Sex and the Super-Groupie

To most beleaguered males, it would seem that the U.S. has enough demonic spokesmen for Women's Lib without having to import them. But Germaine Greer, 32, who arrives this week to publicize her new book The Female Eunuch (McGraw-Hill; $6.95), has some outstanding credentials. A contributor to the European underground press and lecturer at the University of Warwick, she has a Cambridge Ph.D., lean good looks, an unquenchable stream of bright, wild talk, much of it unprintable, experience on the telly, and a new proposal for the oppressed sex.

A six-foot-tall Australian, Greer is billed as the rare feminist who likes men. In fact, she seems obsessed by sex. Her marriage lasted only three weeks, but she speaks freely of her pleasure in being a sort of super-groupie, and the sort of woman who can tame violent men. Indeed, there are a few passages in her book that make her sound more like a Helen Gurley Brown than a Kate Millett. (Keep your lover by letting him go free. If you have joy and strength, you will never be lonely.)

Affirm the Libido. Most of The Female Eunuch is a thorough exegesis of the tenets of Women's Lib--exaggerated, unreasonable, but written with passion, wit and a bottomless supply of earthy words from centuries back.* Though Greer is erudite, her book is far less intellectual than Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, with its long, scholarly analyses of Mailer, Lawrence, Miller and Genet. Greer is more interested in the popular press, which she combs for illustrations of her thesis. To her, woman has become a eunuch, a poor creature castrated and forced into passivity by men, who have somehow commandeered all the world's energy.

Many American feminists assume that a woman's libido must be denied if she wants to get on in the world. Quite the contrary, says Greer. What vitiates women's energy is their suppression of their sexuality. Nor does Greer agree with the radical women who believe in giving up men as a revolutionary tactic. Sex, she says, is the arena of confrontation in which new values must be hammered out.

Forget about Organs. Greer is also concerned about the "clitoromania" of some of her American sisters. Freud believed that in the psychosexually mature woman, the primary erogenous zone was the vagina, but Masters and Johnson found the clitoris equally important. Women's Lib theoreticians were delighted, and Anne Koedt's pamphlet called The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm has become an important part of the liberation canon, bought today even by high school girls with inquiring minds. Greer takes bold issue with the notion of "the utter passivity and even irrelevance of the vagina." It is time, she says, to put the clitoris in its place as only "a kind of sexual overdrive in a more general response." More important, one should make love to people and not to organs.

Greer also has some pragmatic criticism of the U.S. movement. Mrs. Friedan's vaunted accomplishment in desegregating Help Wanted columns simply meant that "more qualified women wasted more time and energy reading about, applying for and being rejected from jobs they had no chance of getting in the first place." As for the demand that women should get equal pay for equal work, Greer thinks it is much ado about little. The hard fact is that women very seldom do equal work. This is partly their own fault. "Opportunities have been made available to women far beyond their desires to use them. [And] the women who avail themselves of opportunities too often do so in a feminine, filial, servile fashion." Why? Because women's energy "is systematically deflected from birth to puberty, so that when they come to maturity they have only fitful resource and creativity."

How to redirect that energy? Back to active sexuality for women, Greer's triumphant answer to everything. Anyway, she says, "men are tired of having all the responsibility for sex; it is time they were relieved of it."

* Women have been called drabs, slommacks, traipses, malkins, draggletails, blowens, bawdy baskets and bobtails. As for the act of sex, Greer likes the obsolete word swive because it has no vulgar linguistic emphasis on "the poking element."

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