The Female Eunuch is a book by Germaine Greer published in 1970. Greer defends the idea that the “traditional” nuclear family, consumerist and living in residential neighborhoods sexually oppresses women, and is castrating, making them eunuchs . She criticizes "the Great Love", "a drug whose popular mythology surrounds sexuality".
The Female Eunuch is a feminist analysis , mixing scientific research and controversy. It was a key text of the feminist movement in the 1970s, widely discussed and criticized by other feminists and a wider community, not least because of its author's strong exposure in the broadcast media. In the sections titled "Body", "Spirit", "Love" and "Hate", Germaine Greer examines historical definitions of women's self-perception and starts from a premise of limitations imposed on women to criticize consumer societies. modern, feminine "normality", and the masculine construction of stereotypes. The stereotypical representation of the eternal femininein magazines turns the wife into a consumer and an emblem of her husband's power; the woman becomes at the same time a commercial target and an object of commodification and the female models of the magazines are like "dolls" of which "[t] he essential quality is castration" . What she sums up as follows: "The world has lost its soul, and I my sex". Marriage makes the woman a passive being, with an "etiolated and neurotic" sexuality .
Unlike previous feminists, Greer uses humor , daring, and foul language to make a direct and candid description of female sexuality; much of this subject has remained taboo in Anglo-Saxon societies. Irreverence Germaine Greer to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis was inspired by The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir . This work established a bridge between academia and the concerns of its time by presenting its objectives in its final chapter, “Revolution”. He is in agreement, and often associated with the creative and revolutionary movement of this period of the 1970s.
Greer argues that men hate women, although women don't realize this and have learned to hate themselves. In opposition to the feminists defending the fight for equality between men and women, Germaine Greer considers that this egalitarianism is a myth: the egalitarian struggle is deeply conservative in its claim to subject all women to the virile model of Western liberal society, and despite, or because of the acquired rights, the woman feels uncomfortable in her body, it is therefore important to privilege the liberation of the woman in the fight for equality .
The Female Eunuch is, like The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan with whom he shares the critique of the representation of women in the media, a seminal book in the history of feminism ; it relates to what has come to be called the second feminist wave.
