[In the following review, Ehrenreich offers unfavorable evaluation of Sex and Destiny.]

Apostasy is the last resort of the political writer. Angry, provocative best-sellers do not lend themselves to sequels, for, as editors and agents are quick to remind us, it is novelty that oils the wheels of commerce. So writers who would like to sell books and at the same time hold on to their followings are driven at least to revisionism. For example, four years ago Betty Friedan published The Second Stage, in which she announced—a bit prematurely for some of us—a d‚tente in the battle of the sexes. Then last year, Susan Brown-miller, author of the powerful 1974 treatise on rape, Against Our Will, came out with a far fluffier book, Femininity, which allowed her, among other things, to express her ambivalence about shaving (or not shaving) her legs. Extrapolating from this trend, we might have expected Gloria Steinem to publish her beauty secrets, or Ellie Smeal to rethink the E.R.A. What is far more astounding, Germaine Greer, who is best known for the ebullient sexual radicalism of The Female Eunuch, has come out with a book that dismisses orgasms, condones the chador, and advocates chastity as a means of birth control.

Anything with as grandiose a title as Sex and Destiny should deserve a less flippant introduction. Greer tells us in the preface (aptly entitled “Warning”) that she did not write this book “for fun or for profit,” and I am ready to believe that this clever and venturesome woman has already enjoyed a surfeit of both. Here she writes in a tone of high moral purpose, without a trace of her former wit, and on themes that should command the most solemn attention: motherhood, sexuality, the relations between rich and poor nations, human evolution, and Western culture. Yet the result is so jumbled and idiosyncratic that it is not the moral purpose that shines through so much as the perverse and cranky pleasure of the apostate.

The core argument of the book is intelligent enough and, if not exactly new, it still bears repeating. Greer contends that population control efforts, whether undertaken by international agencies or local governments, do more damage than good, if good is indeed intended. Sometimes they merely miss the mark, as in the case of the I.U.D.s that end up being worn as amulets, or the diaphragms dispensed to people who lack indoor plumbing and privacy. Very often they do violence to local customs and cultures, if not to the physical health of the “target populations.” High estrogen birth control pills have been dispensed in vast quantities to the malnourished, underweight women of Bangladesh; unsterile and otherwise hazardous I.U.D.s still lodge in the wombs of thousands of Third World women; surgical sterilizations have been performed on large numbers of the unwilling as well as the uninformed. In almost all cases, population control efforts have been shaped by Western values—which, she argues, are profoundly antinatalist and even antichild—and tainted by Western technocratic arrogance.

If Greer's argument stopped there she would have succeeded in offending, or at least provoking, a great many well-meaning people, but she would still have remained in good company. Many thoughtful people, mostly of a left or feminist persuasion, have challenged the meaning of “overpopulation” in a world where the necessities of life are so unequally apportioned, have questioned the chauvinist and racial biases of the population controllers, and have done their utmost to expose particular horrors, like the drug companies' practice of dumping hazardous contraceptives in the Third World. But the last thing Greer seems to want is company. Not only does she fail to acknowledge any likely allies or ideological predecessors, she often goes out of her way to antagonize them.

One small but telling example: feminist groups in the United States and England have campaigned long and hard against the distribution of unsafe contraceptives in the Third World. One of these drugs is Depo-Provera, which is valued by population control agencies because it is injectable and requires little conscious effort on the part of those who use it. Depo-Provera has not been approved for use as a contraceptive in this country because it causes what one physician has called “menstrual havoc,” and may cause sterility and cancer. Does Greer, then, who finds something sinister about almost every known method of contraception, have a kind word for the anti-Depo campaign? No, she asserts that the side effects of Depo-Provera are relatively benign (“inconveniences rather than major health hazards”) and that the efforts to ban it are “downright crackpot.”

In general, the forward motion of Sex and Destiny derives less from the strength of its arguments than from Greer's efforts to scamper ahead of the reader and pop out, almost maliciously, from unexpected places. Usually she does this by engaging in a kind of hyperbolic rampage, in which it seems that no bath water can be disposed of without stuffing a few babies down the drain after it. Thus it is not enough to condemn the coercive or reckless imposition of contraceptives on people of other cultures; we are invited to throw out all “mechanical and pharmacological methods.” But a few chapters later we find that even this isn't enough. The problem is “recreational sex,” presumably another Western capitalist invention like rubber condoms and plastic I.U.D.'s, and aimed, like them, at luring the world's innocents from the proper goals of “land, family, and children” to “orgasms and consumer durables.” At this point, Greer peeps out momentarily to acknowledge that “such an attack upon the ideology of sexual freedom, usually, and quite correctly, called permissiveness, must seem shocking coming from a sexual radical, as the present writer professes to be.”

Indeed. And it is on the subject of sex that Greer seems most determined to disconcert us, switching suddenly from Falwellian to Sadeian themes. She starts, as she often does, with a point well taken: that Western (and, I would guess, much non-Western) sexuality focuses unduly on the kind of genital encounter most likely to lead to pregnancy. Hence our dependence on contraception. There are alternatives, however, to the old vaginal in-and-out, and at this point my imagination leapt to homosexuality, masturbation, and varieties of heterosexual attention to the clitoris. But Greer has no brief for these innocent and familiar practices. Clitoral sexuality bothers her because it is “masculine,” because it lets men off the hook for “any ineptitude in the phallic department,” and finally because “it leaves no irritating surplus of orgastic potency … in woman”—which, I would have thought, is its strongest selling point. What Greer promotes, instead, is coitus interruptus, a practice she recklessly insists is a reliable method of birth control, and heterosexual anal intercourse, which she seems to feel quite militant about. Well, chacun … son go–t, but when it comes to intercultural sensitivity, I think most of us would be more comfortable offering a weary Third World multipara a Lippes loop rather than a jar of vaseline.

There are, however, themes that give a certain tortured consistency and, eventually, predictability, to Sex and Destiny. One of these is antimodernism, which is more or less of the quotidian, pro-family type popularized by the new right, except that the new right's lost Golden Age is the capitalist suburban culture of the 1950s, while Greer's is represented by the world's embattled peasantry. Whether they are the farmers Greer knows through her part-time residence in Tuscany, or members of the intact preliterate cultures preserved in anthropological accounts, peasants can do no wrong.

Nor, it seems, can their counterparts in the world's metropolitan centers do anything right, from sex to child raising. While this may be a commendably humble stance for a writer of Anglo-Saxon descent, it creates some awkward conflicts with her extreme pronatalist bias. Greer would like the peasants to be as pronatalist as she is—to have sex for the sake of reproduction and to welcome each baby with spontaneous affection. But the truth is that pre-industrial people almost universally have shown remarkable ingenuity—and sometimes coldbloodedness—in contracepting and otherwise reducing the birth rate. They have devised pessaries, douches, magical remedies, and both mechanical and herbal methods of abortion; and—not uncommonly—they have resorted to infanticide.

Greer gets around this in a most peculiar way. First she simply ignores—or is ignorant of—the wealth of folk methods of contraception, which she regards as a rather recent Western invention. (Except for coitus interruptus, which is favored by her Tuscan neighbors.) One might have expected infanticide to be more daunting, especially after her attack on the industrialized West for failing to love its children. But even infanticide turns out to be an act of affection when performed by a suitably brown and weathered hand. In fact her argument in defense of infanticide is the same one that has been used to defend the most callous and coercive schemes of population control: “if you will not feed them, do not condemn them to life. …” She finds female infanticide especially “merciful,” since girl babies are less valued and more likely to suffer from neglect anyway!

There is a real case to be made against the West, but the grounds are not anti-modernist, as Greer insists in her woolly-minded way; they are anti-imperialist. Before contact with the West, most indigenous peoples managed to live in some kind of rough equilibrium with their food supply, using a variety of means to limit births when necessary. When Europeans arrived on the scene, they did not initially bring condoms and pills, but drastic disruption: slavery, epidemics, forced dislocations, extermination, and—in all cases—an end to the old ecological balance between food and population. Traditional food sources gave way to cash crops, and traditional birth control, especially prolonged lactation, became impractical. Some populations dwindled toward extinction, but others increased rapidly, in no small part because of the disruption of traditional birth-spacing methods. If there is overpopulation—and there certainly is relative to 1800 or even 1900—then the only cure we know is the one Europe and North America themselves underwent: raise the standard of living so that people have some reason to believe that their children will survive and that they themselves will not starve in old age. Hence the message from most critics of population control as it is usually practiced: offer contraceptives (and, preferably, the best we have to offer, not the discards), but offer also health care and some chance for genuine economic development.

But Greer does not analyze the world in terms of nations and classes and their economic interests, for the other great organizing theme of Sex and Destiny, in addition to antimodernism, is sociobiology. Individuals are slaves to their genes, which aim only to reproduce; and whole cultures also turn out, by some mystical leap, to be mere carriers for the genes of their members. Sadly, the West is a tired, “subfertile” culture that has gotten too lazy to propagate as fast as its collective genes would like. Hence it resorts to suppressing the genes of more vigorous, child-loving cultures, and it does this by barraging them with contraceptives and alluring images of recreational sex. From Greer's sociobiological vantage point, population control turns out to be just one more skirmish in the D.N.A. wars that have been raging since our ancestral molecules emerged in the primordial soup.

This is not the place to attempt a refutation of the tenets of sociobiology (interested readers are referred to the recent Not In Our Genes, by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin), nor to question what genetic unity defines “the West,” nor to inquire into what miracle of genetic transcription impels an official of the International Planned Parenthood Federation to foist I.U.D.s on the peoples of the southern hemisphere, and so on. But I will underscore a point that may already be obvious: Greer's sociobiology of cultures justifies all the abuses and tragedies she decries. If population control at its most arrogant and imperious is only an expression of our genes, why buck nature? Why not root for the home team? Sterilize the wretched of the earth, and, while we're at it, add a few more babies to the greedy legions of the West.

In the end I can't imagine that Greer is any happier with the morass of Sex and Destiny than the reader is likely to be. While she never tells us directly what path led her from the good-humored lucidity of The Female Eunuch to this strange destiny, the book is littered with clues. She emerges, in her first-person persona, as an affluent white tourist on sabbatical in the Third World, where she discovers that all her fame, knowledge, feminist insight, etc., are as nothing compared to the simple joys of motherhood. Among the peasantry she finds women who are “unequivocally successful,” who have not succumbed to “a masculine sense of self,” and who are living out their late and middle years surrounded by loyal progeny. In their eyes, she imagines that her own childlessness is tragic and inexplicable, that her life is “shapeless, improvised, and squalid.”

Well, this is sad. Sad that Greer doesn't have her own children, if that's what she now wants. Sadder still that she has not chosen to expend her maternal energies on the spiritual progeny she has earned in her years as a feminist spokeswoman. They deserve something better than this burst of midlife petulance.