many men' and a 'brilliant attack on marriage'. She's done a lot of re-thinking in the last 14 years and shares those thoughts in her recently-published Sex and Destiny. Nowadays, phetess of Whitehouse might have been right after all.
The book deals with the problems of the sexual revolution and its connec tion with the issues of third population. This time, MS Greer USCS her iconoclastic dare-devilry to tear down the pillars of thought rather than challenge the establishment.
Her first target is the sexual revolution. Despite all our efforts, it's still squeezing jam into doughnut'. Women have simply made themselves more available to play the doughnut game.
In pursuing this theme, she denies the positive impact of the contraceptive pill and increased abortion facilities on the lives of thousands of women. But choice, prefering vocate that today's young women should consider practicing chastity.
She looks with favour on societies like South India where the sexes the one-time Mary and marriages arranged. Women are not objectified even fat, ugwomen tind husbands She fact that such K denying chains them any choice of sexual partIn the course of this Germaine Greer reveals her main concern:
liberation of women but the imporlalice of the tamily as al institution for child raising.
Her arguments reach absurd heights when she advocates coitus interruptus as the most effective method of birth control (despite the volumes evidence to the contrary). She cites her experience of Italy. It is widely used and she believes well both as birth control and sexual pleasure or booth sexual pleasure She leaves the facts that the pill is dif ficult to obtain and that thousands Italian women die each year from backstreet abortions.
Pehaps she has forgotten the experiences of her when men Do it, promising the 'to promising they'd withdraw time. «HOu diday Wor ra val as birth many you know who control increases the DOWCI of over women in the chapter 'Fate of the Family' that Ms Greer's thoroughly ¡ cacuuddl antiideas coherently put The claustrophobic nuclear family is the scourge of the Western she believes. feminists would agree. Ms Greer extolls the virtues of the extended family, with greater spirit of cooperation its stronger family ties She ignores the abject poverty of the third world material background binding them together. correctly attacks the arrogance of the West in assuming that the nuclear family is superior and the incursions of the state into family functions Unfortunately, her confused anti-imperialism leads her to apologise for the reactionary regimes in the countries she cites - regimes which perpetuate these inequal esperal se imperialism. She quotes approvingly presi dent Gaffer al-Nemeiry i the Wield clitoridectomy is widespread and women are forced lo wear the veil.
Perhaps the reader
wondering by now if Ms Greer Margaret Thatcher's secret weapon on the family? She could have been. Throughout history, bourgeois sold out women's struggles scene teminism of individualistic solutions to the collective problems women face.
Ms Greer has achieved tame ana fortune without sticking around to see the Dalle her ivory-tower Italiar villa she has lost faith in the women's liberation movement. She has capitulated in the face of the Tory government's reactionary offensive against women.
Socialist Action 9 March 1984 7.
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THE FEMALE EUNUCH, Germaine Greer's first book was hailed as 'a wild book which will enrage