieve 'the denial of life' (p270). Security can mean restriction; a wife and family trap the male worker with a mortgage and household consumption. And women are not made secure by marriage any more than a worker who accepts lower pay for the promise of lifelong employment. They could be “laid off” at any time. Nor can marriage deliver emotional security, because that 'is the achievement of the individual' (p275). We sneer at insecure women, but women are merely aware of the fact that they could be abandoned. When we ask women not be insecure, we ask them to pretend that they are secure and to take no measures to protect their interests. Greer says women should give up the false security offered in the bargain of marriage, and choose free associations instead.
I partly agree with Greer here. I think it's quite normal to seek financial and emotional security, and the problem is not that we seek it, but that women are encouraged to place responsibility for their security in men's hands and not their own. Women should have sources of happiness other than their mate and children, and they should take steps to ensure their material security and independence, too. If their partnership goes as well as they hope, they will be no worse off. If it goes badly, they will not be trapped.
HATE men hating women, women hating themselves
'Women have very little idea of how much men hate them' (p279).
Greer says that men view available women as 'slags' and unavailable ones as 'bitches'. They fear being trapped in marriage. Male writers pretend that women are secret sluts whose distress at men's harassment is actually a thin disguise for their passionate desire to be degraded. She writes that men see ejaculation as disgusting and they project this disgust onto their partners. They treat women as spittoons, receptacles to empty themselves into and then distance themselves from. While I don't personally know any men who reveal such attitudes, such men can certainly be found without great difficulty, and indeed it is scarcely possible to use the internet without encountering them.
Greer says rape is not the result of uncontrollable lust but of murderous hatred. 'A certain kind of male imagines that women are all the time flaunting themselves to inflame his senses and deny him, in order to build up their deficient egos. He imagines that women get away with outrageous exploitation of male susceptibility' (p301). I don’t know if this characterises all misogynists or rapists, but Greer’s description here perfectly foretells the kind of rhetoric used by “incels” (online misogynists who are enraged by women denying them sexual attention).
Greer writes that our culture is steeped in “cunt-hatred”. At around the turn of the 20th century, doctors in America treated female masturbation with clitorectomy, though 'such a remedy for male masturbation has never been suggested' (p291). Female genital mutilation and particularly infibulation are similarly hateful and punitive. Learned self-loathing is a factor in some women's “compulsive self-abasement”, which includes invitations to men to degrade them. Women apologise for their bodies, try to change them, and are disgusted with themselves. We might add to Greer's list the increasing rate of women seeking labiaplasty, probably driven by the airbrushed female genitals in pornography (for a detailed critique of labiaplasty, see Sheila Jeffreys' Beauty and Misogyny3).
Greer lists common insults that reduce women to their genitals and describe these in the most crass terms. She also lists both friendly and unfriendly terms for women that describe them as foods or animals. She notes that it's common to joke about murdering women out of frustration with their failings. 'Another kind of humorous insult that women take in good part is the drag artists' grotesque guying of female foibles' (p304). Though some drag acts are done in love and celebration and show that femininity is arbitrary, artificial, and has nothing to do with femaleness, others are hateful caricatures of women. If we want these insults to stop, Greer says women must give up femininity and the affectations of silliness and helplessness they use to charm men.
Personally, I'm not that giving up femininity would work, since misogynistic men have as much animosity and as many insults for women who reject femininity as they do for those who conform. I also wonder what Greer would say about the very popular television show, Ru Paul's Drag Race, which has played a central role in introducing drag queens into mainstream culture. I'd say it consists mostly of sexist caricatures, and that it could nevertheless reveal the artificiality of femininity, if people were to view it critically (they don't). My full thoughts on the show are here.
ineffective rebellions
'It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practice oppression on their own behalf' (p353).
Greer says that rebellion must be consciously chosen and justified in order to be effective. It cannot be a mere reaction.
Betty Friedan, according to Greer, was not radical, because she wanted women to have the same things that men suffer from: university, career, and stress-induced heart attacks. But we need more than equal opportunity; women must learn to desire opportunity rather than fearing it. And we don't just need equal pay for equal work because the conditions of work must change.
Greer insists that violence is not a solution but a red herring. And it only makes sense to identify men as “the enemy” so long as they act out their masculine role within patriarchy. 'Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off' (p335). Joining male-led leftist organisations is not a solution, since they reproduce male hierarchies and put women last. Celibacy and political lesbianism are not solutions, since separatists find relief from the status quo but have little effect on it.
First, I like that Greer identifies men's behaviour as the problem rather than men, innately. Although it is important to be able to identify men and woman as classes, and to describe their collective interests, it is also true at the individual level that our behaviour is what makes us allies or enemies of women's liberation. There is no logical reason why men cannot refuse to understand their interests in the narrow, selfish way suggested by patriarchal values, and reconceive their interests in harmony with women's. And indeed some do. Second, although separatism may not be practical as a large scale solution for all women, having the option of separate living enhances women's bargaining power so they will be in a better position if they do choose to remain involved with men. Women-only spaces and communities could also be fertile ground for experimenting and developing other, non-hierarchical forms of social life. And many women could find it very valuable to spend at least some time in separate spaces, for healing and consciousness raising. And lastly, separate social spaces might be particularly valuable as a haven to lesbians, who can come under intense social pressure to be involved with men against their wills. We should therefore support and fund separate spaces, even as we continue trying to change the rest of society in other ways, as well.
Greer has listed everything she thinks is not revolutionary, so what is?
REVOLUTIONS
'The first significant discovery we shall make… is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free' (p371).
Greer says we can't wait for the destruction of private property and socialism; we have to rescue our lives right now and make what we can of them. But people don't give up their cherished gender roles just because the law changes. We need to actively resist, by withdrawing our cooperation. We must refuse to do things, and refuse to want to do them. Women should stop admiring and rewarding violent men. They should give up their insistence on 'marrying up' or matching with 'superior' men as a prop for their egos. With regards to sex, we should take the emphasis off male genitals and endorse a holistic human sexuality for which women take their share of responsibility.
(Here I should include a brief aside on sexuality. In the foreword to the 21st anniversary edition, Greer explains that when she wrote the book, she thought it most important to emphasise women's freedom to express themselves sexually. Now, though, she thinks it equally important to emphasise 'a woman's right to reject male advances' (p10). There was a similar caveat in McKinnons’s foreword to Millet's Sexual Politics. It is interesting to see how feminist understanding has evolved. It seems to me that women's sexual liberation has not eliminated everyday male sexual predation—harassment, coercion, assault, and so on. With the normalisation of pornography and its entry into mainstream culture, women scarcely lack freedom to express sexuality, at least in ways that are compatible with male interests. The more urgent task now, as McKinnon and Greer suggest, is establishing women's rights: to boundaries; to be viewed as people and not sexual objects; to non-sexualised time and space; and to freedom from male sexual demands.)
Greer says women shouldn't marry. But married women are an important part of the movement for women's emancipation and cannot be excluded. They must simply set aside their guilt and fear, and use what bargaining power they have. Women must refuse to be chief consumers of the household. They must buy less, or unbranded, and share things like washing machines. It is fine for women to use cosmetics and clothes expressively, but not to cover their imperfections in order to bring them up to a minimum standard of acceptableness: 'Cooking, clothes, beauty and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient' (p366). Such things can be done for fun but the key is spontaneity, pleasure and rejecting the norm. (How interesting! I had picked up the impression that all radical feminists are staunchly opposed to makeup. Greer, it seems, is not.)
Finally, women must be honest and courageous, and take joy in the struggle. Cajoling, pleading, politeness and pretending are ineffective and demeaning.
REFLECTIONS
Greer admits that she doesn't write about poor women. This book, then, is about middle class women with formal legal equality and some economic opportunities, who nevertheless get trapped in performances of femininity that encourage them to make the wrong choices in life. In that sense, the book is similar to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, even though Greer criticises Friedan as not radical. Greer is more radical in that she criticises love, marriage, and family. But her argument takes a similar course, identifying cultural expectations of femininity that limit women. The difference is that Friedan clearly identified some of the cultural agents who were most responsible for generating the culture of femininity at the time (Freudians, functionalists, advertisers, magazine writers). Greer mentions some specific sources of the ideas she discusses: advertisements, books and film/tv, popular discourse, drag queens, and men generally. But for the most part her focus is not on the agents who create culture, but on women's responsibility to resist and choose differently. Women must reject the messages, the conditioning, the temptations, the exhortations, of our culture.
I think this is an important argument, and a part of the solution. We can easily get caught up in resentment and feelings of powerlessness if we focus on what our culture does to us (with good reason). But obviously the culture makers won't change on their own initiative. So our own feelings and behaviour are one possible point of leverage. However, I do not think that the choices and feelings of individual women can be the primary solution to cultural sexism or to sex based injustice. There are still considerable economic and legal barriers to many women's liberation, even if Greer is reasonably well off in that regard. Men's violence against women is also a serious injustice. There is no pretending that this is a problem of women choosing stereotypical femininity, and I was a little uncomfortable about Greer's dismissal of the threat of male violence as mostly for show, and easily turned aside. Violence is something that men choose to do, and that our governments fail to effectively prevent and sanction as they do other crimes.
Also, culture does not simply generate itself from our choices. It is deliberately designed and promulgated by culture makers with extraordinary wealth and calculated strategies to influence our behaviour. Advertisers, for example, do not merely have an idle liking for femininity and glamour. Rather, they have concrete plans to undermine our self esteem and manufacture desires in order to nudge us to spend money on their products. In the face of massively funded, ubiquitous, tightly orchestrated and ruthlessly calculated efforts to influence our behaviour, our response must be equally strategic. An individual choice not to comply can be part of the plan, but other responses are needed, too.
What was most useful about The Female Eunuch? Firstly, I appreciated Greer's very clear criticism of feminine beauty as an artificial, man-made stereotype having little to do with real women. It provoked me to think about what we're really valuing when we value feminine beauty (not women, I think). Greer's explorations of romance, love and marriage were also useful. She says that girl's fantasies change from stories of adventure to the story of 'falling in love' that we want to relive over and over. That tracks with the experience I had of the narratives presented to me in film, television and books as I was growing up. The falling in love story is popular but… what happens afterwards? Like achieving beauty, it feels like a dead end. Girls need different stories, more active stories, to grow up with. Greer also insightfully ties traditional marriage to consumerism, and explains how nuclear families get trapped in cycle of consumption and earning.
Lastly, I greatly valued Greer's uninhibited, unselfconscious style of writing, and the fact that she was not prevented from opining honestly by the fear of making mistakes or giving offence. Whether or not I agree with Greer on every point, she is a role model for courageous, forthright speech.
'The key to the strategy of liberation lies in exposing the situation, and the simplest way to do it is to outrage the pundits and the experts by sheer impudence of speech and gesture' (p368).
Greer, Germaine. 2006. The Female Eunuch. London: Harper Perennial.
Criado-Perez, Caroline. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press.
Jeffreys, Sheila. 2015. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Second edition. Women and Psychology. Hove, East Sussex ; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.