SOURCE: “The Female Misogynist,” in The New Republic, May 31, 1999, pp. 34-40.

[In the following review, Talbot offers negative evaluation of The Whole Woman, citing serious faults in Greer's “men-are-dogs” perspective and contradictory arguments that undermine the well-being of women.]

I.

Whatever else Germaine Greer's new book will be called, it will almost certainly be called a work of feminism. There are reasons for this, but they have almost nothing to do with the book itself, which is a sour and undiscriminating litany of charges against men—all men, men as nature created them—wrapped around the willfully obtuse argument that little or nothing has improved for American and European women over the last thirty years. The Whole Woman presents men as irredeemable and equality as a hoax. For this reason, the book is just a sideshow, a shrill distraction from the humane and transformative and exhilarating vision of justice that has animated the enterprise of feminism since the late eighteenth century.

In that vision, let us remind ourselves, the struggle for equal dignity, equal possibility, and equal worth was supposed to change and to benefit men, too. Women's rights were thwarted by culture, not by nature; by cruel social arrangements, not by timeless male troglodytism. “We do not fight with man himself,” the nineteenth-century feminist Ernestine Rose observed, “but only with bad principles.” In the great feminist vision, neither men nor women were to be defined by, let alone reduced to, their anatomy. For liberal feminism, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, sex, like caste and rank, was a “morally irrelevant characteristic” that acquired its significance historically and not biologically—through law and custom, which are amenable to moral and historical agency. Otherwise politics are meaningless, and women have reason only for despair.

In Greer's view, however, men are “doomed to competition and injustice, not merely towards females, but towards children, animals, and other men.” The concept of doom never served much of a purpose in feminism, which is, at its core, hopeful and ameliorative; but Greer presses it into service. After all, she writes, men are “freaks of nature … full of queer obsessions about fetishistic activities and fantasy goals.” They are single-minded, and “single-mindedness produces hideously anti-social behaviors, from paedophile rings to waging war.” They are slothful and sponging—and irredeemably so, because their “anthropoid ancestors” were slothful and sponging, too. A woman who burdens herself with a man in the form of a husband will likely find that “the cost of feeding him, grooming him, humouring him, and financing his recreation is way out of proportion to the contribution that he makes in return.”

The home truth is that men hate women. And “there is no point in trying to establish” why. (Why think, when you can rage?) “Men bash women because they enjoy it; they torture women as they might torture an animal or pull the wings off flies. …” So repelled are they by their girlfriends, their wives, their sisters, their mothers, and their daughters that they are doing their malevolent best to eradicate us altogether. As Greer barmily puts it, “If state-of-the-art gestation cabinets could manufacture children and virtual fetishes could furnish sexual services, men would not regret the passing of real, smelly, bloody, noisy, hairy women.” (Smelliness and bloodiness and noisiness and hairiness being the signal qualities of “real” women.) If that is what you really believe, what is the point of any concerted movement for social reform? The answer is simple: Greer sees no point in it. The only tattered hope that she holds aloft is her own naïve enamorment with the gender apartheid of certain Middle Eastern cultures. “I gazed at women in segregated societies,” she writes, “and found them in many ways stronger than women who would not go into a theatre or a restaurant without a man.” The “dignified alternative” for women in the United States and Europe would be to segregate themselves, perhaps in “matrilocal families.” Purdah-hood is powerful!

Why, then, will such fatalistic claptrap be dignified with the good name of feminism? Why, for that matter, is The Whole Woman a bestseller in England? Why does the Knopf catalogue praise the book as a “shattering critique” and a “call to arms?” (Even PR should show a little decency.) One reason, certainly, is Greer's reputation as a fire-starter of 1970s feminism, a writer who galvanized and outraged. Another reason, a more alarming one, is the insidious reach of an attitude that we will call Men-Are-Dogs-ism. This increasingly popular sensibility represents a convergence of influences: the animal determinism of evolutionary psychology; essentializing bromides of the sort made famous by Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; sitcom-style girl-bonding; the frightened, triumphalist rage of a certain strain of women's rock-and-roll. In the end, it is this way of thinking—or rather, this escape from thinking—that Germaine Greer exemplifies. The Whole Woman is empty-headed vehemence of a discouragingly familiar kind.

II.

In 1970, The Female Eunuch made Germaine Greer famous, and it made feminism famous, too. “Every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy or still owns a copy somewhere around the house, dog-eared and coffee-stained with use,” Lisa Jardine recently recalled in the London Observer. “[F]or women born in the immediate postwar years, there was ‘before Greer’ and ‘after Greer’; the book, and Germaine's attention-grabbing brand of stand-up comic, in-your-face assertiveness taught us all how to behave badly and take control of our lives.” The Female Eunuch was the sort of book that wives read in defiance of their husbands, copping a thrill of insurrection. It was the sort of book, according to Christine Wallace's informants in Untamed Shrew, her new biography of Greer, that broke up dinner parties, sending fondue sets crashing to the floor. (The copy that I recently took out of the library—the original hardback with Greer in a feather boa on the back and her name on the front in bloopy purple letters—contained this time-capsule inscription: “Sheila the Peela: Don't tell Pat about this. We decided a little lib would be good for you.”)

Greer herself was a 31-year-old Cambridge Ph.D. in 1970, transplanted from Sydney and living the Boho life in London. Within a year of publishing The Female Eunuch, she had debated Norman Mailer in a truculent disputation at Town Hall in New York, turned up on the cover of Life magazine as the “saucy feminist that even men like,” and inspired innumerable women to stop wearing underpants. She was, in short, the “libbers'” first real celebrity, a crossover-hit, with one Mary Quant-ified leg firmly in the counterculture and one firmly in the bestseller lists.

It must be said, though, that The Female Eunuch has not aged especially well. In this regard, it is quite different from, say, The Feminine Mystique, whose thick description, scrupulous reporting, and acute diagnosis of the social and psychological costs of restricting women's orbit make it, even now, illuminating to read. Betty Friedan's book even has a very particular utility today, as an antidote to Nick-at-Nite nostalgia for an era in which suburban housewifery really was the dominant outlet for female talent and Donna Reed really was the model. All those conservative women who wax rapturous about stay-at-home-momdom (while pursuing ambitious writing careers themselves) should be obliged to re-read it annually.

The Female Eunuch, by contrast, is thoroughly steeped in the patchouli-scented idiosyncrasies of its time and its place, and especially of its author. It is written with vigor, certainly; but its vigor is what hobbles it. There is a great deal of hectoring of women for cooperating in the suppression of their own libidos (Greer was under the sway of the Reichian religion of sexual energy) and adopting the characteristics of the castrate: “timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy, and preciosity.” There is a certain amount of head-girl disdain for lesser—and especially less sexually liberated—females. This privileged sisterly snobbery seems a bit off-point for a time when women still faced institutionalized job discrimination, a criminal justice system preoccupied with the sexual purity of rape victims, a general disregard of, and lack of resources for, women who were beaten by their husbands, and other unglamorous barriers to just bucking up and getting on with things.

The Female Eunuch, like The Whole Woman, is dismissive of organized feminism past and present, and bored by political solutions. Still, it is flushed with a sense of possibility—dizzy at times, but inspiriting—that is almost entirely missing from the new book. In 1970, Greer writes stirringly of female independence, of “joy in the struggle” for it.

Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise. It does mean pride and confidence. … To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth: that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness. To have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve, and at last something genuine to give. To be free from guilt and shame and the tireless self-discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathize. To claim the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage.

It was a humane vision; but so much of this vision of new womanhood was to be achieved, in Greer's view, by specifically sexual means: by smashing monogamy, by promoting the commitment-free fuck, and so on. Greer's self-satisfied hedonism crippled her manifesto. In the first place, there were the Greerian idiosyncrasies that made it unlikely to mobilize a real following: she doted on the vagina, at a time when other feminists were cheering the rediscovery of the clitoris. For Greer, the real significance of her favorite female organ resided not so much in its capacity for pleasure as in its capacity for power, since it actively “embraced and stimulated the penis instead of taking it.” A minor distinction, you might say—ever hear of Kegel exercises?—but a distinction that promised, for Greer, nothing less than emancipation. More importantly, the Greerian dream of sexual liberation had little relevance for the spheres of life in which women spend most of their days and define much of their identity—work, family, citizenship.

At the time, though, Greer's high-minded randiness—and her gleeful exhibitionism, as when she posed nude for Screw magazine, called herself a “super-whore,” and wrote paeans to pornography and to the joy of sex with rock stars—had a kind of propagandistic purpose. It signaled that feminism need not mean sexlessness. At a cultural moment when flaunting one's sexual attractiveness and seriously committing oneself to women's advancement really were regarded as contradictory acts (as they no longer are, the latest round of complaints against feminist puritanism notwithstanding), this was probably useful. Indeed, what has been so odd about Greer's incarnation of the last fifteen years or so—during which she has written at least two books (Sex and Destiny and The Change) in which she broadcast her disgust with promiscuity and argued that intercourse itself degrades women—is that she has made no attempt to explain her reversal, or even to acknowledge it.

There is nothing wrong with changing one's mind in the light of experience. Greer is hardly the first feminist to recognize that the sexual revolution was not an unmitigated blessing for women. What is striking about Greer is that she is so unwilling to take responsibility for her earlier positions, and so averse to arriving at a middle ground. Most feminists—most women—have little difficulty with the notion that neither rock groupiedom and the “zipless fuck,” nor the renunciation of intercourse and contraception as so much pandering to men's “penetrative” agenda, hold much promise. Lots of people in their forties and fifties look back with a wince or a smirk on their own days and nights of Aquarian bed-hopping—but they do not devise an entire theory of gender relations on the basis of it. Greer, though, is a creature of absolutes. The substance of her ideas matters less to her than their radicalism. And so her internal gyroscope is permanently out of whack.

She is in the outrage business. In England, Greer's lurchings from hyperbole to hyperbole—combined with her polemical flair in countless television and radio appearances—are often taken as signs of genius. Her more bizarre and offensive positions—such as her defense of female genital mutilation, which may be found in The Whole Woman—are met with argument, but not with disgust. Her spiteful attacks on other women—she assailed the journalist Suzanne Moore for her “hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage,” and remarked of the novelist Fay Weldon, “I know she has had a facelift, and I know she's on HRT, but would that have such a devastating effect on the cerebellum?”—elicit the sort of nervous titters with which you might flatter a formidable and eccentric aunt. Greer may be eccentric, but she is also, as one British journalist put it, “dangerously close to becoming a national treasure.” This sort of indulgence presupposes that Greer is still producing something resembling real and original analysis. But what is remarkable about The Whole Woman—Greer's particular crotchets aside—is that it has so much in common with the general run of Men-are-Dogs-ism. She is no longer travelling to the beat of a different drum. Her stunts have become banal.

III.

In the men-are-dogs theory of life, anatomy is destiny. Men always have been, and always will be, loutish, messy, insensitive, and helplessly programmed to spread their seed far and wide. Women always have been, and always will be, the moral betters of men, and also their dupes. Real women sometimes talk this way, of course; but it is in television humor and other artifacts of mass culture that this line of thinking receives its fullest elaboration. In pop fiction, it is the language of bitch sessions at the wine bar. (“Bastards!” yells one of Bridget Jones's friends in the eponymous diary, “pouring three-quarters of a glass of Kir Royale straight down her throat. Stupid, smug, arrogant, manipulative, self-indulgent bastards. They exist in a total Culture of Entitlement. Pass me one of those mini-pizzas, will you?”) In pop psychology, it is the language of Mars and Venus. You hear it in you-go-girl jokes about Lorena Bobbit. You see it in those posters hanging in dorm rooms that say “10 Reasons Why a Dog is Better than a Man.” You see it in Must-She TV and in commercials where wives joke smugly about how “well-trained” their husbands are, and in the explanatory use to which pundits put testosterone.

Lately, Men-Are-Dogs-ism has acquired some intellectual respectability from the pop psychology of our day, which is evolutionary psychology. The new Darwinists are strangely obsessed with the supposedly deep and constitutive and ineradicable difference between men and women—differences that are allegedly “hard-wired” by the machinery of natural selection. Since the most successful of our tree-swinging ancestors were those males who propagated their genes most widely, men today are more promiscuous than women. They just can't help it. They also have stronger sex drives, and seek out the sort of dewy-skinned, dewy-eyed (read: young) partners likely to provide a happy uterine home for their seed. And women, whose tree-swinging ancestors cared for little else but finding a nice papa monkey for their young, have lower sex drives and prefer the kind of hominid who can give them stability—the older and the richer, the better. (By this calculus of genetic self-interest, as Natalie Angier has pointed out, baldness ought to be a real turn-on for women.)

There is plenty of empirical evidence to complicate and to counter these generalizations, not least our own experiences of women and men who fit neither mold. There is a preponderance of studies that show that most psychological sex differences are small to moderate, and exceeded by variation within each sex. In few other aspects of life, certainly, would we regard animal behavior or the behavior of our anthropoid ancestors as inescapable blueprints for our own actions. (Indeed, as Angier puts it in her delightful new book, Woman: An Intimate Geography, “many nonhuman female primates gallivant about rather more than we might have predicted before primatologists began observing their behavior in the field—more, far more, than is necessary for the sake of reproduction.”) Most importantly, it is a fundamental lesson of human history that a change in cultural norms can effect a change in sexual behavior—so that, for instance, when women are given the social opportunity and the cultural sanction, many of them will not feel it necessary to hide their libidos (and their thongs). For the evo-psycho school of misogyny (and it is misogyny, whether it is delivered in liberal or conservative voices), it is enough that we have all known men and women who resemble the evolutionary stereotypes. But in truth it is not enough. The reality of biological differences is undeniable, but it is also not the only reality, or the most significant reality. Yet Darwin brings so much comfort to unregenerate males. …

Men-Are-Dogs-ism finds other support in the culture as well. It draws on the sort of “difference feminism” in which women are seen as morally superior creatures—more empathetic, kinder, better listeners, and so on. This tradition of feminine self-congratulation extends from the subset of suffragists who argued for the sweetly civilizing consequences of the women's vote to Carol Gilligan and Deborah Tannen in our day. It need not rest on a theory of innate difference, and many of its adherents explicitly say that they are talking about socialized characteristics; but their accounts have a way of slipping into essentialism—all the more so since they place so much value on the traditionally feminine virtues. These feminists restore women to the pedestal that they set out to destroy.

The difference feminists could have argued that there are jerks of both sexes, and that men in general are prodded by a variety of social clues to express their jerkiness in one way—by crushing beer cans on their heads, say, or by pummeling people—while women in general express their jerkiness in another way—by emotional manipulation or verbal abuse; and they could have argued that both these tendencies are subject to change as cultural expectations change, though they will in all probability never be interchangeable. But that is not what the difference feminists wish to argue. They are not especially struck by the infinite variety of human beings. Like the evolutionary psychologists, they prefer to believe that men are one way and women are another way, and so it has been and so it shall be. And what point is there in social and political reform, if the problem is biological? Genes are impervious to legislation.

From the early chapters of The Whole Woman, it is clear that Germaine Greer's feminism has devolved into Men-Are-Dogs-ism. She likes to explain obnoxious male behavior by reference to animal behavior. If men are reluctant to do their share of housework, it is because they inherited from their “anthropoid ancestors” a resentment of work and “a positive ambition to do nothing, which women do not share … Females, be they gorillas or worker bees, are naturally busy.” (Does Greer forget the Queen Bee? Oh, well.) “Lionesses do the hunting to feed their cubs and their father.” “Male animals are conspicuously less busy than females, yet somehow the human male has convinced the human female that he not she is the worker.” Never mind the accuracy of Greer's zoology. What on earth does it have to do with the chores of living? Are we really compelled to divide our labors as lions or penguins or cockroaches divide theirs?

Another clue is Greer's tendency to elevate minor complaints about men to the status of gender oppression. Not only are men bellicose and competitive and slovenly. They also “pay less heed to traffic lights” and “brake harder and later.” Oh, and they fish too much. Greer has a real bee in her bonnet about fishing, which I must say would seem to be rather a benign pursuit, unless you are a trout. Yet she sees it as yet another male plot to escape us. She insists, darkly, that “women of any age are not welcome on the riverbank.” The danger is everywhere.

Then there is Greer's rush to condemn with whatever opprobrium springs to mind, however contradictory or baffling. Men are obsessed with penetrating women—but they are also obsessed with evading women, and therefore with masturbation. This is one of Greer's dicta on the subject: “Masturbation is easy; relationships are difficult.” It is not quite as devastating as Lenny Bruce's remark that the nice thing about masturbation is that you don't have to send your hand home in a cab. Or consider the following assertions, at once absurd and unfalsifiable: “In some British circles, women are now expected to perform fellatio on demand.” “In the last third of the twentieth century more women were penetrated deeper and more often than in any preceding era.” “There are many, and more and more each day, who think a rectum has more character [than a vagina] and that buggery is more intimate than coitus.” What British circles? How does Greer know? Why the syntax of social science, as if “deeper and more” were amenable to some sort of statistical proof? If men are perpetually fleeing intimacy, why would they seek a more “intimate” kind of sex? And why the preoccupation—and take my word for it, it is a preoccupation—with the supposed eclipse of the vagina by the rectum?

To establish her case that men in the United States and Western Europe (as opposed, say, to Afghanistan) are engaged in an unprecedented assault on womanhood, Greer defines all manner of medical interventions as attempts by “male-dominated governments” or the “patriarchal medical establishment” to subdue unruly females. “Women,” she writes, “are the stomping ground of medical technology, routinely monitored, screened and tortured to no purpose except the enactment of control.” (Notice the easy slide from “screening” to “torture.”) Contraception is bad because it allows men to keep penetrating women, exposing them to “male hyper-fertility.” If we are not actively involved in conceiving a child, we ought to be celibate or to have sex without intercourse, thus avoiding the “wastage of so many embryos.” Our wombs, in other words, should determine the way we have sex. Again and again, anatomy is destiny. The only explanation that Greer can offer for the persistent popularity of intercourse (this is a mystery?) is its “symbolic nature, as an act of domination.” Pity the woman who experiences sex symbolically.

There is more. Screening for cervical cancer is bad because cervical cancer is not all that common, and also because the pap smear is not a fool-proof test: it returns a lot of false positives and women worry when they have to go back to their doctors for a second time. Or as Greer puts it, “the result is an epidemic of terror.” Why this should be regarded as a misogynist assault on the womb, as opposed to a medical procedure open to improvement, is left unsaid. Even a seemingly neutral medical instrument such as the speculum is an instrument of oppression. In Greer's dire description, “it's usually cold, extremely hard-edged and hurts, even if it does not pinch the tissues of the vaginal introitus. What hurts physically can also hurt psychologically. …”

There is still more. Episiotomies—the minor incisions made to women's perineums during labor to avoid a tear—are bad, because they are terrifically painful and the pain can last for months or even years. (This is certainly not the experience of anyone I know, but maybe they are too intimidated by the patriarchy to speak of it.) Cesarean sections and hysterectomies are also bad—which is a more substantiated and fair enough charge; journalists have been reporting for years that the rates of both operations are going up, and for reasons that have as much to do with medical economics (fear of malpractice suits, for instance) as with good medical sense. But Greer depicts women who choose hysterectomies as victims of “a female predilection for self-mutilation,” hopelessly out of touch with their essential wombitude. Women who want the operation because they have been truly uncomfortable or inconvenienced and want no more children will find this sort of uterine fetish patronizing in the extreme, and who can blame them? Greer is a hysteric about hysterectomies.

I do not mean to say that medicine is blameless, or free of biases, or undeserving of criticism. Indeed, feminists have long been among the most intelligent critics of the practices with which doctors have sometimes infantilized women. In this way feminists have helped to win welcome reforms, such as the establishment of alternative birthing centers in hospitals and the opening up of delivery rooms to fathers, and they have encouraged more women to become doctors. In 1998, 43 percent of entering medical school students in the U.S. were female, a fact that seems to undercut the idea of medicine as an unrelenting masculine citadel.

But Greer plays fast and loose with facts. She claims that “there is no pressure group within the medical profession lobbying for the right to save men's lives by regularly examining their prostate.” This is wrong. Prostate cancer, like breast cancer before it, has become one of America's trendy diseases. And Greer's comparison rests on an odd notion of fair treatment. “Men have the right to take care of themselves, or not, as they see fit,” she writes, “but women are to be taken care of, whether they like it or not.” So men have the right to die young, but women do not? (Some patriarchy.) Nowhere is there any sense that in many parts of the world advances in medicine have helped eradicate one of the most oppressive fates imaginable for a woman: dying in pain and in fear, giving birth to a child whose conception was not her choice.

Greer exaggerates the coercive power of the medical profession. Nobody is obliged to get a pap smear. I doubt that any women in the United States or England are “pressured” by “the health establishment” and “the state” to have abortions. They are certainly not “required” to undergo “investigations of their pregnancies for which there is no treatment but termination.” If a pregnant woman has “the tests, say for Down's syndrome,” Greer claims, “and refuses the termination she will be asked why she had the test in the first place. And she will probably be talked into the termination.” This is nonsense. For one thing, some doctors in England and America will now do surgery in utero for conditions such as spina bifida that have been diagnosed in a fetus. Moreover, some people would prefer to know in advance whether the baby that they are carrying has a birth defect, even if they would not have an abortion. And far from pressuring women to have an amniocentesis or to terminate a pregnancy on the basis of it, most doctors are reluctant to issue a direct recommendation of any kind on the subject, if only because they do not want to be held responsible for a decision that a woman may regret.

It is true that the availability of new medical tests makes it likelier that they will be used and even overused, and that they will encourage unreasonable or unethical expectations of our own perfectibility. Technology always creates its own imperatives. It is also true, as Greer says, that the aggressive expansion of the fertility industry means that many women will undergo expensive, protracted, and even painful fertility regimens that are ultimately disappointing—and that some of those women would have been happier had they never been given the option. And it is also true that we now have tests that diagnose diseases (in both sexes, I might add) for which there is no cure and no clear course of action, such as tests that detect the gene for Huntington's disease.

These are all fair and important points. So why does Greer caricature them? Her intensity is hardly an excuse for her demagoguery. Does fertility treatment really “cause far more suffering than it does joy?” Not if you are one of the many thousands of patients each year who end up with a healthy baby. And Greer's indictment of the medical profession is suffused with an offensive condescension toward women themselves. In her account, women who opt for hysterectomies for whatever medical reason are deluded self-mutilators who are allowing themselves to be “spayed.” Women who have abortions have submitted themselves to “the gynecological abattoir.” Infertile women who want a child ought to be purged of the notion through hypnosis. And women in general, she avers, “are driven through the health system like sheep through a dip.” Like sheep? Through a dip?

IV.

In a way, Greer's deprecation of women's minds, her denial of the capacity of women for intelligent choice and personal agency, is not so surprising. The logic of Men-Are-Dogs-ism demands, after all, that women be earth angels, and earth angels can easily be mistaken for ninnies. The womanly qualities that they display must always be qualities of the heart, not the head. And they must always be self-sacrificing. “Love of the father, love of the partner, love of the child, all remain for the vast majority of women, unrequited,” Greer writes. “A woman's beloveds are the centre of her life; she must agree to remain far from the centre of theirs.” This is the Tammy Wynette view of the world. It is certainly not a mature or nuanced picture of the twists and the turns of real love between real people. (In real marriages, even in good and lasting marriages, wives sometimes hate husbands and husbands sometimes hate wives.) Nor does Greer's line of thought comport particularly well with the fact that it is women who initiate more divorces, and who report greater levels of happiness afterwards.

“Women love all kinds of things, places, animals and people.” We are to infer that men love no kinds of things, places, animals, and people. “They can love animals with such tenderness that they will die for them, whether in a burning home clasping an old cat or under the wheels of a lorry loaded with live calves for export. They love undaunted by ill-treatment, abandonment or death, returning good for evil. They do not kill the things they love but cherish them, feed them, nurture them, remaining more interested in them than they are in themselves. They do not come to love the objects of their love by fucking them.” And so on and bathetically on.

It is not enough to point out that women commit many fewer homicides and other violent crimes than men do, which is manifestly true. Greer must also explain away the behavior of women who do commit such crimes, arguing that their brutality toward others is only “an outgrowth of self-destructive behavior.” (This was the point sometimes made about Susan Smith, who was going to kill herself along with her two little boys but decided against it.) Aren't many male criminals also self-destructive? Don't men commit suicide—literally self-destruct—at a much higher rate than women do? Well, yes and yes, but never mind. We left the real world long ago.

Greer is not content to rehearse the familiar argument that women often feel pressured by advertising to buy useless beauty products and to fret about the adequacy of their appearances. She must also refuse to acknowledge that clothes and make-up can ever be a source of pleasure or creativity for women, to contend dolefully that “preoccupation about her appearance goes some way towards ruining some part of every woman's day.” Even having our teeth fixed is a coerced concession to false gender consciousness that starts us down the slippery slope to plastic womanhood.

Sometimes Greer must flatly deny that women do certain things that, in fact and to no great shame, they do. “I suspect that even if fertility clinics offer significant sums for oocytes women will not respond, not simply because being farmed of oocytes is painful and dangerous but because women do not regard their seminal material as light-heartedly as men do, and have no ambition to spread their genes through the ecosphere.” But many women appear to harbor precisely such an ambition: egg donation is one of the fastest growing sectors of the fertility business. When a wealthy couple recently offered $50,000 for an egg from an Ivy League-educated woman, two hundred women responded within a day. When I interviewed the “egg donor administrator” at a fertility clinic in L.A. a year or so ago, she claimed that many women who give eggs are motivated in part by the desire to spread what they regard as their superior genetic goods.

Liberal feminists and egalitarians of both sexes have usually made it a premise of their thinking that none of us can know precisely the essence of womanhood in the absence of social conditions. “What is now called the nature of woman,” John Stuart Mill observed, “is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.” American women in 1999 are no longer such constricted houseplants, clipped to bend in one direction and unable to grow in another direction, but neither do they exist in a sexless utopian zone. Surely humility on the subject of what constitutes a whole, a real, an essential woman is in order.

But not for Greer. She is quite sure of what a real woman is. The secrets are in her possession. “Real” women are women who live in sexually segregated societies. Chinese women were real before Western marketing distorted them. The post-menopausal woman is authentic, too, because menopause “burns off the impurities,” which is a strange way of referring to the capacity to bear children. But the “whole woman” is also, confusingly, a woman who is acutely aware of her uterus at all times—to the point of embracing the old canard about the wandering womb as the cause of hysteria and the barrier to women's intellectual achievement.

The whole woman is certainly not a woman who seeks to compete with men, to enter professions in which men have previously dominated. For she can have no hope of changing such male enclaves, and the men lying in wait for her there will humiliate her. Still less is she the woman who buys convenience food, wears make-up or otherwise enters with any enthusiasm into the capitalist marketplace. Greer's “whole woman” is just a sentimentalization of the natural woman. Her quarrel is finally with civilization.

This leads her to some very dotty ideas. On the harmless side, there is Greer's nostalgia for chicken-plucking, chip-frying, and the like, and her confident assertions that laundry was easier before the washing machine (you only did the washing one day a week, though a whole day a week), and that women were appreciated and respected more when they had to do all the cooking and therefore exerted a kind of authority as food providers. “That female role has now disappeared. It could only last as long as there was not a shop on the corner selling things more delicious than mother could ever make.” It was just a matter of time, I suppose, before the shop on the corner metamorphosed into advanced monopoly capitalism.

But not all of Greer's nostalgia is quite so harmless. Her glorification of preliterate societies, and of female illiteracy in general, is very disturbing. “The preliterate woman lived within a self-validating female culture that was to be obliterated by the authority of the printed text. It is not until women learn to read that they internalize the masculine schema. When women become literate they are brought up sharply against the prevailing misogynies. They will only accept them if they are in the process of swallowing the masculinist cultural package of which they are a part.” Oh sister, go and read A Room of One's Own, with its desperate yearning for the wide vistas of the word. Read The Mill on the Floss, with its unforgettable picture of what it is like to be a girl whose mind has always been called “quick” but who will never be permitted to set that mind to a task worthy of it. Read only the epigraph to Sex and Society by Martha Nussbaum, in which a Bangladeshi woman named Rohima explains how learning to read transformed her life:

If there had been no change, then how could I have learned and understood all this? … Mother asked: ‘What do you see in the books?’ I said, ‘Ma, what valuable things there are in the books you will not understand because you cannot read and write.’ If somebody behaves badly with me, I go home and sit with the books. When I sit with the books, my mind becomes better.

It is astoundingly naïve to think that illiterate women have no way of being “brought up sharply against the prevailing misogynies.” In societies in which women are veiled, kept in purdah, stoned for adultery, infibulated, chronically underfed, burned for their dowries, or cursed when they bear girl-children, they know a thing or two about misogyny. I would venture to say that women also knew a thing or two about misogyny in early Europe, where they were persecuted and tried as witches and generally thought more susceptible to deviltry, where their suffering in child-birth was complacently regarded as the price they had to pay for Eve's apple.

Yet Greer's idealization of miserable women—which is to say, her denial of their misery—is worse than naïve. It is cruel. Consider her defense of female genital mutilation—the ritual, practiced in a number of African countries, whereby young girls are subjected to the forcible amputation of their clitorises (and in some cases of the inner lips of their vaginas as well). These disfigurements have devastating results, which range from life-threatening hemorrhages and infections in the immediate aftermath of the operation to chronic infection and infertility later. Genital mutilation also makes it unlikely that a woman will ever be able to experience sexual pleasure. That is the point of the ghastly procedure. It is designed to make women more tractable.

Greer contends that the “criminalization of FGM can be seen to be what African nationalists since Jomo Kenyatta have been calling it, an attack on cultural identity.” But this coarse outburst of multicultural romanticism assumes that cultures are monoliths, and that the only objection to FGM comes from outside African societies—from the World Health Organization or from pampered Western feminists. In fact, there are passionate critics of genital mutilation in all of the countries in which it is practiced; and they have been sufficiently influential to have gotten it officially outlawed in some of those countries. Moreover, there is no reason to consider African opponents of FGM—such as the valiant young women who have sought asylum in Europe and the United States to avoid being cut—any less authentically African than those who uphold it. And even if you could establish a reliable scale of authenticity, the moral value of protecting human beings from forcible mutilation must take precedence over the preservation of cultural customs. Mustn't it?

Ever eager to denounce the West, Greer asks how we can possibly condemn FGM when we countenance plastic surgery, genital piercing, and the circumcision of male infants. “If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?” A right to FGM! But circumcision is not comparable to clitoridectomy; the comparable operation for a male would be the removal of most of the penis. Unlike FGM, circumcision is generally regarded as medically neutral or mildly beneficial. And unlike FGM, it is not practised in the absence of adequate sanitation or anesthesia. Plastic surgery in the West is not forced on very young girls. (Greer insists on referring to “women” who undergo FGM, when it is usually children between the ages of five and twelve, who have no choice in the matter.) And even if you want to argue that women who choose plastic surgery are constrained to choose it by the “beauty myth,” a reasonable person would still recognize that being pinned down, screaming, by four adults with a knife is not quite the same as reading a copy of Vogue.

Nor is Greer satisfied with her cultural relativism. She insists also upon a positive good for FGM, even if it flies in the face of her own pronouncements on women in the West. “Certainly in many of these cultures tightness in the vagina is prized by both men and women … penetrating a tight, dry vagina causes pain but pain can be indistinguishable from pleasure in a state of high arousal.” I see. Only Western women ought to be renouncing intercourse. Only Western medical practitioners are to be reviled if they suggest that an episiotomy can help to restore vaginal muscle tone. FGM cannot be bad for women, Greer contends, because women are the ones who perform it. But you don't have to be a man to mistreat a woman.

The problem with Germaine Greer is not only that she is no friend to men. It is also that she is no friend to women. What friend of women could have written this apology for their forced mutilation? What friend of women could have written most of this ugly and loveless book? When we are “brought up sharply against the prevailing misogynies” of our own time and place, we will have to number this famous feminist's misogyny among them.