Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Falwell: Lilith sucked face with she-demons
Falwell shifts focus from Tinky-Winky to the Beast; off with his head! Prince William gets digital makeover. Plus: This week's fun couple -- Evel Knievel and Chrissie Hynde.
By Amy Reiter
[06/22/99]

Brilliant Careers
Germaine Greer
The impulsive, fatally naive diva of feminism made the world a better place in spite of herself.
By Laura Miller
[06/22/99]

People Feature
Force of nature
David Brower, the grand old man of the environmental movement, talks about the Sierra Club, why conservationists shouldn't compromise and why tree-huggers should lighten up.
By Steve Chapple
[06/22/99]

Nothing Personal
Global gobsmacking
John Wayne Bobbitt writes a joke book, but isn't that redundant? Boo-hoo: No baby for the lady with the incubator cleavage; Cruise "absolutely whipped"; Tom Hanks will not take on "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
By Amy Reiter
[06/21/99]

What's Your Story?
"Promoting exposure of a person"
Artist Spencer Tunick is in hot water with the NYPD for attempting to photograph 150 nude people in Times Square.
By Jenn Shreve
[06/21/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But after the beating that "The Whole Woman" has taken since its publication last month, I wasn't surprised to see a trace of weariness in her answers to questions about the book tour. (It has been suggested that the book is destined to be remaindered rather than remembered, and Margaret Talbot, in a scathingly exhaustive essay in "The New Republic," declared that Greer wasn't simply a simplistic man-hater but a world-class misogynist as well.) "It is hard," she conceded. "But I don't do this Camille Paglia thing: 'Do people like me?' I've done this for 30 years. I just do it."

Entering the gender battlefield again, "The Whole Woman" functions both as sword and shield -- lashing out in all directions, and at the same time remaining remarkably impenetrable, if only because it's so convoluted. Her fiery rhetorical power is still blazing at full guns, but the logic of her arguments is often difficult to follow, not to mention swallow. One minute she's critiquing the popular misreading of "The Female Eunuch," which allowed "hacks" and "hackettes" to advertise her philosophy as an "exhortation to get laid more often by more men," then within the same paragraph she generalizes that "there are many, and more and more each day, who think a rectum has more character and that buggery is more intimate than coitus." A mere page later she launches into an inquisition of the handbag, "Why do women always carry bags, and why are those bags so often heavy? Why is it that most women will not go out of the house without bags loaded with objects of no immediate use? Is the tote bag an exterior uterus, the outward sign of the unmentionable burden?" How she gets from point A to point C involves passing through Connie's first experience of anal sex in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and writer Fiona Shaw's mistakenly referring to her womb as her stomach and her obsession with having a suitcase packed as a little girl. Both presumably prove that women have lost touch with the literal and symbolic importance of their uterus -- resulting in the rectum becoming the sine qua non of intimacy and the handbag burdening womankind everywhere.

She rattles on a bit about her imperviousness to criticism. Though her gray hair and gray pantsuit frame a beautiful, elegant face, her British/Australian accent often sputters with intensity. What they say about her charisma is undeniable: A mix of bravura and vulnerability merge into something irresistible. Then suddenly she knocks her head softly against the wall.

"My ex-husband just stood me up," she says mournfully and frowns. "Not that I didn't deserve it."

She stares off, pensively. She explains that they were married a very long time ago and that he later married Maya Angelou, who lasted longer in her marriage. (He was a construction worker; Greer was married to him for three weeks.)

A moment later she describes an old student of hers, an African-American quarterback for the University of Texas, whom she tutored privately for her Shakespeare class because he kept missing class. "It wasn't hard," she said of the tutoring, "because he was gorgeous." Soon after, she begins to talk about her love of baseball, recalling that before Sammy Sosa "got all that lard and became a heavy hitter," he was "chocolate eros."

From our casual chatter, I'm getting more comfortable but also more befuddled. How can the author of "The Whole Woman," which casts men as hate-filled victims of their own quasi-innate desire for control, preface our interview with not one but three wistful recollections of ultra-masculine men?

But Greer doesn't pretend to be uncomplicated. In some way, she's made a career of making herself a creation of unlikely juxtapositions. From her professional to her personal life, she's bushwhacked a path of controversy. "The Female Eunuch" made her the so-called mother of pro-sex feminism. Now in "The Whole Woman," critics are accusing her of changing her tune and becoming a murky-headed essentialist who feels just as comfortable suggesting that much of what passes as feminist sexual liberation is really just the triumph of a penetration-fixated male sexuality. Yet this about-face isn't quite so sharp or recent. By the mid-'70s Greer was recommending that men pursue a path of orgasmic abstinence, modeling themselves after Burmese villagers and Zinguano Indians.

As she ate a lunch of grilled chicken and shrimp tacos at San Francisco flavored-vodka bar Infusion, Greer discussed her fury over sexual crimes against women, her likeness to her mother, the way she'd like to die and whether I could find her a 20-year-old man for the evening without her having to pay for him.

What were the things you saw in contemporary culture that made you want to write this book?

There are things every single day. In America there is a lot of prattle now about hate crimes. They don't understand that when some girl's body is fished up out of the Everglades, that that was a hate crime. So he fucked her. It's a hate crime? Get it? He hated everything about it. He hated the fact that he wanted to fuck her. He hated the fact that he did fuck her. And he hated her. It's hate in spades. And they seem to think that sex crimes are somehow different. No, sir. Just as you sexualize the black man and humiliate him and stuff a stick up his ass the way those policemen did in New York. I don't care if you do it with your penis or with a stick. In fact, it is worse with a stick. I can talk to your penis, I just can't talk to you, you know?

Find books by Germaine Greer at BARNES & NOBLE   Also Today Brilliant Careers: Germaine Greer The impulsive, fatally naive diva of feminism made the world a better place in spite of herself.

I kept waiting for someone to say, well why do you hate me so much? Why do you sexualize me? Brutalize me? Turn me into nothing but an assemblage of parts? But they didn't do it. People like Jan Breslauer, teacher of feminist theory at Yale, were saying, Gee, I'm empowered because I have got these store-bought boobies. Oh, please. And I was prepared to be silent forever and let somebody else speak. But they didn't. I couldn't believe it. How many insults do you have to take before the iron enters your soul?

It seems now that feminists, the sort of mainstream popular feminist movement, have become increasingly focused on issues around sexuality rather than all the other ways women might become more equal.

Yes, but women in this country aren't getting the sex that they want, are they? Are they in San Francisco? They are certainly not in New York. Some may very well be sexually liberated but great ... you can be as liberated as all get out, but if nobody fancies you, it is kind of an academic concept.

What is interesting to me is that your book seems to critique sex-focused feminism --

That is generally supposed to be my fault.

Well, that's what I was going to ask you. There is the sense that you were part of the beginning of that -- the proto-pro-sex feminist.

Well, but pro- what sex? You know, being reamed with a super large dildo is not my idea. There is an Australian magazine called Cleo. And the letters to the doctor are chilling. They say things like, "My boyfriend used a super large dildo on me and my vagina is all torn. What should I do?" And I keep expecting the doctor to say, Ditch the boyfriend, then go to the doctor. It says, Go to the doctor. And "I was having anal intercourse with my girlfriend the other night and I noticed all these little white things wriggling around her ass." And the doctor says, "These are bloodworms."

Oh no, yuck. Well how do you feel about that being attributed to your earlier work? Do you feel like people misunderstood you?

Yes. Well, they didn't read me, they read about me. And journalists can only grasp ideas of enormous simplicity, so if I said ...

Not all journalists.

Oh, well ... I said that there is no such thing as promiscuity, as long as the woman chose all her sexual partners; and if she didn't choose them, then she was in deep trouble and it was something more serious than promiscuity.

So I was really arguing against the division of women into two kinds. Good women and rubbish. But I don't think I was arguing for sexual activity as a path to liberation. Because it depends entirely on what the understanding is. Women like Monica Lewinsky will always interpret very low-level interaction as evidence of commitment and real interest and so on. So that women will constantly put the best construction on a relationship and then end up humiliated and ripped off. Because eventually it becomes undeniable, you know?

Next page | People who are ugly or old or poor never had any sexual revolution at all