The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don’t. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are too well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It’s meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth. Women don’t nip down to the local: they don’t invent, as men do, pretexts like coin-collecting or old-schoolism or half-hearted sporting activities so that they can be together; on ladies’ nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves. What we actually see, sitting at the tables by the wall, is a collection of masked menials, dressed up to avoid scrutiny in the trappings of the status symbol, aprons off, scent on, feigning leisure and relaxation where they feel only fatigue. All that can happen to make the evening for one of them is that she might disrupt the love-affair around her by making her husband lavish attention on her or seeing that somebody else does. Supposing the men do not abandon their women to their own society the conversation is still between man and man with a feminine descant. The jokes are the men’s jokes; the activity and the anecdotes about it belong to the men. If the sex that has been extracted from the homosexual relationship were not exclusively concentrated on her, a woman would consider that she had cause for complaint. Nobody complains that she has sex without love and he has love without sex. It is right that way, appalling any other way.

  Hope is not the only thing that springs eternal in the human breast. Love makes its appearance there unbidden from time to time. Feelings of spontaneous benevolence towards one’s own kind still transfigure us now and then—not in relationships with the stakes of security and flattery involved, but in odd incidents of confidence and cooperation in situations where duty and compulsion are not considerations. This extraordinary case of free love appeared in the correspondence of The People:

  Eighteen years ago my husband and I moved into our first house. Two weeks later our neighbours arrived next door. We thought they were rather standoffish, and they, in return, were not too keen on us.

  But over the years we have blessed the day they came to live next door. We have shared happy times. They were godparents to our daughter. And when trouble was at its worst they were always at hand with help.

  Now they have paid us the biggest compliment ever. My husband recently changed his job and we had to move 200 miles. The parting was just too much. Rather than say goodbye, my neighbour’s husband has changed his job, and they have moved with us.

  Although we are not neighbours, we are only five minutes away from each other. This is a friendship that really has stood the test of time.4

  This remarkable situation is rare indeed, for it is the tendency of family relationships to work against this kind of extra-familial affection. Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity. To be sure, he is unpacking his heart with words but at the same time he is encouraged to expect interest and sympathy, and he usually gets it. His interlocutor feels unable to impose his own standards on his confidant’s behaviour; for once he feels how another man feels. It is not always sorrow and squalor that is passed on in this way but sometimes joy and pride. I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. For once we are not contemptuous of Camille or jealous of Juliet we might even understand the regicide or the motherfucker. That is love.

  The love of fellows is based upon understanding and therefore upon communication. It was love that taught us to speak, and death that laid its fingers on our lips. All literature, however vituperative, is an act of love, and all forms of electronic communication attest the possibility of understanding. Their actual power in girdling the global village has not been properly understood yet. Beyond the arguments of statisticians and politicians and other professional cynics and death makers, the eyes of a Biafran child have an unmistakable message. But while electronic media feed our love for our own kind, the circumstances of our lives substitute propinquity for passion.

  If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal personalities as having a better perception of reality—what Herbert Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not ego-centred and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared to the present and not to nostalgia or anticipation. Although they do not serve a religion out of guilt or fear or any other sort of compulsion, the religious experience, in Freud’s term, the oceanic feeling, is easier for them to attain than for the conventionally religious. The essential factor in self-realization is independence, resistance to enculturation; the danger inherent in this is that of excessive independence or downright eccentricity; nevertheless, such people are more capable of giving love, if what Rogers said of love is to be believed, that ‘we can love a person only to the extent we are not threatened by him’. Our self-realizing person might claim to be capable of loving everybody because he cannot be threatened by anybody. Of course circumstances will limit the possibility of his loving everybody, but it would certainly be a fluke if such a character were to remain completely monogamous. For those people who wanted to be dominated or exploited or to establish any other sort of compulsive symbiosis, he would be an unsatisfactory mate; as there are many fewer self-realizing personalities than there are other kinds, the self-realizer is usually ill-mated. Maslow has a rather unlooked-for comment on the sexual behaviour of the self-realizer:

  His word pronounced ‘selfishness’ blessed, the wholesome healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul—from a powerful soul to which belongs the high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around which everything becomes a mirror—the supple, persuasive body, the dancer whose parable and epitome is the self-enjoying soul.

  Nietzsche, ‘Thus spake Zarathustra’

  Another characteristic I found of love in healthy people is that they have made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes. That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active, whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were so certain of their maleness or femaleness they did not mind taking on some of the aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both passive and active lovers…an instance of the way in which common dichotomies are so often resolved in self-actualization, appearing to be valid dichotomies only because people are not healthy enough.5

  What Maslow expresses may be little more than a prejudice in favour of a certain kind of personality structure, merely another way of compromising between Eros and civilization, nevertheless we are all involved in some such operative compromise.
At least Maslow’s terms indicate a direction in which we could travel and not merely a theoretical account of what personality might be like if psychoanalysis accomplished the aim which it has so far not even clearly declared itself or justified to the waiting world, ‘to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation.’6

  It is surprising but nevertheless it is true that Maslow included some women in his sample of self-realizing personalities. But after all it is foreseeable, even if my arguments about the enculturation of women are correct. In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who decides to go her own way will find that her conditioning is ineradicable, but at least she can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. A woman who decided to become a lover without conditions might discover that her relationships broke up relatively easily because of her degree of resistance to efforts to ‘tame’ her, and the opinion of her friends will usually be on the side of the man who was prepared to do the decent thing, who was in love with her, etcetera. Her promiscuity, resulting from her constant sexual desire, tenderness and interest in people, will not usually be differentiated from compulsive promiscuity or inability to say no, although it is fundamentally different. Her love may often be devalued by the people for whom she feels most tenderness, and her self-esteem might have much direct attack. Such pressures can never be utterly without effect. Even if a woman does not inhibit her behaviour because of them, she will find herself reacting in some other way, being outrageous when she only meant to be spontaneous, and so forth. She may limit herself to writing defences of promiscuity, or even books about women. (Hm.)

  For love’s sake women must reject the roles that are offered to them in our society. As impotent, insecure, inferior beings they can never love in a generous way. The ideal of Platonic love, of Eros as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe, was most fully expressed in English in Shakespeare’s abstract poem, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, who

  Loved, as love in twain

  Had the essence but in one

  Two distincts, division none:

  Number there in love was slain.

  Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

  Distance and no space was seen

  ’Twixt the turtle and his queen:

  But in them it were a wonder.

  The poem is not a plea for suttee, although it describes the mutual obsequies of the phoenix and the turtle. It states and celebrates the concept of harmony, of fusion, melting together, neither sacrificed nor obliterated, that non-destructive knowledge which Whitehead learned to value from the writings of Lao-Tse.

  Property was thus appall’d

  That the self was not the same;

  Single nature’s double name

  Neither two nor one was call’d.

  Reason in itself confounded,

  Saw division grow together;

  To themselves yet either neither

  Simple were so well compounded.7

  The love of peers is the spirit of commonalty, the unity of beauty and truth. The phoenix and the turtle do not necessarily cohabit, for they are the principle of sympathy which is not dependent upon familiarity. The phoenix renews itself constantly in its own ashes, as a figure of protean existence. The love of the phoenix and the turtle is not the lifelong coherence of a mutually bound couple, but the principle of love that is reaffirmed in the relationship of the narcissistic self to the world of which it is a part. It is not the fantasy of annihilation of the self in another’s identity by sexual domination, for it is a spiritual state of comprehension.

  Spirituality, by which I mean the purity of a strong and noble nature, with all the new and untried powers that must grow out of it—has not yet appeared on our horizon; and its absence is a natural consequence of a diversity of interests between man and woman, who are for the most part brought together through the attraction of passion; and who, but for that, would be as far asunder as the poles.8

  In fact, men and women love differently, and much of the behaviour that we describe by the term is so far from benevolence, and so anti-social, that it must be understood to be inimical to the essential nature of love. Our lifestyle contains more thanatos than eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.

  Altruism

  ‘Love seeketh not Itself to please,

  Nor for itself hath any care,

  But for another gives its ease,

  And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’

  So sung a little Clod of Clay,

  Trodden with the cattle’s feet…1

  I have talked of love as an assertion of confidence in the self, an extension of narcissism to include one’s own kind, variously considered. And yet we are told, ‘Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend.’ At our school we were encouraged to deny ourselves in order to give to others. We ate no sweets and put our pennies in a red and yellow box with a piccaninny on the front for the missions, if we were holy that is. That understanding of love was that it was the negation by abnegation of the self, the forgetfulness of the self in humility, patience, and self-denial. The essential egotism of the practice was apparent to many of us in the demeanour of the most pious girls, for the aim of the exercise was ultimately to earn grace in the eyes of the Lord. Every such act had to be offered up, or else the heavenly deposit was not made to our account. And yet it was a seductive notion. It picked up on our masochistic tendencies and linked with fantasies of annihilation. This is the love, we were told, of the mother who flings her body across her child’s when danger threatens, of the mother duck who decoys the hunters from her nest. Noble, instinctive and feminine. All our mothers had it, for otherwise they would not have dared pain and illness to bring us into the world. Nobody could tell the greatness of a mother’s sacrifices for her children, especially for us who were not even getting free education. Every mother was a saint. The Commandment was of course to love thy neighbour as thyself, but the nuns were fired by the prospect of loving their neighbours more than themselves.

  The ideal of altruism is possibly a high one, but it is unfortunately chimeric. We cannot be liberated from ourselves, and we cannot act in defiance of our own motivations, unless we are mother ducks and act as instinctive creatures, servants of the species. We, the children who were on the receiving end, knew that our mothers’ self-sacrifice existed mostly in our minds. We were constantly exhorted to be grateful for the gift of life. Next to the redemption, for which we could never hope to be sufficiently grateful, although we had no very clear idea of why we needed anyone to die for us in the first place, we had to be grateful for the gift of life. The nuns pointed out that the Commandment to love our parents followed immediately upon the Commandments about loving God, and because they themselves were in loco parentis and living solely for God and their neighbour we ought to be grateful for that too. But children are pragmatic. We could see that our mothers black-mailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or the toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with and to us. The notion of our parents’ self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude, but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived, and it was our fault. The cry of Portnoy’s mother is the cry of every mother, unless she abandons the role of martyr absolutely. When we were scolded and beaten for making our mothers worry, we tried to point
out that we did not ask them to concern themselves so minutely with our doings. When our school reports brought reproach and recrimination, we knew whose satisfaction the sacrifice was meant to entail. Was there no opportunity for us to be on the credit side in emotional transactions? As far as the nuns were concerned we were fairly sure that in giving up the world to devote their lives to God and to us they had not given up anything that they had passionately wanted, especially not for us whom they did not know.