The Madwoman's Underclothes, by Germaine Greer
Tuttleton, James W.
T o find oneself in The Madwoman's Underclothes is to get a whiff of the more fetid odors that still emanate from the sleazy international counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Germaine...
...Castro's regime is romanticized as creating a place where "life was not soap opera, but real...
...At least there is a wild anarchy here, from essay to essay as the years pass, that throws logic to the wind and consistency of principle into the dustbin...
...In "Women and Power in Cuba" (1985), Greer tells us, based on a two-week trip, that Cuba is not "a fraud or a failure...
...That this might be the consequence of one-night stands and other failures of emotional commitment seems beyond her...
...Germaine Greer—Australian-born author of The Female Eunuch, The Obstacle Race, and Sex and Destiny, now living in England—presents in this volume some fifty-odd articles composed between 1968 and 1986 for recognizable periodicals like Esquire and the London Sunday Times and for underground porno rags like Oz and Suck...
...It is now wisdom that she is fain to give us...
...In Saigon in 1971, she can see only the go-go dancers and hookers are "casualties of American policy in Vietnam"—as if such women didn't exist in all times and places, war or not...
...None of Greer's topics is uninteresting in itself, but as they issue forth in this book, article after article, the mind rebels against remembering the inane acting-out of the counterculture, especially as Greer so stridently represented it...
...She had gone there, she tells us, to look for "a different notion of woman, for it seemed to me that consumer society could never regard human qualities as anything but commodities...
...It perturbs her that feminists will not like the "machismo" of Cuban men, who will do anything for a lay, so she whitewashes their male cock-strut as "an attempt to counterbalance the dominance of women in family and kin relations...
...that they have been duped by the advertisers of vaginal deodorants...
...If it has a method, it is the defiance of censorship...
...In a rare moment of candor, Greer remarks that "given their deeply serious view of sexuality, I must have seemed like a child using sex as a toy, a distraction, a pastime...
...In any case, "men are the enemy'a refrain to which this book returns again and again...
...Her latest opinion is that "the so-called sexual liberation of our time" is "fundamentally masturbatory...
...Unfortunately, the mantle doesn't fit...
...C uch is her hatred of Western civilization and liberal democracy that political venom permeates much of her sexual theorizing...
...But if the number of articles is large, the focus is tediously narrow: sex, seduction, rape, contraception, abortion, artificial insemination, nude male pin-ups, cosmetic surgery and female scarification, premenstrual syndrome as a legal defense, legalizing pot, rock and roll, and Norman Mailer as the prisoner of his cojones...
...It was incorporated in the capitalist system which has power to absorb and exploit all tendencies, including the tendencies towards its own overthrow...
...The grand experiment in Cuban Communism has produced a people who have not, she opines, "our prurient interest in domestic and sexual affairs...
...Her notion of music in "Mozaic and the Revolution" (1969) is that "the rock revolution failed because it was corrupted...
...While Greer likes to fancy herself a liberal (sometimes a radical, sometimes a Marxist), she is in fact an old-fashioned moral anarchist committed simply to doing her own thing...
...Have the years given her wisdom...
...Sexual love, as she has experienced it, seems no longer capable of perfection, since it is "riddled with hostility and insecurity...
...Nor can we sympathize with her resentment at now finding herself "considered an architect of the permissive society...
...But, alas, this is an insight that Greer cannot quite grasp: she has treated sex as a toy all these years...
...THE MADWOMAN'S UNDERCLOTHES: ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS Germaine Greer/Atlantic Monthly Press/$17.95 James W. Tuttleton THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 49...
...that chemical abortifacients are preferable to the pill...
...The scandal she tries to provoke, however, goes deeper than the naughtiness of language and may be suggested by the James, W. 7littleton teaches English at New York University...
...In "Flip Top Legal Pot" (1968), she amplified on her notion that "marijuana is basically a good habit...
...No one will want to quarrel with the virtues of motherhood, but the consummate sentimentality of Greer's latest effusion can hardly be taken seriously...
...Funny, by 1986 the chicken of substance-abuse had come home to roost...
...Those three months," she remarks, "destroyed all my certainties...
...They "tottered round the exhibits on four-inch heels clutching their comparieros for support...
...that government has no right to "spy" on welfare mothers to determine whether they're otherwise supported...
...Besides, our society no longer "greets the newborn with joy and makes of the mother a heroine, as itonce did...
...In short the subject is politics—sexual and otherwise...
...But it is the fake of an even-handed pose when she concedes that "women don't really like women either, and they too can usually be relied on to employ men in preference to women...
...In "Welcome the Shit-Storm" (1971) she complains at the arrest—for obscenity and corrupting minors—of three editors of Oz, who intended to put out a porno issue for kids...
...Hence we will have to put up with titled essays like "Welcome the Shit-Storm," "Going Without [Underpants]," and "Lady Love Your Cunt" —mere instances of her principal aim, to scandalize bourgeois readers, that is, members of her own class...
...Yet a mere couple of pages later she reluctantly concedes that "the Cubans have accepted that adultery istheir national sport...
...But here she comes along, insisting that we remember her contribution to the period...
...They are the opposite of competitiveness, acquisitiveness and domination, and may be summed up by the word 'co-operation...
...Her new conviction is that "the only corrective to social inequality, cruelty and callousness is to be found in values which, if we cannot call them female, can be called sororal...
...simple quotation of her typical attitudes...
...With hindsight she remarks: "The years of social smoking were an unending ordeal, the combination of marijuana and sex an obscenity...
...She finds Cuban women wonderfully liberated under Communism but resents how they cling to "the bourgeois paradigm of the nuclear family which is what most Cubans take as the basic unit of the modern state...
...One of those who shaped the permissive society, she instructed our spoiled kids on how to evade the fuzz and "learn the criminal's rule: to protect your own, especially your connection, and don't as one idiot did, toss your gear to someone else when you're getting busted...
...What she found in Calabria were some truly remarkable women, full of life, serious about sex, devoted to their husbands and children, living —despite their impoverishment—full lives...
...So public-spirited are Fidel's comrades that "men and women volunteer to clean the streets and plant public gardens in their free time...
...She now celebrates, with consummate sentimentality, "poor women, women's women," and "the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love...
...The most interesting piece in the collection is the "Introduction," a piece which describes Greer's three-month stay with some very poor villagers in Calabria, Italy...
...But it is always sex that most interests her...
...This, however, seems oddly contradicted by her own description of the Cuban women, "whose bottoms threatened to burst out of their elasticized pants...
...Yet she is willing to forgive this weakness because "the Cubans are involved after all in a much bigger adventure than sex, speed and smack could possibly supply...
...In any case, "it is not women who have downgraded motherhood," she avers, "but Western society itself...
...Their clothes, including their brassieres, were all two or three sizes too small and flesh bulged everywhere...
...Not much...
...An essay on population resettlement in starving Ethiopia whitewashes the brutal Communist government there as the champion of the people, while Western relief efforts are trashed as inadequate...
...Other articles in The Madwoman's Underclothes avow that women are in the sinister hands of (male) doctors...
...that abortion is desirable because an unwanted child "becomes an occasion of sin...
...She may be growing up at last, but the road to her maturity is much longer than she imagines...
...Their hair had been dragged over rollers, bleached, dyed and coloured...
...On the employment question, she opined in "The Slag-Heap Erupts" (1970) that "men don't really like women and that is really why they don't employ them...
...Fidel, it seems, hasn't changed some basic Cuban traits...
...If her book has a theme, it is sexual liberation...
...There is no question that she hated "The System" and lusted for its overthrow...
...Hence she tries on the mantle of the serious moralist...
...And what a contribution it was...
...Their nails and faces were garishly painted...
...Still, after two decades of hell-raising, Greer now feels that she must have become wiser...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
