The Whole Woman By Germaine Greer, Doubleday, 330pp, £16.99 in UK
Germaine Greer's new book is full of flaws. Buy it anyway, read it, get annoyed, be reluctantly impressed. Press it on your friends, have arguments. May it sell a million, like her first badly flawed gem, The Female Eunuch. She is not just often wrong, she is often bizarre. But she is still, in a currently popular phrase, the most cunning and ruthless of them all; the wiliest of combatants with that uniquely feminist sword, the pen.
Which other veteran of the feisty of the early women's-liberation movement is now the subject of a critical biography? Who else could catapult feminism back into the news with what is basically only another analysis of where-weare-now? And much of the fuss she has fomented stems from the entirely erroneous impression that The Whole Woman claims women are worse off after 30 years of equality legislation. La Greer is far too clever to argue anything so indefensible.
What she actually says is: "In the last 30 years women have come a long, long way; our lives are nobler and richer than they were, but they are also fiendishly difficult." With this harassed women everywhere, juggling their many roles, must agree.
But it's a pretty meaningless line without some comparison of degrees of fiendishness from one generation to another. So is the other line from her introduction - rousingly entitled "Recantation" - that has been widely quoted: "When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves."
This is classic Greer: terrific rhetoric, faulty syllogism. She has always enjoyed tricking around with dull principles of cause and effect. You might add that our sons were not committing suicide in record percentages, either, a statistic frequently brandished by those who believe most contemporary social evils are the result of women rejecting their subservient role.
Or you might simply ask whether it's as true as it sounds. In her essay, "Food", Greer herself points out that 30 years ago we did not hear of eating disorders, which is not to say they did not exist. We didn't hear of self-mutilation either, or wife-battering on any scale - or rape, back-street abortions, child sex abuse.
Unquestionably, feminism encouraged women to speak and so lifted the lid on a Pandora's box of evil secrets. It may certainly be true that vice has not only been exposed but has flourished in the open air. I know a learned criminal lawyer who maintains that when the double standard prevailed, paedophiles thought they were isolated freaks; now they have found a support group in Arbour Hill. But whether the grim situation we are now seeing is worse than what went before - when the price of the double standard was exacted cruelly and sometimes fatally from women - is not the issue. The problems we have now are different and terrible, but the issue is still who benefits from women's oppression.
The usual suspects spring to mind. But precisely because so much has been done to level up the pitch, it isn't possible even for Greer to blame men as readily as was once the case for everything that's wrong in women's lives. That doesn't mean she's going to let them off the hook. Men emerge from our heroine's scrutiny as pathetic creatures - head-butting at the office, dossing at home; indolent and insecure, popping Viagra, peering at pornography, scuttling away from intimacy. Men are the enemy not because they are powerful these days, but because they are obstacles to women's evolutionary progress. This brand of offensive caricature has been around in one guise or another for the past 30 years. It never fails to strike chords, but it never survives the reality check. Women who nod, laugh and grind teeth while they're reading the polemics still look around at the assorted sons, brothers, husbands in their lives, and the postman and that nice fellow at the chemist's, and say "Ah, no; he's not the enemy, nor him, nor him."
Greer's brief is, in any case, much wider than the battle between the sexes. Her thesis is that equality is a poor substitute for what the visionary feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s intended when they called their political movement "women's liberation". When some merely "clamoured to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts", she sneers, true liberationists knew women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men. Instead, they searched for clues to "what women's lives could be like if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate". Quite true, I remember; they were the very devil at the searching. But liberationists were not the only visionary feminists, as Greer knows perfectly well. The impetus for that early movement came from left-wing women, and they saw a flaw in the liberationist analysis. It was that many women would choose to define their values by the prevailing values of their class and trim their norms to suit, which is exactly what happened.
For their part, the socialists saw feminism as part of a larger struggle to liberate the great majority of the world's unfree people from an unjust system. As far as I can see, those of the 35 essays in The Whole Woman not about sex bear out the view that where women are oppressed, somebody is profiting, whether it is employers, the armaments, pharmaceutical, and advertising industries, or cosmetic surgeons.
Greer doesn't draw the conclusions I do, but she doesn't deny this either. A great deal of the best in this book is about her fury and frustration with the powerful forces that continue to manipulate our lives, working in fact against the liberation of all those without power. And because she is a scholar with an original and inventive mind, a great deal of that is backed up with insights, information and ideas that are new and important.
She ends the book with an apocalyptic warning of what will happen when the women of no property, the increasingly impoverished women of the Third World, finally rise up and demand redress. It's not impossible.
Maddening woman, Germaine Greer, but she deserves her place of honour. Get the book, give your consciousness a work-out.