Think You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby? Think Again, Author Says

Undoubtedly, it is bad form to begin a story on feminist icon Germaine Greer by describing her dress. But it is irresistible when Greer turns up to promote her latest book looking part Golda Meir, in thick stockings and sensible shoes, and part private-school girl, in a pleated skirt and blazer.

From a keen social observer, such an outfit can only be a statement. But what is Greer trying to say?

Before anyone in the room can ask, she offers an offhand apology for the clothes she just happened to pull out of her closet that day. Never mind that few 60-year-olds have knee-length pleated skirts in their closet, this seems plausible until, a few nights later, she appears on British television wearing a man’s tie.

Clearly, nothing about Greer is offhand.

Like her clothes, Greer is often contradictory and defies easy labels. She is deliberately irate and humorous, challenging and disarming as she seeks to undermine firmly held beliefs about all that women have achieved in the three decades since she wrote “The Female Eunuch.”

“It’s time to get angry again,” Greer asserts in the introduction to her new book, “The Whole Woman,” which will be released in the United States by Random House on May 20.

As if she ever felt it was not time to be angry about the status of women in the 20th century. Greer is, after all, professionally angry. She has made a career of being cross at a male-dominated world, and demanding change. And she is widely regarded as one of the mothers of the women’s movement, along with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, responsible for improving the lot of women today.

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But according to Greer, the world has not changed for women. At least, not sufficiently and not always for the better. And so she has written what she calls “the sequel that I said I would never write.”

She had thought that each generation should pen its own critiques and blueprints for action. But then she read the writings of young women who cut their teeth on her feminist classic and went on to call themselves “post-feminists.” And she didn’t like what they had to say.

In what might be regarded as her Round 2 of consciousness-raising, Greer has gone on the offensive, challenging the assumption of many successful women that feminism has achieved its aims at home and in the workplace and, therefore, has rendered itself obsolete.

Women who once fought for liberation have settled for the fundamentally conservative goal of equality, Greer says. Equality equals assimilation.

“Black power was the fight for the right to be black, not to be assimilated,” she told another crowd that came to see her in London one recent evening.

“The problem with equality is that we’re being inducted into an existing system that is unjust, rude and brash,” she said. Women have opted into a male corporate America, not made it more flexible, caring and female.

Celebrated “girl power” is little more than women trying to out-drink and out-sex the boys, she maintains. Meanwhile, men continue to define femininity, which is distinct from round, wide-hipped femaleness. Women hate their bodies more than ever.

“When ‘The Female Eunuch’ was written, our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves,” Greer wrote in “The Whole Woman.” Nearly everything that women regard as advances in the field of medicine, Greer sees as insufficient--or more male mucking around with women’s bodies. The hard-fought right to abortion is no choice when women feel they have no economic alternative.

Cervical smears are inadequate tests that have not improved in decades, she says. Mammograms are a form of torture that have not led to a significant reduction in the death rate from breast cancer. And fertility treatment “causes more suffering than it does joy.”

Women are too quick to go under the knife, which is usually wielded by and for men. Breast implants, tummy tucks and liposuction to please. Episiotomy and hysterectomy in the name of good medicine, along with hormone replacement therapy, are “hopelessly oversold” to women who expect it to give them back their youthful skin and hair.

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But in what is seen as her greatest contradiction, while condemning plastic surgery as butchery, she does not think the African traditions of clitoridectomy and sewing the vagina tight are all that bad. They must have cultural value because they have survived decades of criminalization.

“How can you say that?” stunned women ask Greer, adding that the procedures are a cruel assault on girls too young to give or withhold their consent.

“What I am saying is that the question of which bits of yourself you cut off is an extremely contested area,” said Greer, in answering a critic at the recent London gathering. “One woman’s beautification is another’s mutilation.”

One suspects that Greer is overstating her point, in a bid to shake people up. She is a polemicist, always cruising for a good fight in the hope that it will knock women out of their complacency.

In the process, Greer is accused of blaming the victim.

But while there is much truth in what she says, the litany of shortcomings and self-deceptions that she describes can leave well-meaning women feeling more incapacitated than empowered. Especially because she is long on critique and short on solutions.

Her new book, which sometimes seems an attack of her own life’s work, has been criticized by younger feminists as too negative and out of touch.

“Is Germaine Germane?” one newspaper asked.

Greer says that is just sexism with ageism thrown in.

“If Norman Mailer wrote a book at 60, no one would be saying, ‘What does he know at 60?’ ” said the woman who once took Mailer on in a debate over feminism. “I am very happy to have opponents. I am not prepared to be dismissed because I am 60.”

No one is dismissing Greer--she is an intellectual force to contend with. But many young women reject her view that the differences between men and women are too great to reconcile. Many also reject her anger.

“I cannot help but believe in men and women working together,” said Lin Lefrancois, 33, a newly graduated lawyer, at one of Greer’s London gatherings. “It’s all about choice. If I want to have a child or I don’t. I have jeans on and makeup. So?”

“Wait until you go to work in a chamber and see the way men are groomed and women are not. You may not be angry now,” Greer said. This is what Lefrancois will face as a lawyer, Greer told her: “Your job will be to carry out the law, not to change it. The fact that the laws are sexist should be of no concern to you.”

Lefrancois looked disappointed. She had read “The Female Eunuch” at 13, she said, and was inspired to go to law school. “I am where I am in part because of her. It’s just the anger. . . .”

But she did not finish, hurried as she was to get the veteran feminist to sign her copy of “The Whole Woman.”

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller can be reached by e-mail at Marjorie.Miller@latimes.com.