The Force Is With Her

Germaine Greer is in love. Or in lust. Or just plain involved. She's being coy about the details, but she is behaving amazingly girlishly. She goes a bit gooey when she talks about the nameless "him" for whom, she confesses, she is making a compilation tape so he can think of her while she is away in America. And like regular women everywhere--women who aren't, say, feminist icons who have written life-changing books like The Female Eunuch--she confesses, "I'm waiting for the phone to ring." It's not that Greer advocates such behavior--"I think it's ridiculous that I won't ring a man. I'm a '50s girl"--but there it is.

Image, step right up and meet reality. Thirty years after The Female Eunuch became a rallying cry for sexual liberation, making its striking young author an international star along the way, Greer, now 60, is out there being herself again: provocative, brilliantly engaging and maddeningly contradictory. She has a new book out this month, The Whole Woman (Knopf; 384 pages; $25)--already a best seller in the U.K. and her native Australia--and a punchy new slogan, "It's time to get angry again." Feminism has stalled, Greer argues convincingly if muddily, pointing out that the equality women have fought for is not the same as liberation and hammering away at the advance of eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, violence against women, the power of the medical profession over women's bodies and, vitally, the feminization of poverty.

This is a book Greer never intended to write. But, she explains, "I can't bear what's happened to the whole discourse about feminism. I can't bear its smugness, its complacency, its juvenility. There are women out there who are hurting, badly." In a flash she shifts from anguish to fierce sarcasm: "We can wear lipstick again. Did you ever stop? And if you stopped, why? And if you want to wear lipstick, go right ahead, but why wear it on your lips? Wear it on your ass."

This is vintage Greer, profane and highly quotable. Says Knopf president Sonny Mehta, who was at Cambridge with Greer in the 1960s and who, over lunch in London's Soho, encouraged her to write The Female Eunuch: "Germaine is a force." Her skill as a quick-change polemicist is what gives The Whole Woman its flashes of originality: she takes issues on which most progressive women thought they had positions and sets a standard all her own. You think advances in reproductive technology have been good for women? Well, writes Greer (who underwent failed fertility treatments), "I think it rather more likely that, if women should be found to be unnecessary for the continuation of the species, they would cease to exist at all." Sexual freedom seem like a good thing? "The sexuality that has been freed is male sexuality." Women deserve an equal shot at a career in the military? Fine, but just remember: "In modern warfare, women and children on the ground are in greater danger than the professionals who maim and kill them from a distance." She will probably draw ire for her chapter on female genital mutilation, in which she argues that Western women should be worried instead about their own forms of mutilation, such as episiotomies or cosmetic surgery.

Famous in Britain for blasting her critics and carefully tending her media image, Greer proves to be self-mocking and strikingly unselfconscious as she sits in the living room of her Essex farmhouse, with gardens, orchards, geese and pets outside. Complimented on the book, she begins rubbing her hands together and singing a song, a la Cream, whose lyrics consist entirely of, "I'm glad, I'm glad, yes I'm glad." She swerves from topic to topic, discussing her sister's flair for botany and home decor, spilling intimate details about one of her 13 godchildren, confessing that she is trying to lose weight for her U.S. book tour. Married for three weeks in 1968, she volunteers that she was unfaithful seven times. But ask her what, or who, is the "whole woman," and she turns sober.

Could it be Greer herself: a woman who has, in many ways, devoted herself to the life of the mind, unhindered by family? She teaches at Warwick University and produces scholarly studies on obscure women poets, whose work she publishes with her own Stump Cross Press. But Greer says the whole woman does not exist, and is not she. There's that little matter of waiting by the phone, for starters. "I still, ah, I make myself sick," she admits. "I will flirt, I will--bleccccch--do all of that s__, it's amazing."

Best not to know this about Greer, perhaps, and better to read her book for its flashes of light on a perpetually murky subject. And best too to let Greer have the last word, since she will no doubt seize it anyway. "I don't want to tell people to do anything," she says. "I have put down what makes my heart ache, and either it will be helpful to people, or it won't."