Reviving the debate she launched with The Female Eunuch, in thirty-five self-contained ‘chapterkins’ of fiery rhetoric, authoritative insight, outrageous humour and broad-ranging enquiry, Germaine Greer once again sets the agenda for the future of feminism, arguing that in spite of a widespread feeling of complacency, the woman question is far from answered.
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
recantation
warm-up
body
beauty
manmade women
womb
breasts
food
pantomime dames
manmade mothers
abortion
mutilation
our bodies, our selves
mind
work
housework
shopping
oestrogen
testosterone
soldiers
sorrow
sex
love
mothers
fathers
daughters
sisters
the love of women
single
wives
power
emasculation
fear
loathing
masculinity
equality
girlpower
liberation
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Doubleday
Anchor edition published 2000
Black Swan edition reissued 2007
Copyright © Germaine Greer 1999
Germaine Greer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.
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is available from the British Library
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This book is lovingly and respectfully dedicated to FLO who taught me street lore and fed me soul food, who has seen more than I will ever see and understood more than I will ever understand, and has been called mad by the very people who most need to know the things she tells them as if they were jokes, hard facts made easy and memorable by Flo’s ready wit, panhandling with a punch;
BETH whose life is the quintessential love-and-work, whose creativity and expertise are by now recognized by hundreds of thousands of people, if not by an establishment that is still exclusively interested in monuments, free-standing unchanging hardbodied things, when she works in living materials, in time and earth and air and water, Beth of the unswerving heart and clever workworn hands;
JANET who has endured every kind of professional insult and belittlement from men less talented than she is and, though she bitches them memorably from time to time, gets on with what she is good at, living and working, learning and laughing, always stylish, never apologetic;
MIRIAM who was born with none of Barbie’s attributes and never let it worry her, becoming instead the avatar of real women, a galaxy of female characters, always eccentric and always beguiling, showing us all that the range of alternatives for unrepentant ‘ams’ is vastly richer than anything dreamed of by the wannabes;
BEATRIX who grows more beautiful as she ages, whose happiness is concerning herself for the happiness of others, who keeps the faith of her youth and her passion for social justice, unmocked by fashionable isms, as if she never doubted that gentle but firm persuasion would eventually liberate from his prejudices even the most hidebound.
Dr Germaine Greer’s books include The Female Eunuch; The Obstacle Race; Sex and Destiny; The Madwoman’s Underclothes; Shakespeare; Daddy, We Hardly Knew You; The Change and Slip-shod Sibyls. She is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University.
This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write. I believed that each generation should produce its own statement of problems and priorities, and that I had no special authority or vocation to speak on behalf of women of any but my own age, class, background and education. For thirty years I have done my best to champion all the styles of feminism that came to public attention because I wanted it to be clear that lipstick lesbianism and the prostitutes’ union and La Leche and the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom and pressure for the ordination of women were aspects of the same struggle towards awareness of oppression and triumph over it. Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts, it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly. When the lifestyle feminists chimed in that feminism had gone just far enough in giving them the right to ‘have it all’, i.e. money, sex and fashion, it would have been inexcusable to remain silent.
In 1970 the movement was called ‘Women’s Liberation’ or, contemptuously, ‘Women’s Lib’. When the name ‘Libbers’ was dropped for ‘Feminists’ we were all relieved. What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality. Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but about asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination. The aim of women’s liberation is to do as much for female people as has been done for colonized nations. Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late Sixties and early Seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men. Seekers after equality clamoured to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts. Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women’s lives could be like if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate.
The Female Eunuch was one feminist text that did not argue for equality. At a debate in Oxford one William J. Clinton heard me arguing that equality legislation could not give me the right to have broad hips or hairy thighs, to be at ease in my woman’s body. Thirty years on femininity is still compulsory for women and has become an option for men, while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character. If femaleness is not to be interpreted as inferiority, it is not to signify anything at all. Even the distinction between the vagina which only women have and the rectum which everybody has has been declared, as it were, unconstitutional. Non-consensual buggery, which can be inflicted on both sexes, has been nonsensically renamed ‘male rape’. In June 1998 an overwhelming vote of the British House of Commons recognized the right of sixteen-year-old homosexual men ‘to have sex’, by which they meant, apparently, for it was never explained, the right to penetrate and be penetrated anally. This the MPs saw as granting homosexual men the same rights as heterosexuals. For them at least rectum and vagina were equivalent; in many cultures (and increasingly our own) the most desirable vagina is as tight and narrow as a rectum. Post-modernists are proud and pleased that gender now justifies fewer suppositions about an individual than ever before, but for women still wrestling with the same physical realities this new silence about their visceral experiences is the same old rapist’s hand clamped across their mouths. Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete.
It is invariably the ‘straightest’ people who speak out against lowering the age of gay consent, paradoxically suggesting that buggery, for a young man, is so bloody enjoyable that just one taste and you’re hooked, and women will forever seem to you like pretty small beer.
In the last thirty years women have come a long, long way; our lives are nobler and richer than they were, but they are also fiendishly difficult. From the beginning feminists have been aware that the causes of female suffering can be grouped under the heading ‘contradictory expectations’. The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man or like herself. Is she supposed to change the organization or knuckle under to it? Is she supposed to endure harassment or kick ass and take names? Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners.
It’s time to get angry again.
The woman question is answered. It is now understood that women can do anything that men can do. Anyone who tries to stop them will be breaking the law. Even the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, can be called to account by a female nobody who accuses him of asking her to fellate him. Power indeed! The future is female, we are told. Feminism has served its purpose and should now eff off. Feminism was long hair, dungarees and dangling earrings; post-feminism was business suits, big hair and lipstick; post-post-feminism was ostentatious sluttishness and disorderly behaviour. We all agree that women should have equal pay for equal work, be equal before the law, do no more housework than men do, spend no more time with children than men do – or do we? If the future is men and women dwelling as images of each other in a world unchanged, it is a nightmare.
Nothing is more empowering than towering over your boyfriend and your boss in shoes that double as an offensive weapon. Stilettos – not combat trousers and pierced tongues – are a real source of girl power.
In The Female Eunuch I argued that every girl child is conceived as a whole woman but from the time of her birth to her death she is progressively disabled. A woman’s first duty to herself is to survive this process, then to recognize it, then to take measures to defend herself against it. For years after The Female Eunuch was written I travelled the earth to see if I could glimpse a surviving whole woman. She would be a woman who did not exist to embody male sexual fantasies or rely upon a man to endow her with identity and social status, a woman who did not have to be beautiful, who could be clever, who would grow in authority as she aged. I gazed at women in segregated societies and found them in many ways stronger than women who would not go into a theatre or a restaurant without a man. I learned the limitlessness of women’s work from labourers, beggarwomen, tribeswomen. I learned about sexual pleasure from women who had been infibulated, about the goddess from great ladies whose hands were untouched by toil and from labouring grandmothers burnt black by the sun. Osage women in Oklahoma, Anmatyerre and Pitjantjatara women in Central Australia taught me about survival.
[Blokes] like you to wear really high heels – so keep stum about aching calf muscles and crippled toes.
No sooner had I caught sight of the whole woman than western marketing came blaring down upon her with its vast panoply of spectacular effects, strutting and trumpeting the highly seductive gospel of salvation according to hipless, wombless, hard-titted Barbie. My strong women thrust their muscular feet into high heels and learnt to totter; they stuffed their useful breasts into brassieres and instead of mothers’ milk fed commercial formulae made up with dirty water to their children; they spent their tiny store of cash on lipstick and nail varnish, and were made modern. Even the hard-working women of China began curling their hair to prove that they too were real (i.e. phony) women. While western feminists were valiantly contending for a key to the executive washroom, the feminine stereotype was completing her conquest of the world.
This insidious process was floated on the lie of the sexual revolution. Along with spurious equality and flirty femininity we were sold sexual ‘freedom’. One man’s sexual freedom is another man’s – or woman’s or child’s – sexual thraldom. The first tenet of sexual freedom is that any kind of bizarre behaviour is legitimate if the aim is orgasm. Men who nail each other’s foreskins to breadboards are not to be criticized or ridiculed, still less humiliated or punished. An individual who gets his kicks by shoving live hamsters into his rectum must not be reviled, though he may be prosecuted for cruelty to animals. Political correctness forbids me to identify such a paraphiliac as male but if he turns out to be female I’ll eat the hamster.
The sexuality that has been freed is male sexuality which is fixated on penetration. Penetration equals domination in the animal world and therefore in the unregenerate human world which is part of it. The penetree, regardless of sex, cannot rule, OK? Not in prison, not in the army, not in business, not in the suburbs. The person on the receiving end is – fucked, finished, unserviceable, degraded. Not actually, you understand, but figuratively, which, language being metaphor, is what counts. When a male soldier calls a female soldier a split, he identifies her as a fuckee and asserts his dominance over her. Penetration has but little to do with love and even less with esteem. In the last third of the twentieth century more women were penetrated deeper and more often than in any preceding era. The result in Britain is epidemic rates of chlamydia, genital warts and herpes, especially in women aged between sixteen and nineteen, together with a rate of teen pregnancy second only to that of the US. What the penis could not accomplish was done for it by the outsize dildo and the fist, the speculum and the cannula. If penetration was the point, it certainly got made.
Why do we pretend we like giving head when we all know it’s about as sexually exciting as stuffing a cold hot dog in your mouth?
The legitimization of the hunt for the perfect orgasm has greatly increased the extent and range of prostitution. Whole communities now live on immoral earnings. Czech women students ‘choose’ to give up their studies and work as prostitutes because they can earn in an hour what their professionally qualified mothers are paid in a month. Every day third-world women are smuggled into European countries to serve as sex slaves, with no papers, no identity and no rights. A person working as a prostitute to fund a drug habit is the least free individual on the planet.
If equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation. Freedom in an unfree world is merely licence to exploit. Lip-service to feminism in the developed nations is a handy disguise for the masculinization of power and the feminization of poverty in the emerging nations. If you believe, as I do, that to be feminist is to understand that before you are of any race, nationality, religion, party or family, you are a woman, then the collapse in the prestige and economic power of the majority of women in the world as a direct consequence of western hegemony must concern you. And when you see women denounce cultural imperialism – the women who donned the chador and howled the Americans out of Iran, for example – you should recognize them and their struggle as your own.
For women who are already a success in their field, working mothers, or just starting out on the career ladder, Tomorrow’s Women offers an unmissable insight into what the future holds.
Ticket prices (including VAT) are £176.25 (corporate rate), £129.95 (non-profit organisation rate) and £82.25 (individual rate) to include full-day event ticket, conference pack including copy of Demos report, morning refreshment and lunch.
The implosion of the Soviet regimes and the ensuing collapse of state capitalism caused great suffering to women. The women whose lives have been spent in hard labour in state-owned industries have lost their free health care and their state-subsidized housing just when they had most need of them. So-called ‘free’ economies are not kind to women who find they must sell whatever they have that is marketable in order to pay market rates for food and housing. ‘User pays’ is a fine principle, but not if you are ill or disabled or a child or responsible for a child. Women have historically been committed to caring; if they are now condemned to be uncaring, can this be a liberation? Or should feminists establish the female principle of caring as a political principle? To do that would be to become that most absurd and outmoded of beings, a socialist.
It is because feminism is not egotistic that its force has been dissipated among a flotilla of other concerns, the peace movement, the green movement, gay liberation, black liberation, anti-pornography, animal rights, the ordination of women, HIV and AIDS. In every street demonstration, direct action, picket, whatever, you will see feminists copping the flak in the front line, though they will seldom be identified as spokespersons. The women at Greenham Common were all feminists but they were holding hands around the nuclear base as peace protesters. Women in Somalia have recently been publicly flogged for daring to mount street protests against the sending of their menfolk into war zones. Should we accept altruism as part of the psychological make-up of the whole woman, or should we insist that she concentrate upon self-interest? Or should we politicize the principle of altruism on the grounds that it is no more than enlightened self-interest? We live in this world together and how we live together affects the way we live alone. We know the planet is in need of good housekeeping and that ecological measures have no impact unless they are co-ordinated and applied across regional, state and country boundaries, just as the childless among us know that we need good education for other people’s children, if our lives are to be worth living. The question whether feminists have to be socialists is seldom asked. American feminists turn their faces away from Cuban feminists struggling to counteract the crippling effects of the American blockade.
Cyclical amnesia seems to be a characteristic of feminism.
It is a chokingly bitter irony that feminism accomplishes most within the confines of the superpower that grinds the life out of the world’s women, makes war on them and starves their children. The identification of feminism with the United States has dishonoured it around the world. Half of the women soldiers in the world serve in the United States armed forces. Feminism can have little credibility with the women of Iraq who saw bare-legged women soldiers laughing with men as they made war on them and now watch their sick children die because of the trade embargo. Yet the women who work to raise finance and organize the buying and sending of medical aid to Iraq and Palestine are feminists.
As a political entity feminism had less clout than the merest lobby. It neither bought politicians nor fielded them. Feminism exists outside the realm of political instrumentality, as an idea. Feminist consciousness now leavens every relationship, every single social and professional encounter. This is not to say that feminism motivates social and political action; more often than not, courses of action are adopted that neutralize or pre-empt possible consequences of feminist awareness. There is no longer any free space where individuals might develop alternative cultural and social systems. Failure to enter into debt slavery equals social delinquency. In the ‘free’ world tax authorities, banks, building societies, credit card companies, the health service and the DSS exercise a degree of control over the individual undreamed of by the apostles of centralized economies. Changes in the law and the social security system force everyone, female, male, old, young, to capitulate. Marketing strategies, now adopted not only by manufacturers and suppliers of services, but by government, communications, churches, charities, schools and universities, obfuscate every issue. What they seek is not informed choice but compliance. Feminism being incompatible with consumerism, marketing co-opted it as a fashion and then immediately declared it passé, only to co-opt it again and again under different designer labels.
Helen Gurley Brown morphed into Naomi Wolf, seamlessly, girlishly, promiscuously.3 Now we have bimbo feminism, giving intellectual pretensions to a world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut.
In February 1997 a National Opinion Poll found that ‘nearly seven out of ten women feel political parties do not pay sufficient attention to issues of importance to women’. These women would not answer to the description of feminist, but if feminism is the consciousness of women’s oppression, they were not afraid to display it. Three-quarters of all women aged between twenty-five and fifty-four were prepared to declare themselves dissatisfied with the politicians’ record on issues such as childcare, low pay, part-time work and the under-representation of women in decision-making positions, and 55 per cent of men agreed with them. More than a third of the women polled had not decided how to vote. According to the psephologists it was the women’s vote that returned Bill Clinton for a second term as US president. Hence Naomi Wolf’s version of feminist triumphalism:
The ‘genderquake’ started in America with the eruption of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment, rocked through 1991–2’s famous rape trials, flung into the light of day Senator Bob Packwood’s sexual harassment of colleagues, and the sexual abuse of US Navy women at the Tailhook Convention; and provided the impetus for 52 new women legislators to take their seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. From these beginnings, and with the election of pro-feminist President Clinton in the USA, the election of the first female Prime Minister of Canada, and the re-election – with the women’s vote – of socialist Prime Minister Paul Keating in Australia, a train of events has been set in motion that leads to one conclusion: women have become the political ruling class.
Wolf’s is an odd way of interpreting the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault throughout the American establishment, to be sure! Fire with Fire was published as recently as 1993; already many of the brave new initiatives Wolf identifies have withered away.
In the British election of May 1997 160 women stood for the Labour Party; 103 got in. When parliament opened there were so many Labour women running around in little red suits that the Palace of Westminster looked like a Butlin’s holiday camp. None of the female candidates had cut any kind of a figure in press coverage of the election which generally treated it as a knock-down-drag-out fight between two men in suits. The media, which make news as well as carrying it, are the real sources of power in our pseudo-democracies. The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combination of the above. Women’s issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to women’s pages which amazingly still survive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last forty years or so of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replaceable ‘hackettes’. Twice a year the British government announces an honours list which is so sexist as to be laughable. The headline names on it are the new knights, who have to be male by definition and whose wives get to be called ‘Lady’. The husband of the odd Dame (usually a performer of some kind) is still plain ‘mister’. Women get few of the orders of the British Empire (sic) until we get to the MBE, called in the corridors of power ‘the secretaries’ award’, where the proportion awarded to females goes up to 40 per cent.
Women may enter political institutions only after those institutions have formed them in the institutional mould; the more female politicians a parliament may boast, the less likely it is to address women’s issues. Prime Minister Blair has less trouble keeping his party under an unprecedented degree of central control because so many of the Labour MPs are inexperienced, young and female. A male Labour MP called them the Stepford Wives ‘with a chip inserted in their brain to keep them on message’; the media call them ‘Blair’s babes’. One woman MP, slated to ask a question at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions, could not master the formula in which such questions have to be phrased and after two tries had to be coached by her colleagues. Few of the silly rituals of the house have been abolished nor has the parliamentary timetable been modified. After a year in the rowdy bear-garden that is the British House of Commons and many weeks without seeing their families for more than a few minutes at a time, the new women MPs were reporting levels of stress approaching the unbearable.
Though parliament is unconcerned about women’s issues, universities appear obsessed by them. Every year brings forth thousands of academic publications on sex roles, the status of women, the history of gender, the politics of fertility, reproductive rights, women and power, women and war, women and peace, women and literature, women and illiteracy, women and Islam, women and violence, menstruation politics, menopause, gynaecophobia, the war of the sexes, segregation, woman power, the feminization of poverty, victimization, rape, anti-rape, heroines, amazons, motherhood, daughterhood, grandmothering, the bad mother, the madwoman in and out of the attic, written by old feminists, new feminists, radical feminists, cultural feminists, post-modernist feminists, post-structuralist feminists, gender feminists, feminist critics, feminist collectives, Jewish feminists, lesbian feminists, disabled feminists, feminist nuns, feminist sex workers, by sociologists, philosophers, geographers, psychologists.4 As far as the intellectual establishment is concerned there is still a profound and ramified women question, which has still to be correctly asked, let alone answered.
Reflecting on the advances made since 1977, when the NOW conference in Houston drew up the National Plan of Action, Susan J. Douglas says bitterly:5
They advocated government-funded battered women’s shelters; national health insurance for all Americans with provisions for women’s special needs; government funding for day-care centers; rape prevention programs and programs for victims of child abuse; and extension of Social Security benefits to housewives. Since as of this writing over fifteen years later America has three times as many animal shelters as it does battered women’s shelters, no national health insurance plan, no federal funding for day-care centers, and a rape rate that is terrifying, any one of these provisions could be thought of as revolutionary.
The recommendations were in fact a wish-list and presupposed a commitment to social justice which has never characterized the US government at any time. Changes in British legislation have been slow and tentative, commitment to the economic enfranchisement of women more apparent than real. A woman is now slightly more likely to find a job than a man, entirely because of the restructuring of the job market in the employer’s favour. As Larry Elliott put it:
Britain has become not just a service economy, but a servant economy. This applies not only to the rapid increase in domestic servants – cleaners, nannies, window-cleaners, car valets and so on – but also to vast chunks of the workforce, which has seen the balance of power in the labour market shift massively in favour of employers.
The workers who will accept a zero-hours contract, which means that they are only called upon if business is brisk and then paid an hourly rate, who will carry pagers and mobile phones and be at the employer’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day, who take work home every night, who are not unionized and have no job protection or guarantee of safe and hygienic conditions or insurance against work-related injury, are women. Now that the labour movement has been brought to its knees by job shortage, so that workers can no longer bargain for decent wages and conditions, women come to preponderate in the squalid and uncertain workplace, without insurance, without security, without safety, without representation, without contracts. Women have not willed this; they have come to outnumber men in paid employment because when male labour unions had power they did not use it to enfranchise the women who worked in cheaper sectors. They allowed a vast pool of cheap female labour to exist alongside them until their elite was eventually overwhelmed by it. Put simply it goes like this: women always did the shit work; now that the only work there is is shit work men are unemployed. Non-shit work will become shit work if women in any numbers get to do it. Prestige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rockbottom; medicine is sliding fast.
Gynocentric feminism defines women’s oppression as the devaluation and repression of women’s experience by a masculine culture that exalts violence and individualism.
Though they are close to parity in numbers, the total earned by British women is only 60 per cent of what men earn; their pay hour by hour is 79 pence for every pound earned by a man. The terms of the Equal Pay Act stipulate equal pay for work of equal value, as if work had an intrinsic value and was not simply worth what the worker could force the employer to pay or, more often these days, the least that the employer could get the worker to accept. The differential between women’s pay and men’s pay has now been enshrined. A woman who brings a case before an employment tribunal will wait for years before a decision will be reached; a decision in a single case is simply that. British equal pay legislation is legislation meant to be ineffective, designed to be ineffective. The Equal Opportunities Commission sent the recommendations for making the Equal Pay Act effective to the Tory government in 1990; they waited three years for the reply which rejected any need for major change. In the interim the government had abolished the Wages Councils that had previously offered some protection to low-paid workers, most of whom are women. The Equal Opportunities Commission has now taken its case to the European Commission, whose recommendations when they finally emerge will doubtless be ignored.
In Britain in 1997 more than twice as many women as men set up new businesses; three out of four new businesses will fail but only one of the three will be headed by a woman.
Women are discriminated against by building societies who treat maternity leave as long-term sick leave and will not lend to couples with both partners in work if the woman is pregnant. Women pay 50 per cent more for medical insurance. Women are the stomping ground of medical technology, routinely monitored, screened and tortured, to no purpose except the enactment of control. They have been punished for their acquisition of a modicum of economic independence by being left with virtually total responsibility for the welfare of children, while gangs of professionals perpetually assess and record their inadequacies. Idealization of the mother has been driven out by criminalization of the mother. The most consistently misquoted sentence from The Female Eunuch is ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’ Some men hate all women all of the time; all men hate some women some of the time. I reckon that in the year 2000 more men hate more women more bitterly than in 1970. Our culture is far more masculinist than it was thirty years ago. Movies deal with male obsessions. Football is Britain’s most significant cultural activity. Computer use is spreading into every home but more than 80 per cent of Internet users are male. Women are ignored by manufacturers of video games, which are mostly war games of one sort or another. Popular music is split as never before; the consumers of commercial pop are female; the rock music that appeals to men is deliberately, unbelievably and outrageously misogynist. While women were struggling to live as responsible dignified adults, men have retreated into extravagantly masculinist fantasies and behaviours.
If we are sincerely concerned with ending the subordination of all women, feminists cannot afford unquestioned assumptions, orthodoxies or dogmatic commitments to positions alleged to be ‘politically correct’.
Every day terrible revenges are enacted on women who have dared to use their new privileges. Female military recruits are sexually abused and harassed, young policewomen subjected to degrading ordeals, and hideous brutality inflicted on women apparently simply because they are female. What confounds women reading of the tortures inflicted on women by men is how elaborately constructed they are; such cutting, burning and maiming is the beginning of the continuum that culminates in the stupendous elaboration of the applied art of killing that is modern military technology. Wars nowadays are fought against civilians; the bulk of military casualties these days are women and children.
On every side we see women troubled, exhausted, mutilated, lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few. The reality of women’s lives is work, most of it unpaid and, what is worse, unappreciated. Every day we hear of women abused; every day we hear of new kinds of atrocities perpetrated on the minds and bodies of women; yet every day we are told that there is nothing left to fight for. We have come a long way, but the way has got steeper, rockier, more dangerous, and we have taken many casualties. We have reached a point where the way ahead seems to have petered out. The old enemies, undefeated, have devised new strategies; new assailants lie in ambush. We have no choice but to turn and fight.
EVERY WOMAN KNOWS that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. She also knows that whatever beauty she has is leaving her, stealthily, day by day. Even if she is as freakishly beautiful as the supermodels whose images she sees replicated all around her until they are more familiar than the features of her own mother, she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her that will not do, her knees, her feet, her buttocks, her breasts. Even if all these are fine and flawless, she knows that within she has guts full of decomposing food; she has a vagina that smells and bleeds. She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. If her body is thin enough, her breasts are sad. If her breasts are full, her arse is surely too big.
I learned fairly early on that a beautiful woman doesn’t consider herself beautiful at all. She’s often crippled by lack of confidence. Every woman has something they dislike about themselves: if they’re blonde, they want to be dark, if they’re tall, they want to be short. If they have big breasts, they want to be flat-chested. The list is endless.
Scientists call abnormal preoccupation with a perceived defect in one’s appearance Body Dysmorphic Disorder or BDD. In July 1996 the annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists was told by David Veale of the Royal Free Hospital:1
These [BDD] individuals are very socially handicapped. There is a high rate of depression and 25 per cent have attempted suicide … Michael Jackson seems to be a clear case of BDD. He has had over 30 cosmetic surgery operations and his ex-wife Lisa Presley has said he would never take off his make-up, even in bed.
What is pathological behaviour in a man is required of a woman. A bald man who wears a wig is a ridiculous figure; a bald woman who refuses to wear a wig is being stroppy and confrontational. Women with ‘too much’ (i.e. any) body hair are expected to struggle daily with depilatories of all kinds in order to appear hairless. Bleaching moustaches, waxing legs and plucking eyebrows absorb hundreds of womanhours. A woman who disported herself in a bikini out of which a bush of pubic hair sprouted would be regarded as a walking obscenity. No-one would say that the woman who puts herself through the agonizing ordeal of hot-waxing her bikini-line must be suffering from BDD. One of my girlfriends is forever stroking the underside of her chin with the backs of her fingers, unconsciously feeling for the emergence of a bristle, and can be seen doing it even in her daughter’s wedding video. Such insecurity has been instilled into women over generations; we have made not the least headway in the struggle to dispel it. Every issue of every woman’s magazine exploits women’s anxiety about ‘unwanted hair’. Readers are not counselled to love their hairiness but to resort to depilatories or electrolysis and even to check that they don’t suffer from the very rare thyroid disorder that causes hirsutism.
You’re born naked, and the rest is drag.
Even if you escape hairiness, you will fall foul of cellulite. When The Female Eunuch was written ‘cellulite’ was a French disease. The English word should by rights be ‘cellulitis’ but, as British pharmaceutical companies jumped onto a bandwagon set off by sales campaigns for French products, they adopted the French word. Cellulite is subcutaneous fat, pure and simple. It keeps women warm and softens the contours of their bodies and, if it builds up, it often dimples. Whether or not your fat dimples is a matter of genetic endowment; some women have tight smooth fat and some women have softer fat, which droops and dimples, even on their knees, invariably on their bottoms. The characteristic orange-peel appearance can be seen even in the bottoms of babies who have not eaten chocolate, drunk coffee or alcohol or smoked, or committed any other of the sins that are punishable by cellulite. Once upon a time men and women both admired dimply fat; it took twentieth-century marketing to render it disgusting. Most of what is written about ‘globular fat cells’, ‘poor lymphatic drainage’ and ‘toxins that have solidifed’ is cynical tosh. Dimply fat will only disappear if it is starved off; no amount of pounding or vibrating or massaging will have any effect on it whatsoever. No cream whether made of placenta or the brains of aborted foetuses or ground glass will break down cellulite. Your cellulite is you and will be with you till death or liposuction, which is expensive and extremely painful and sometimes more disfiguring than the dimply fat itself. As fat distribution is hormonally regulated the fat will probably build up again gradually after liposuction. As cellulite will neither kill you nor go away it is a goldmine for doctors, nutritionists, naturopaths, aromatherapists, fitness experts and lifestyle managers. The manufacturers of creams, exercise equipment, skin brushes and dietary supplements all make a bundle out of women’s carefully cultivated disgust with their own bodies, scarfed about as they are by ‘unsightly fat cells’. Criminalizing cellulite is just another way of demonizing fat, any fat, anywhere.
In the UK 47% of women take a size sixteen or above.
As a way of inducing them to buy products of no use or value, women have been deliberately infected with BDD. Conditions that practically all women ‘suffer from’ are spoken of as unsightly and abnormal, to make women feel that parts of their bodies, perhaps their whole bodies, are defective and should be worked on, even surgically altered. Most women think that their hair is not good enough and dye it or bleach it or perm it. Most women feel that their legs are not long enough, that their thighs are too heavy or not firm enough. Most women are unhappy about their bottoms which are either too flat, too low-slung, too fat or too broad. Preoccupation about her appearance goes some way towards ruining some part of every woman’s day. Multi-million-dollar industries exploit both her need for reassurance and her need to do something about the way she looks.
Thirty years ago it was enough to look beautiful; now a woman has to have a tight, toned body, including her buttocks and thighs, so that she is good to touch, all over. ‘Remember,’ she will be told, ‘beauty starts from within,’ so she keeps her bowels open with plenty of fibre and her kidneys flushed with lots of pure water. She might also take Perfectil, ‘just … one capsule a day, every day, for care that is more than skin deep’, which will cost her £7.95 for a month’s supply, even though the capsules can do little more than ‘safeguard’ her ‘supply of essential factors – like magnesium, zinc and Vitamin B complex’, worth a few pence, if that. If she has another £24 to invest she might try ‘Firm Believer Body Toning Treatment’ by Clinique, which aims to eliminate cellulite ‘by building up collagen and elastin and preventing fat from infiltrating the skin’, thus transforming the orange-peel effect into the peach-skin effect. Being beautiful from within takes even more time than slapping beauty on from without. Demi Moore is said to work out for four hours a day, beginning with a cardiovascular aerobic workout, then working her legs and buttocks with pliés, standing lunges and thigh lifts, her upper body with shoulder and punching exercises, and toning her abdominal muscles.4 She also eats only non-processed, pesticide-free, totally vegetarian foods. The result, taut abs, a rock-hard butt and twanging musculature, was still not enough to save her marriage.
Says Dr Fenton, dermatologist, ‘Avoid wasting money on expensive top-of-the-range creams offering tiny amounts in elaborate packaging.’
Products to try: Guerlain Odélys Perfect Care (£29.50), Estée Lauder Vérité Moisture Relief Cream (£36), Prescriptives All You Need + for Drier Skins (£32).
Whatever a woman does, she must not look her age. The fitness regime is lifelong, to go with the lifelong sexual activity that is nowadays obligatory. ‘Today’s granny, rather than being a white-haired old lady in a shawl, will probably wear trainers and a track suit and arrive for babysitting duties straight from the gym or still in her business suit, fresh from her job.’
The UK beauty industry takes £8.9 billion a year out of women’s pockets. Magazines financed by the beauty industry teach little girls that they need make-up and train them to use it, so establishing their lifelong reliance on beauty products. Not content with showing pre-teens how to use foundations, powders, concealers, blushers, eye-shadows, eye-liners, lip-liners, lipstick and lip gloss, the magazines identify problems of dryness, flakiness, blackheads, shininess, dullness, blemishes, puffiness, oiliness, spots, greasiness, that little girls are meant to treat with moisturizers, fresheners, masks, packs, washes, lotions, cleansers, toners, scrubs, astringents, none of which will make the slightest difference and all of which would cost money the child does not have. Pre-teen cosmetics are relatively cheap but within a few years more sophisticated marketing will have persuaded the most level-headed young woman to throw money away on alchemical preparations containing anything from silk to cashmere, pearls, proteins, royal jelly, placenta extracts, ceramides, biotin, collagen, ‘phyto-tensers’, bisabolol, jojoba, ‘hydra-captors’, serine, fruit hydroxy-acids, oleospheres, corneospheres, nanovectors, glycerol, anything real or phony that might fend off her imminent collapse into hideous decrepitude.
I don’t know how many more times I can beat this face into submission.
Women are exhorted to fight and deny their age by every means in their power. Consumer research regularly reports that nothing applied to the surface of the skin can affect the underlying structures or prevent ageing, and still the anti-ageing products sell. Every day hospitals put placenta into special freezers to be collected once a week by unmarked vans and sold on to face-cream manufacturers. So desperate are some women to stave off ageing that they are prepared to submit to injections of botulin toxin to freeze their facial muscles and prevent wrinkles.6 It must be a sad world when what every mother wants for Mother’s Day is ‘younger-looking skin’. That is one thing she is never going to have, not even if she endures all the agonies of a face-lift.
What is truly depressing about the false dawn of feminism is that, as we have been congratulating ourselves on largely imaginary victories, BDD has become a global pandemic. Women who were unselfconscious and unmade-up thirty years ago, who walked at a natural pace and worked alongside men in the fields and the factories, are now infected. In provincial cities in China hanging up over shop doorways you can see boards with padded brassieres pinned all over them, and trays of cheap lacquer and lipstick under fly-spotted glass, so that women who are naturally small-breasted can assume the ‘new shape’. Beauty salons crimp and curl shining hair with a fall like silk into shapeless frizz. The two billion people worldwide who regularly view Baywatch are all recognizing a single, tawdry, synthetic kind of skinnied-down, pumped-up, bleached and depilated female beauty. Real girls tell me that when they run along the beach, their male companions make fun of their real breasts that bounce up and down unlike the rigid half-tennis-ball boobs of the Baywatch babes. Who cares that Pamela Lee Anderson who has been put together out of all the movable parts of male and female fetishism has been abused by her husband? We are selling fantasy here. When German supermodel Claudia Schiffer visited Argentina the president accorded her an hour of his undivided attention. Two-thirds of Argentinian girls want to be Teutonic blonde models, just like Claudia. Barbie is an Aryan.
Vichy LiftActiv, £15, is the first anti-ageing cream to incorporate aminokine, made from a derivative of soya protein, which helps stimulate the production of glycans in your skin.
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