She's Baaaack!

Photo by Carolyn Djanogly

But the point is, everyone, pretty much, agreed she was loony. So when word of her latest book, immodestly entitled The Whole Woman, leaked across the Atlantic, the literate feminist community was gripped with anticipatory shudders of horror. What -- post-feminism, post-sex -- could she possibly do next, announce her membership in the Christian Coalition? And how would we explain her to our daughters?

So what a delight to read The Whole Woman and find that she's back -- the old kick-ass, motor-mouthed radical who some of us, anyway, knew and loved. She's a feminist again, not to mention an out socialist and, at the same time, outrageously, unpredictably un-P.C. -- sort of Camille Paglia with principles. True, she's not exactly a sex fiend anymore, but just when you think she's sounding a little like Andrea Dworkin, she whips around and surprises you with a decisively un-Dworkian insight, such as that feminists have made too much of a deal over the penis: "Of all the parts of a man that can hurt, a penis is the least." There's still the loose-cannon factor to contend with, as when she denounces male transsexuals or argues that female genital mutilation isn't all that bad, at least compared to silicone implants. But overall, The Whole Woman is imbued with a maturity and sweep that supersedes all of Greer's earlier incarnations. It's brave and smart and funny and also deeply hopeful, as when she tells us at the end, "The second wave of feminism, rather than having crashed on to the shore, is still far out to sea, slowly and inexorably gathering momentum."

Greer spoke with the Weekly by phone.

L.A. WEEKLY: I have a sort of gossipy question about why you wrote The Whole Woman. You say in the foreword there were women of your own generation who started saying feminism had gone too far. Were you thinking of Betty Friedan with her book The Second Stage?

GERMAINE GREER: No, I didn't mean Betty. I always thought she had a very conservative idea of what liberation would be like and always thought of it as getting power within the existing system . . . No, the person I was referring to was someone more important to me, namely Fay Weldon . . . She has a new husband who's somewhat younger than she is, and now we're suddenly hearing [from her] that men are in trouble and that we should stop trying to work out our own liberation and go back to raise the wounded male and rebuild him.

You argue that in some ways women are worse off than they were 30 years ago. I keep wondering if there is anything we -- feminists of our generation, that is -- could have done better.

I don't think so. I think the things working against us were structural in our social system. What actually happened was that capitalism or the bosses or whatever we want to call them just sidestepped organized labor and drew this whole pool of auxiliary labor into the work force, which was women who are working now, in so many cases, under these terrible conditions, without any possibility of amelioration. Most of them would probably rather not be working at all. They're probably trying to take up the slack where the head of the family is unemployed. But now working women get blamed for undermining the working man, trying to bite his balls off.

In the U.S., I think everyone pretty much accepts the idea that women are going to be in the workplace, and we're not so likely to be blamed for men's problems as workers. The problem here is, when you try to talk about structural economic change -- when you even use the word capitalism, for example -- you're likely to be cut off pretty fast . . .

But it's a very middle-class movement here.

And it isn't in England?

I think you'd find in England that feminism is represented much more strongly in academe than it is in the world of work. And then you've got the lifestyle feminists in journalism who, because they have a situation in which every political party plays lip service to feminism and feminist issues, think that that's it, they've done it. They want to turn feminism into a triumphalist discourse that I just can't bear, because we have the attack on the entitlements of single mothers, for example.