Feminist crusader Germaine “The Female Eunuch” Grrrrr-reer is back, and she says it’s time to get angry again. Women aren’t liberated after all, she says, reflecting on the women’s movement she helped start.
Instead, as women have sought to imitate men, they are more than ever enslaved to a patriarchal society, she says. Not to be a pill or anything, but I told you so.
Greer examines the failures and follies of the women’s movement in a new book, “The Whole Woman,” which came out in the United States Monday, to coincide with International Women’s Day. This go ’round, Greer is hawking sexual abstinence (well, it’s about time), while dismissing gender equality.
She takes aim at patronizing politicians who put women in high government positions only to turn them into obedient sheep, and at the U.S. health industry, which, she says, has deviously convinced women they should allow their bodies to be “managed.”
Greer, now 60 and on the staff of a British university, criticizes the deceptive selling of in vitro fertilization, which she says has a high failure rate and devastating side effects. She notes the paradox of women seeking breast implants (to satisfy men’s fantasies) when the health industry has a lousy record of detecting and treating breast cancer.
One has to agree with Greer that women who endure bodily mutilations to please the male animal aren’t quite liberated. In a line destined for the next quote compendium, Greer says, “Pamela Anderson’s breasts are raised scars.”
Equality, meanwhile, is a joke on women who still need the punchline explained. Instead of achieving equality of opportunity–a goal all rational Americans embrace–women have merely staged sorry imitations of men.
“To be as competitive, aggressive, lecherous and cruel as men is to be as fragile and miserable as men,” says Greer.
Ouch. Although I’m not ready to be angry at men for women’s failures–or to call them “fragile and miserable”–I agree more than disagree with Greer. Where we part company is that I blame certain women rather than male culture for women’s paradoxical condition.
Those certain women are the self-anointed spokeswomen of the past 30 years who presumed to speak for half the population, many of whom still appreciate courtesy from gentlemen, prefer marriage before children, seek ways to care for their babies instead of farming them out and take responsibility for their own bad choices.
The proper targets of our anger are the “gender feminists,” who, by insisting that men and women are the same, have done more damage than good for many women. By contrast, “equity feminists” believe in equality–equal pay for equal work, for instance–but not sameness.
The distinction between the two is important if we’re ever going to reverse some of the bastard offspring of so-called equality: Coed wrestling and women in combat come to mind, as do sexual promiscuity and the trivialization of motherhood.
Babies in the new world aren’t small souls to be nurtured, loved and protected, but fashion accessories available to anyone with a checking account. I’ll take a blond, blue-eyed boy and a latte, please. Sex isn’t the physical expression of a spiritual union between mature, committed adults; it’s a condiment on life’s daily menu, often followed by the unjust desert of a fatherless child.
No wonder young girls in record numbers are sticking their fingers down their throats. They’ve no clue what they’re supposed to do; neither do the little boys down the lane. Such is the legacy of gender feminism.
Greer’s right. It’s time to get angry again, but only at ourselves. Next revolution, let’s get it straight: Equal, not the same.
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E-mail: kparker@kparker.com
