When you criticize your feminist elders, it’s wise to examine your motives. She was writing, too, about the encroaching invisibility of old age, which occludes women more than men, and which is no doubt especially hard for someone like Greer, who derived so much of her power from her youthful beauty.

Greer was deeply disappointed that the vision of the sexual revolution she’d held dear-D.I.Y., feminist, anti-capitalist, exuberant-had been eclipsed by the relentless triumph of commercial porn. It created more room for the rest of us.Ī contracting of that sense of possibility is what made “The Whole Woman” so dispiriting. That book, and some of Greer’s other recent writing, found her in a very bad mood. Her challenge to women who called themselves emancipated-“consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood”-didn’t really mean anything, but it was thrilling just to know that somebody had traveled that far out into the territory of acceptable female behavior and planted her flag there. Correcting the historical record often got you nowhere, though pointing to Greer-lanky, louche, stylish-was more persuasive.Įthic of adventure and courage, of a zest for taking on the world. A prim investment in women’s high-minded virtue was one aspect of the women’s movement, but free-love bohemianism was braided into its history just as inextricably. Six feet tall and partial to Carnaby Street miniskirts and rock-star conquests, Greer gave the lie to the notion that feminists were puritanical. Back in the seventies, she’d disdained underwear, celebrated the cunt, as she liked to call it, and debated Norman Mailer in a famously ribald and chaotic town-hall meeting.

The Greer I was reading was so different from the one I remembered and liked. It was in 1999, when I was reviewing Greer’s book “The Whole Woman,” a sequel, she said, to “The Female Eunuch,” her splashy and clever contribution to second-wave feminism. When I last spent time in the intellectual company of Germaine Greer, I hated the experience.

The whole woman germaine