Sorry Germaine

I think I sounded a little dismissive of Germaine Greer a few posts ago, and I have to completely take it back. The Female Eunuch is just as rad as The Feminine Mystique, and is definitely killing me softly with its insight. It was published in 1971, seven years before I was born, and it's not like the second this thing was published the whole world changed, so its relevancy reverberates, for sure. I think what she is talking about in terms of the cultural pathologizing of women's bodies, sexual repression, conflicting messages of school and culture (you can do anything! be pretty above all else! you can do whatever you want! we have no guidance for you on that except that you should fear you own autonomy!), all still very much applies to my upbringing - especially since my upbringing wasn't exactly orchestrated by progressive radicals.

Here's something from Ms. Greer that, the second I read it, occurred to me as obvious and true even though I'd never thought of like this before - even though I traffic with the "energy" and "feeling" folk in my yoga world:

"It's not too hard to point out to the averagely perceptive human being that women have plenty of the destructive kind of energy, but far fewer people can see that women's destructiveness is creativity turned in upon itself by constant frustration."

Yes. This is true. So what is our constant frustration? Expectation. Prescriptions of feminine identity. How about self-loathing, Germaine? Why, yes, Martha, that too:

"Women cannot love because, owing to a defect in narcissism, they do not rejoice in seeing their own kind. . . . . Those women who boast most fulsomely of their love for their own sex . . . usually have curious relations with it, intimate to the most extraordinary degree but disloyal, unreliable and tension-ridden, however close and longstanding they may be."

So I think women can, generally speaking, love just fine, but gazing back through time at the human wreckage of my own series of failed female friendships, I can see how my own self-loathing played a large part in their destruction. A less defective kind of narcissism, which I am equating with self-assurance, would have really helped. My female friendships didn't start to stay manageable until I was about 23; I was still learning (I am still learning). I think a lot of adult women have had to work pretty hard not to feel lessened by other women who seem more professional, more fit, happier, whatever - nowadays anybody with a perfect life just looks like a real kool-aid drinker to me, and I'm finally starting to feel at ease enough with myself not to have to hate people with "cooler" lives.

So anyway this stuff is really inspiring me to unleash a little bit. When I recognize myself in The Female Eunuch, and I am being described as the sum total of my having successfully adapted to the fear and and violence of my oppressors, it certainly spurs a little rebellion in me. In some ways I am, in my feminine identity, not fully expressed in my human identity. So I am thinking especially of my musical/lyrical self, which I tend to comb and preen a little bit to sound more neutral than it needs to be, more universal sounding that it needs to be; this could get much more sincere to my inner gestures, less edited, than I permit it to be.

In sum: I love Germaine Greer.