Knowing we are all affected and sculpted by our personal experiences, GG herself was one of the first liberated women and cannot understand that her own choices as a sexually 'liberated' woman in Australia-Cambridge Uni when 80-90% of the universities were full of men led her down this road. When her reputation got around is there litle wonder she attracted men interested mainly in her for some sex. As you sow so shall you reap.

I would think we could all benefit if warhorses like GG could explain why if men really have it so good, why is it men die off so much earlier than women and the mortality gap is greatest in the most 'advanced' western countries. Before the Industrial Revolution and (taking out deaths from wars and childbirth) men and women died at about the same age. The trouble is such facts have to be ignored because they show how much more stressed the average male is.

Of course having made herself immensely wealthy, though personally unsatisfied, GG can hardly turn around and say I was wrong, though I suspect if she did she'd end up with even more money simply by being even more controversial. This book is for those who wish to wade in bitterness and pretend they're a victim. Most young women today find this boring though it may appeal to women who are in their 50s and 60s who wish to remember the past. The arguments are as old as reliving the Vietnam War


Over-rated sensationlist and hate-filled   April 29, 2001
 45 out of 74 found this review helpful

This book only deserves attention because it is so sensationalist. When I first read it at the age of 18 I felt that, as a young woman, I was being mentally assaulted by the author for being female; she really does not seem to like the average woman who longs to feel secure in her femininity very much. It is a rant that makes interesting anecdotal points but has too little backup evidence. No historical point is traced thoroughly through documents. The basic assumption of the book is a pseudo-Marxist one; men and women are two political classes and the former has been oppressing the latter throughout history until along came the swinging sixties. Greer blames women for having been supposedly brainwashed by men and the patriarchal order into accepting femininity, which insofar as behaviour is concerned, she clearly sees as a social construct foisted upon women. No doubt there is real room for investigating this claim, because certain social norms of femininity (and masculinity) vary between societies, but Matt Ridley has shown in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, that these differences are less significance than universal similarities. Greer is too keen to take up the sort of view espoused from Rousseau to Margaret Mead et al.that it is western civilisation that has been most oppressive upon women, whereas there exist 'liberated' societies of 'noble savages' elsewhere. Again, evolutionary science and anthropology will show evidence to the contrary. It must be said clearly to Greer and all other western feminists that it is precisely western civilisation, and the fact that the notion of human rights and civil liberties originated in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that has provided the fertile soil for feminism in the first place. Everybody who reads this book should read the rejoinder to it, 'The Female Woman' by the Greek femal economist Arianna Stassinopoulos. That book contains much more accurate cross-cultural evidence and is much more realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of both women and men.