When Germaine Greer was in her twenties, she acted in a short film about the fatal, destructive power of female emotions. Dressed in bridal white, her face a pan-stick parody of women’s magazine femininity, she plays a woman pushed to the edge of madness by a heartless, intransigent man who, in spite of her entreaties, refuses to reassure her of his love.
“Darling,” she wheedles while petting his hat, “do you love me?” He stares at the camera, impassive, as her tone becomes more urgent. “Do you love me?” Still no response.
In another scene, he is walking as if late for a meeting, trying to ignore her as she flutters and flaps about him. By now, she is begging.
Trying to attract his attention, she throws herself down at his feet. Without pausing, he steps over her. Finally, driven insane by his indifference, she strangles him. “I love you,” he gasps, hoping that the words she’s been longing for will cause her to loosen her grip. Or perhaps he really means it? As her fingers tighten around him, we are left to wonder whether our man was a vicious sadist or a common-or-garden commitmentphobe of the type who would rather deny his love than deal with its implications.
It’s hard to picture Greer as a supplicant. The idea seems vaguely outrageous. Of all Greer’s many personae, the loser-in-love is surely the least convincing. And yet, according to her god-daughter, interviewed recently on British TV: “She’s been as much a duffer in affairs as all the rest of us.”
Assuming she’s telling the truth, this news is either reassuring or profoundly depressing. If a singular spirit like Greer is not immune to self-abasement in relationships, what hope can there be for those of us who don’t have her strength of character? On the other hand, if she of all people can behave like a doe-eyed fool in the face of some unworthy object, maybe we shouldn’t berate ourselves at those times in our lives when, against our better judgment, we are turned from human beings into wheedling, bleating creeps.
Describing her relationship with Roeloff Smilde, a stern libertarian who didn’t believe in romance, Greer presents a woman she hardly recognised. “I was possessive and I was clingy. I’d look at myself in the mirror and think, Christ, how the mighty have fallen. How can you be so pathetic. How can you be always sobbing and crying when he’s late home for dinner. Why did you cook the fucking dinner? He doesn’t even want to eat it! And why are you sobbing because he didn’t come home and eat it when he didn’t promise to come home and eat it anyway?”
For Greer’s detractors, this is all grist to the mill. The people who say her politics are self-centred will point to these romantic disappointments as evidence for their theory that her pessimistic view of relationships is based on her own experience. Thus, Greer’s belief that men and women are emotionally incompatible is seen as product of pique. If only her father had hugged her, they say. If only she had found the right man.
As if feminism wasn’t always, in some sense, a rationalisation of disillusion. It doesn’t deal with happy marriages. What it does, and should, deal with is the gulf between women’s romantic hopes and their chances of realisation. This question falls outside the remit of most post-feminist discussion which either ignores sexual politics or simplifies it to the point where it is meaningless.
Addressing only those aspects of male behaviour which are obviously offensive – violence, infidelity, not phoning when you say you’re going to – it misses a crucial problem, namely, why do so many otherwise decent men fail to respond to women’s romantic needs? And why do so many intelligent, desirable women still humiliate themselves with men who don’t really want them?
It will be argued that this is not a gender issue. But how many men do you know would stay in a relationship in which they were inadequately loved? Women do it all the time. Instead of complaining or leaving, they make excuses for their partners – seeking to salvage hope from a situation that is basically hopeless. “He does love me, he just doesn’t know how to express it.” “It isn’t that he doesn’t love me, it’s just that he’s scared of commitment.”
In these words, generations of myth- making about men’s emotional reticence is marshalled to preserve them from the wrath of women spurned.
Women collude in this process – kidding themselves that it is really possible to love someone yet not want to live with them, or that seeing someone one night a week is great because it allows you your freedom. “It suits me this way,” they say, “I value my independence.” As far as Greer is concerned, if men loved us, they would find a way to say it. The most refreshing thing about her analysis is the way it attacks the idea that men just need “drawing out”.
Instead of spending pointless days “working on” the relationship in the hope that, with the right combination of praise and sexual favours, their men will become more forthcoming, Greer says women should accept the fact that nothing they do will make any difference. “You need him more than he needs you,” she says in The Whole Woman.
Her solutions – separatism, solitude and books – will not suit everyone. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine anyone looking happier than Greer does in her present incarnation.
“It’s not the academic life that is attractive,” she explains, “it’s the life of the mind rather than the struggle with relationships. Relationships survive, I think, because you don’t question them too much – you’re not a perfectionist about them – whereas the life of the mind, you just keep on going. You can be as demanding as you want to be of yourself and your material.”