This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 39, Summer 1999.
Today’s publishing industry is controlled by huge conglomerates, driven by market forces and obsessed with the bottom line. Increasing pressure to maximise profits has encouraged a publishing ‘cult of celebrity’: books are sold on the strength of the author’s name rather than on the strength of the ideas inside them, and the effort put into promoting a book is directly proportional to the fame of the writer. Feminism is not exempt from this tendency. In the 1990s, a great deal of public discussion of gender issues has revolved around books by ‘celebrity’ feminists (and celebrity antifeminists like Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe). Big names may generate big profits, but do they produce anything feminists might actually want to read? Debbie Cameron put one of this year’s most hyped celebrity offerings, Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, to the test…
Mary Ellman once observed that male criticism of women’s literature often boiled down to ‘a literary measuring of busts and hips’. Critics ignored the writing and focused instead on the attributes of the writer. This rule now applies to feminist writing too: you can bet that any review of a book by Andrea Dworkin will at some point contain the word ‘dungarees’. What has changed (and this is not an improvement) is that the critic, nowadays, will probably be a woman.
In her latest book The Whole Woman Germaine Greer remarks on male editors’ apparent delight in setting women to attack other women, so she probably was not surprised when women reviewers lined up to trash her. ‘What would Germaine Greer know about the whole woman, she’s never been married or had children’ was one common response. ‘What would she know about the whole woman, she’s a rich overeducated media celebrity’ was another.
I can’t remember anyone suggesting that Camille Paglia cannot speak for or about women, though exactly the same arguments would apply to her too. And I can’t imagine that if Mrs Nobody, an obscure housewife and mother, wrote a 350-page treatise on the condition of women today, the Natashas and Nigellas would deign to notice it. It’s because of Germaine Greer’s celebrity status, and her reputation as a mad old bat (rather than a happily married mother of two) that her book is a media event and gets reviewed in every newspaper. Yet according to the reviewers (many of them media personalities themselves) it cannot be a good book because the woman who wrote it is a single, childless celebrity.
If that’s objective or illuminating comment, I’ll eat next week’s Observer. If a book is that bad, why bore us with the details? The answer is, ‘because Germaine Greer is famous’. However idiotic the utterances of the celebrated, the one thing they cannot be denied is the oxygen of publicity. This means that many interesting books by people we haven’t heard of never get reviewed at all.
I am not saying Germaine Greer’s book is idiotic — just pointing out that if it was, one perfectly reasonable response would be to ignore it. Before I saw the reviews I was planning to do just that: I had no more desire to engage with The Whole Woman than with any other product of the celebrity blockbuster industry (women’s issues subdivision). But the hostile media responses made me want to read it; they made me want to take it seriously; they even made me want to like it.
The promotional posters were promising, emblazoned with the rallying cry: ‘It’s time to get angry again’ And I was pleased to note that the book had indeed got certain readers angry — power-dressed post-feminists, unreconstructed Trots and surgically reconstructed transsexuals, for instance. Sad to say, though, my own blood did not boil when I read it, and my intellect was not fully engaged either.
Female Eunuch II: this time it’s personal
Germaine Greer made her name with The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970, and The Whole Woman is billed as the sequel she swore at the time she would never write. In the first section, titled ‘recantation’ (all sections have one-word lower-case titles — ‘body’, ‘mind’, ‘love’, ‘power’), she explains why she changed her mind. In a nutshell, she got angry again, notably with those women of her own generation who now whinge incessantly about feminism getting it wrong/going too far/achieving nothing.
Germaine Greer thinks feminism did not go far enough for long enough. As she sees it, we gave up the struggle for liberation (just as we gave up calling ourselves the ‘women’s liberation movement’) and settled down to the more respectable pursuit of equality. This shift may have made feminism more acceptable in the mainstream, but it has undermined more fundamental challenges to a system based on women’s subordination. The symbolic, everyday enactment of that subordination — the cluster of traits and behaviours that constitute femininity — has not withered away, but on the contrary seems to be flourishing and spreading. ‘Thirty years on’ Germaine Greer observes, ‘femininity is still compulsory for women and has become an option for men, while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity’ (p.2).
To the extent that The Whole Woman has an overarching argument, this sentence will serve as a fair potted summary of it; and it illustrates one of the main reasons why my own response to the book is ambivalent. I agree with the argument about liberation versus equality (though I could wish Germaine Greer acknowledged that some feminists remain committed to radical goals — some of us don’t need to get angry again because we never calmed down in the first place), and also with the argument about compulsory femininity. These points may have gone out of fashion but they haven’t, alas, gone out of date.
What I don’t like, however, is the way the argument is framed in terms of an opposition between the artificial (femininity) and the real (‘genuine femaleness’). What is implicit in the sentence I quoted above becomes more explicit in passages like the following:
…female is essence and feminine social construct. Deciding which behaviours mirror female and which the castrated form of feminine is not easy, until menopause burns off the impurities. What remains in the crucible after that proof is the whole woman (p.232).
The problem with this line of argument is, as soon as you assert that ‘female is essence’ you raise the question of what is female, and thus essential — a futile question which positively invites dodgy answers. (The answer actually given here — you’ll know what’s female when you’ve been purified by the menopause — is a good illustration of this dodginess.) The question is futile because there has never been and will never be a situation where women exist in a state of pure femaleness, outside a social context. Femininity as we know it is undoubtedly a worthless and oppressive charade, but this is not because it falls short of some state of female nature, it is because it forms part of a system in which women are treated as less than fully human. The opposition that matters is not between artifice and reality, it is between servitude and freedom; being free is not the same thing as being true to your supposed ‘nature’.
The most obvious answers to the question ‘what is female?’ are unpalatable because they will inevitably tend to the lowest common denominator, namely biology. In the 200-plus pages that precede the statement quoted above, Germaine Greer explicitly or implicitly proposes that among the essential attributes of the whole woman are her body, heterosexuality, the capacity and desire to mother children, and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to masturbation. Later she will suggest that women are in essence more cooperative than men. This catalogue of essential traits is more or less indistinguishable from what any old misogynist (or new Darwinist) would come up with if invited to pontificate on the same subject. But an equally important criticism of it is that we cannot know if it is true, precisely because it is impossible to separate out the effects of nature and nurture in any real population of human beings: they are inextricably interwoven.
On other issues (notably the question of whether male aggression has its roots in culture or testosterone) Germaine Greer makes this argument herself. On the issue of ‘which behaviours mirror female and which the castrated form of feminine’, however, she reserves the right to apply a simple rule of her own invention: if she approves of it then it must be ‘essence’, if not then it must be ‘construct’. Apart from being intellectually unpersuasive, this is not a useful creed for a political movement seeking to build — that is, construct — a better world.
In general, Germaine Greer seems not too bothered about inconsistency. Writing about ‘girl power’ as a cynical marketing concept in an ever more sexualised western consumer culture, she comments: ‘Nobody observing the incitement of little girls to initiate sexual contact with boys can remain unconcerned. …the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm’ (p.319). I agree; but I also remember what she said a couple of hundred pages earlier about female genital mutilation carried out on Kenyan girls of about the same age. Although it would be inaccurate to say she defends FGM unreservedly, Germaine Greer refuses to condemn it outright, suggesting it needs to be understood in context, as a rite of passage to womanhood. But doesn’t ‘womanhood’ in this context mean eligibility for marriage, and thus the exposure of a young woman’s vagina and cervix to the penis of her husband? If heterosex and pregnancy are bad for the ‘baby’ body of her western counterpart, why are they OK for her?
What’s at work here, I suspect, is the venerable western tradition of idealising the ‘noble savage’. The western feminist writer in search of the ‘whole woman’ is like the male enlightenment philosopher of the 1700s looking for the true essence of ‘man’, uncorrupted by the trappings of ‘civilisation’ (or in this case, western consumer capitalism), and she looks in much the same places. But this attitude just places obstacles in the way of feminists elsewhere, who are struggling, not for the imposition of western values but for an end to the local forms of women’s oppression. If ‘the whole woman’ is a woman not subject to cultural norms and practices that subordinate her, then there are no ‘whole women’, anywhere.
When she isn’t tying herself in the knots of cultural relativism, Germaine Greer is capable of talking a lot of sense, without mincing her words. She is one of very few 1960s-vintage, straight and left-identified feminists I can think of who has not capitulated either to the maunderings of postmodernism or to the uncritical celebration of women’s ‘agency’, which usually means their ‘freedom’ to get fucked by men. On that subject, Germaine Greer observes briskly that one major beneficiary of sexual ‘liberation’ has been the sex industry, and that ‘a person working as a prostitute to fund a drug habit is the least free individual on the planet’ (p.6).
She is equally bracing on the issue of sexual identity, rejecting the idea that people are born gay or straight, so that a woman who becomes a lesbian must in some sense be discovering her ‘true’ sexuality. ‘It is at least as likely that the woman has changed, that she has developed from being the subordinate partner in a heterosexual relationship…and moved to a new kind of relationship between equals’ (p.237). She also reminds us that not all love is sexual, and reasserts the value of women’s friendships. Radical feminists will not find these observations revelatory, but they may appreciate the elegance and force of the expression.
But I digress…
The words above were written soon after I finished reading The Whole Woman. I then got distracted by other things for about a week; and when I returned to writing this review I realised there was nothing more I wanted to say about the ideas in the book. If I had really hated it I would not have had this difficulty, any more than if I had really liked it. But it failed to stir any kind of passion; reading it was like eating something generic and uninspiring, a bowl of cereal or a limp pre-packaged salad. When you start it tastes OK; half way through you’re getting bored (though you’re occasionally perked up by a stray raisin or a sliver of garlic); by the time you finish you’re not hungry any more, but you’re not exactly satisfied either.
So I started thinking about why I was so half-hearted about The Whole Woman. And reluctantly, I concluded that it did have something to do with the identity of the author. The truth is, many of the things I found troubling, or unsatisfying, or just plain irritating about it are attributable to its being a book by ‘Germaine Greer’. (I put her name in quotation marks here to signify that I am talking not about the person Germaine Greer, whom I do not know, but the publishing commodity ‘Germaine Greer’.) If ‘Germaine Greer’ were an isolated case the point wouldn’t be worth dwelling on. In fact, though, more and more of the books we are urged to read, the exhibitions or performances we are urged to see and even the charitable and political campaigns we are exhorted to join or contribute to, are conceived and marketed on the basis of commodified personal celebrity. If you want to raise standards of numeracy, don’t look for an outstanding maths teacher to front your campaign, get Carol Vorderman from Countdown. If you want the public to give money to a good cause, it isn’t enough to show them people in obvious need, you have to associate the cause with some popular personality (like Princess Diana with landmines).
I think this cult of celebrity is a bad thing in general, but its effect on feminism seems to me particularly pernicious. So with apologies to T&S readers who were looking for a more exhaustive account of The Whole Woman, I’d like to go back to the point I began with: the problem of Germaine Greer’s celebrity, and more generally of the celebrity feminist book.
The cult of celebrity and the pitfalls of popularity
Like any other market commodity, ‘Germaine Greer’ has her brand image. She is expected to shock, to utter controversial views and take up unorthodox positions whose distinctive feature is that no one ‘respectable’ agrees with them. In The Whole Woman she repeats many of the views that have bolstered her claim to outrageousness in the past: that women make too much of rape, that no sex is preferable to bad sex, that HRT is a swindle with few real benefits to most of those who take it, that women are liberated by the loss of sexual desire as they age. She has also found a couple of new things to be controversial about, notably cancer screening programmes (ineffective at saving lives but very effective at keeping women fearful) and transsexuals (you do not produce ‘genuine femaleness’, or maleness, through surgery, and FTM transsexuals have no business representing themselves as women).
Actually I agree with some of these sentiments, and I imagine many other radical feminists will too. What bothers me is less the conclusions Germaine Greer comes to than the way she gets there: the sweeping quality of her arguments, her failure to spend long enough on anything to tease out the full complexity of it, the way she expects us not to notice or care if what she says on page 99 is inconsistent with what she says on page 300, her sometimes careless and cursory research. Since she cannot be writing exclusively for the very small audience that agrees with her already, her apparent disdain for the apparatus of reasoned persuasion might suggest that she is not actually trying to persuade, but merely setting out as usual to be provocative in the style of ‘Germaine Greer’.
The structure and format of The Whole Woman just encourages the resort to easy aphorisms and sweeping statements. It is a relatively long book composed of very short chapters (the jacket copy refers to them, ickily, as ‘chapterkins’) in which no topic can be explored at sufficient length to do it justice. I have already commented on the stylishly minimal section and chapter titles; another stylistic tic is the insertion throughout of bits of boxed text, which range from poems to lists of masturbation techniques. These items are not commented on directly, just dropped in for us to make of them what we will. In some cases I made nothing much of them, and after a hundred pages or so I was tired of the whole device.
I imagine the format was a marketing decision, aimed at making the book both ‘cool’ and accessible to a wide audience. But this notion of ‘accessibility’ is one I have some problems with, since the main assumption behind it appears to be that the intended reader has the concentration span of a gnat. She cannot process long continuous stretches of prose, but needs her reading-matter broken up into bite-size ‘chapterkins’, with a box every couple of pages to distract her. At the risk of sounding like an old schoolmarm instead of a multimedia-literate, 21st century kind of gal, I doubt whether serious political analysis can usefully be couched in a style which is the printed analogue of MTV.
When Germaine Greer spoke at an event promoting the book in London, she said that she had deliberately set out to write a ‘non-academic’ book. She acknowledged the value of at least some work produced by feminist academics, but pointed out that the work of academics has very little impact on mainstream public discourse, because almost no one reads it. As I interpret what she said, she figured she could exploit the cultural conditions in which only celebrity sells, using her own celebrity to advance the feminist cause. I think her intentions were probably good. But I also think the strategy is a miscalculation.
I should probably declare an interest here, in that I am myself a feminist academic (as indeed is Germaine Greer, who was described on my ticket to her promotional talk, introduced and very pointedly addressed as ‘Professor’). But still, I want to ask how much is really gained, in current economic and cultural conditions, by feminists adopting the trappings, not of ‘accessibility’ (which I would define simply as writing in a way readers can understand) but of popularity, which is defined by the standards of the mass media. Media coverage and subsequent sales are a measure of what matters to the publishing industry — profits — but for several reasons I would question if they measure what matters, or should matter, to feminists.
Famous for fifteen minutes?
First of all, I think ‘impact on mainstream public discourse’ has come to be far too closely identified with being noticed and discussed in the small, self-referential world of the media. If your book is reviewed in the upmarket Sunday papers and discussed on Start the Week and The Late Review, have you really had an impact on ‘public discourse’? Or have you simply made yourself famous for fifteen minutes, among people whose opinions and behaviour are unlikely to change as a result?
Most media discussions are superficial, uncommitted and ephemeral — tomorrow the same pundits will have moved on to something completely different. Media publicity has a short-term effect in terms of sales, but that need not translate into anything more profound. Many of those who buy a book because they learned from the media it was currently ‘hot’ will not read it, while many more will skim-read without thinking at all deeply about what they are reading.
Unfortunately, to obtain this commercially useful but politically empty result, the feminist author will have been encouraged by her publisher to do various politically questionable things. Write in media-friendly soundbites (or ‘chapterkins’); go easy on the footnotes; court controversy for its own sake; agree to the use of her ‘image’ as a marketing tool. Germaine Greer has done all of these things, and no doubt they have had the desired effect from the publisher’s point of view, but they have also caused her to write a book that is not as useful as it might have been for feminist purposes, while making her fair game for every kind of personal abuse.
With that in mind, I think it’s time to question the feminist tendency to reserve our deepest suspicion for ‘academic’ writing. Pretentious incomprehensible writing is a bad thing wherever it may be found (and that isn’t just in academia); but in today’s publishing industry, I would argue that an even greater threat is dumbing down for the bottom line. Actually, you could argue that these apparently opposite faults are essentially just two sides of a single coin (and the word ‘coin’ is apt, because we are talking about publishers’ profits). Pretentious books and dumb books are each aimed at their own market niche: they are, respectively, the Giorgio Armani and the Top Shop of publishing. And between them they are squeezing out the kind of nonfiction publishing that is of most use to most feminists: books which are at the same time informative, decently researched, thought provoking and readable. Books that wouldn’t be out of place on an academic reading list, but which could also be read with pleasure and profit by any woman with a modicum of curiosity and intelligence. Overall The Whole Woman falls short of that standard, not because (on the evidence of some of her other work) Germaine Greer is incapable of meeting it, but because of the constraints of ‘popular’ publishing.
When I say the book is not as useful as it might have been for feminist purposes, one of the things I’m thinking of is the number of statements which are totally unsourced and unsubstantiated: you turn to the notes for the relevant chapter and find…nothing. An example is the statement (p.66) that ‘many transsexuals work in the sex industry…in some countries the number of transsexuals working as prostitutes equals the number of women’. How many? What countries? If you make a claim like this, I think you should cite the source, so the reader can judge for herself if the claim is well-founded. In this instance the standard academic practice is also the only politically defensible one. Feminists are not supposed to believe things uncritically on the basis that they are said by somebody famous or charismatic. And feminists of all people should resist being talked down to, along the lines of ‘there, there, dear, we know proper notes would overtax your fluffy little brain so we decided not to bother with them’.
I also found mistakes. For example, though in general the arguments about medicine are the most thoroughly referenced in her notes, Germaine Greer refers to drugs like Prozac as ‘selective serotonin uptake inhibitors’ (p.173) when it should be ‘reuptake inhibitors’. I suppose this could be a copy editor’s error rather than the author’s, and it may also sound like a petty point to take her to task about, but the significance of it is, reuptake inhibitor describes how the drugs in question work. Every discussion of SSRIs explains this, so a mistake that indicates the writer does not understand it calls into question whether she has actually done her research.
Too many facts for my taste are sourced to reports in newspapers and magazines, as opposed to the original sources from which the journalists took them. To find this problematic is not mere academic snobbery. Anyone who has ever dealt with the media must be aware how selectively, simplistically and sometimes downright inaccurately they use their sources. Germaine Greer has often been misrepresented herself: she must know you can’t believe everything you read in the papers.
An ‘academic’ book does not have to mean a scholarly history of sixteenth century cheese-making of interest to seventeen readers worldwide, with two thousand footnotes and a price-tag of £54. It can mean a book read by thousands of students — the sales will not tell you how many, since some copies will be sold to libraries — with a potential shelf-life of many years. An important difference between students and media pundits is that students read books with a view to actually learning something from them. They are open to having their views changed by what they read, and they are also in a situation where the ideas they encounter can be absorbed into their thinking over time, as complex ideas need to be. To my mind the ability of students to profit from a feminist book is a better measure of its value and potential influence than whether Julie Burchill slags it off in a Sunday paper. If you write with students in mind (and let’s remember here that ‘students’ no longer denotes a tiny elite consisting mainly of young white men) you will certainly need to be accessible in the sense of ‘clear and understandable’, but that is not the same as pandering to the media appetite for simple soundbite arguments.
I can think of several books that cover one or more of the same topics as The Whole Woman, but which I would rather recommend to students even though their facts and figures are out of date (and they themselves may well be out of print). The books I’m thinking of are accessible, and were certainly not written as academic treatises, but the amount of information in them, the cogency of the arguments and (not least) the thoroughness with which the writers reference their sources just underlines how much dumbing down has affected more recent feminist nonfiction publishing.
The earlier book which The Whole Woman resembles most strikingly — in format as well as subject-matter — is Susan Brownmiller’s Femininity. Although Germaine Greer’s examples are more contemporary, I don’t think her book is better than Susan Brownmiller’s. Moreover, she does not seem to me to have superseded the analysis offered in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s For Her Own Good of the medical profession’s perennial need to control women, nor improved on Gena Corea’s meticulously detailed, chilling account of reproductive technology in The Mother Machine, nor gone beyond Janice Raymond’s discussion of transsexualism in The Transsexual Empire. Arguably, the resources put into producing and promoting The Whole Woman would have been better used re-issuing updated editions of these works — all of which first appeared between 1978 and 1986. But of course, they would not be blockbusters or media events, so no publisher would bother.
Let us not praise famous women…or not too much, anyway
Though the publishers are definitely the villains in this story, with the other media as accomplices, it seems to me that we, that is feminists, too often collude in the cultural tendency I’ve been describing. When I went to hear Germaine Greer speak about The Whole Woman, a large majority of the mostly-female and presumably feminist audience behaved like fans at a pop concert. Well, they didn’t scream or throw underwear, but they laughed and clapped like anything, and many questions from the floor were strikingly sycophantic. I’ve seen the same thing happen when Andrea Dworkin speaks in public, though in her case there’s usually also a significant minority of people who come specifically to attack her.
I’m not opposed to giving individual women credit for their talent and their courage, and I think Germaine Greer has both (Andrea Dworkin too). But there is a kind and degree of personal adulation which, in my view anyway, corrupts both the adulator and the object of adulation. Many histories of the WLM argue that its aversion to ‘stars’ was mean-spirited, but there were some good reasons for it. It encouraged feminists not to let a few women do all the thinking, and it kept the most ‘visible’ women grounded in the ideas and values of the community they belonged to. Today, by contrast, the cult of celebrity makes a virtue of separating ‘them’ from ‘us’, and the result is bad for everyone, including the stars themselves. Someone who becomes the object of star-worship can easily start to believe in her own infallibility and world-historical importance (the Camille Paglia syndrome); or she may get trapped in the venerated persona (for her fans do not know her as a person) and be prevented from developing beyond it.
Ultimately I think Germaine Greer is as ill-served by her fans as by her critics. Both groups want her to shock; neither group provides the kind of constructive criticism that might encourage her to think ideas through more carefully. She is allowed, even expected, to periodically change her mind (a mad old bat’s privilege), but not her basic persona: we all keep putting her back in her box. This strikes me as not unlike the mechanism which keeps women compliant with male-defined femininity — Germaine Greer uses the metaphor of ‘castration’, though for reasons which I hope are obvious, I would prefer ‘domestication’. The wilder she seems, the tamer the threat she really poses. And the pity of it is, this wastes a considerable talent: she is smarter and far more radical than all the Natashas put together. If publishers, editors, journalists and — not least — readers were less dazzled by the outrageous and celebrated ‘Germaine Greer’, perhaps Germaine Greer would write better books than The Whole Woman. Heaven knows we need them.
References
Susan Brownmiller Femininity (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
Gena Corea The Mother Machine (Harper & Row, 1986)
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Doubleday, 1978)
Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (Doubleday, 1999)
Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch (McGibbon and Kee, 1970)
Janice Raymond The Transsexual Empire (Beacon Press, 1979)