The Radicals: The Female Eunuch, Relevant Or Redundant?

Relooking at the Radicals: The Female Eunuch, Relevant or Redundant?

I am looking at the ways in which one of the most radical voices of the second wave of feminism; Germaine Greer, offered a systematic deconstruction of the notions of femininity and womanhood in her seminal text The Female Eunuch and more specifically how she explored ideas of sexual liberation, the formation of sexual identity and the exploratory nature of female pleasure in the context of the years leading up to publication of her novel in 1968.

The sexual liberation movement which began in the 1960’s started to coincide with the feminist ideologues of the Women’s Liberation movement due to a shared understanding of the necessity to confront the traditional hegemony; which

Greer continues to explain how the denial and unwillingness to discover the workings of the vagina has manifested an even deeper mystification when considering the vaginal orgasm and therefore the concept of clitoral stimulation has been neglected in the desertion of female genitalia in medical science and society.

With publications of Anne Koedt’s essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1968) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1958???) receiving worldwide acclaim for the revolutionary emphasis upon female pleasure; this ideology was a proclamation advocated and shared by the radicals of the second wave. And many of Germaine Greer’s contemporaries collectively united on the issue of society and the medical industry’s confusion and denial surrounding any attention upon the

It has now become apparent that the element of female pleasure has now been even further removed from contemporary culture and phallocentric idolism has become more applicable than at the time of publication of The Female Eunuch.

In Jessica Ringrose’s essay Are You Sexy, Flirty or a Slut? Exploring ‘Sexualisation’ and How Teen Girls Perform/Negotiate Digital Sexual Identity on Social Networking Sites (Find date) Ringrose explains how teen girls are under pressure on social networking sites to convey a visual display of sexuality due to the escalation of hyper-sexualised, pornified discourse being circulated online. When discussing the representations demonstrated through choice of interactional linguistics and site ‘skin’ by young people on the social networking site Bebo, she states:

“ Masculinity is epitomized in buying consumer goods…with which to gain access to the sexually commodified female body. Femininity in contrast is epitomised through approximating the sexually commodified body, performing as a sexual object, and occupying the position of the sexually desirable ‘baby girl’.” (pg