The Female Eunuch

The ideal manifestation of love is different for men and women: Boys can show love for other boys without connotations of sex or romance, but girls are discouraged from showing love for other girls, regardless of whether the love is sexual or platonic. Children internalize expressions of love that dictate values of “egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession, and addiction” (167). The understanding of romantic love as reserved for one man and one woman strips away other elements of love, such as reciprocal generosity, gregariousness, and spontaneity. Greer debates the false dichotomy between Thanatos (the ancient Greek personification of death) and Eros (the ancient Greek personification of love) in relation to collective understandings of love, arguing that there are more elements of Thanatos than Eros in usual expressions of love.

Acts of altruism (acting selflessly for the benefit of others) and of love are often conflated, particularly in sexual and romantic relationships. Love, according to Greer, is dynamic and necessitates reciprocation in contrast to the static, selfless nature of altruism. The conflation of altruism and love often leads women to feel guilty because, whereas true altruism indicates a lack of ulterior motive, the altruism–love hybrid performed by women contains other motives. Another outcome of this conflation is that girls are taught that to show a man love, they must be willing to do anything to make him happy, but boys are not taught the same about pleasing women. Romantic relationships are thus situated in “a kind of commerce” wherein women are always “the creditor” in emotional exchanges because they give love that men do not reciprocate (170-71).

Egotistical love, rather than altruistic love, is the most commonly expressed form of love in romantic relationships. Egotistical love aims to serve the self, and therefore manifestations of romantic love most usually illustrate elements of codependency, dishonesty, and exploitation—even if the opposite claims are made. Greer argues, “The hallmark of egotistical love, even when it masquerades as altruistic love, is the negative answer to the question ‘Do I want my love to be happy more than I want him to be with me?’” (180). A negative answer to this question acknowledges that the love expressed in such a relationship is egotistically motivated and therefore is not sustainable between two individuals. Egotistical love makes monogamy, especially as a way for men to possess women, the default type of romantic relationship and distorts notions of what constitutes love or a loving action.

Romantic love is most often a form of socially acceptable obsession. Linguistic expressions describing love in English liken it to a disease or a drug and frame obsessive elements in a positive manner. For example, one can be “‘head-over-heels’ in love,” but not “gently, reliably or sensibly in love” (185), which illustrates that linguistic constructs reflect the normalization of expressing love as obsession. Obsession extends into the relationship between sex and love: Sex performed without love is perceived as fulfilling an instinctive desire, whereas sex performed with love is more respectable. Greer questions the role of obsessive love in sexual intercourse and argues that the relationship between these two constructs must be severed for women to achieve sexual liberation because there is no basis for the argument that love and sex must coexist.

The romance genre reinforces sexism by romanticizing ideals of (sexual) conquest, the paternal husband, and subservience, which is especially damaging because the intended audience for these books is women. Traditional expressions associated with romance during courtship are often a product of a woman’s internalized self-hatred because she is happy to have little agency in this relationship. In popular romance novels, female characters are helpless and lack autonomy, while the male characters who pursue them possess all the power in their relationship. When marriage is the end goal of romance, it allows the concept of romance to become a tool with which women are manipulated. Romance novels not only illustrate this manipulation, but also show how women are (perhaps subconsciously) happy to sanction such a relationship, for they both consume and write these books as testaments to their lifestyles.

In romance literature written for men, the stereotypical object of male fantasy is a woman who can fulfill all his needs (ideally before or instead of fulfilling her own), while she remains entirely expendable, thus an object of his control. This expendability of women is salient in men’s literature because the protagonist often kills or conquests female characters by the end of the story, and her conquest is often essential to the male protagonist securing victory. Men’s romance literature is written from the perspective of and for the gratification of the male fantasy, and it illustrates the many ways men are dissatisfied with traditional life—dissatisfactions that go undiscussed between the sexes. As the subservient female characters in men’s literature illustrate, traditional marriage does not reflect a man’s desire for greater opportunities. Greer notes that an important aspect of this analysis is that this type of literature is not part of the romance genre (meaning literature intended for women), a fact that illustrates the disparity between the expectations of men and women regarding romance.

Social norms present marriage as the formalization of a romantic relationship wherein two people in love pledge to be together exclusively forever. This is, according to Greer, a myth invented and proliferated by a rising middle socioeconomic class because, in practice, marriage does not necessitate or guarantee love everlasting. As the middle class developed, ideas about marriage changed quite drastically for members of this class. Historically, for the lower social classes, marriage functioned as a necessity that never required love between the partners, and because people of this class expected life to be difficult, they assumed the same of marriage; for the rich, marriage served as a social necessity dictated by station and politics, not love. For the rising middle class, however, literature and folklore (rather than a clearly defined socioeconomic purpose) drove their vision of an ideal marriage, leading them to establish the idea that marriage necessitates love. This idea, combined with the confounding of marriage and sexual conquest, became entwined with religion, further muddling the origins of marital practices and their relationship to (religious) traditions.

Like marriage, the common understanding of the family as a single, self-contained unit is not based on sociocultural developments driven by capitalism. The nuclear family is an apparatus of state control that encourages isolation, individualism, and egotism to the point of fragmentation. Unlike the stem family that persisted until the 16th century or the “organic family”—a return to the dynamic nature of the stem family—the nuclear family strips away the communal nature of a family. Social norms limit the parents in a nuclear family not only according to permissible actions (they must be monogamous, the man works while the woman raises the children, etc.), but also according to their own self-determination because to reject family is to reject one’s place in society. The nuclear family stifles children similarly: They are removed from other family and community members, heavily surveilled by the mother, who has few other duties, and indoctrinated to accept this relationship. According to Greer, there is no one “right” type of family, and each dynamic has its problems and benefits, but the rigidity and isolation imposed by the nuclear family structure is unsustainable.

Security is a false construction, and though nothing in life can be truly certain, most everyone attempts to create and seek out ways to feel secure. Most often emotional and material security are conflated, and although neither type of security can be attained with certainty, emotional security is much harder to obtain. Social norms dictate that marriage offers security and is desirable for women, who must constantly reify themselves through their relationships to others, but men perceive it as undesirable and stifling because they may seek freedom throughout life. Greer argues that women should reject traditional notions of security and embrace the idea that insecurity means freedom. If all the ways in which one might seek security are systems founded on the sexist oppression of women, flouting these systems is a way of self-determination. Elimination of the myth of marriage as a security net would allow romantic relationships to flourish without the pressures imposed by the false dichotomy of security through marriage or insecurity without marriage.