The Female Eunuch

Part of the radical rejection of existing sociopolitical systems in The Female Eunuch is the rejection of capitalist, consumerist narratives and practices. Greer argues that the consumerist system driven by capitalism is a major factor in the metaphorical castration of women in Western societies because this system solidifies a woman’s status as an object and discourages women from freedom of expression. The marketing that proliferates consumerism plays a primary role in the reification of gender roles because it allows for the advertising of products as solutions to problems that exist only to further oppress women. Greer touts many Marxist values in her work, namely that sociopolitical systems do not reflect morals or values and are instead driven by the privatization of material wealth.

A major component of the Marxist theme of this work is its use to explain how capitalist practices have further entrenched the shame women feel toward their bodies. This is most salient in the number of products marketed toward women with claims of fixing them or improving their lives. These products range from makeup and clothes to period products and home goods and come with vague claims of providing unqualified and vague benefits, like “‘zest’, ‘zip’, ‘energy’, vitality’, fitness’, happiness’, [or] ‘inner glow’” (308), further suggesting that women must possess these qualities without offering a reason why. Greer encourages her readers to question the validity of such marketing claims and the relevance of products designed to covertly instill shame toward the female body.

Consumerist culture establishes more means to police women’s bodies. Greer uses products that claim to eliminate vaginal odor as an example: She explains that “women are warned in every women’s magazine of the horror of vaginal odour, which is assumed to be utterly repellent” (43), but instead of offering medical advice, these magazines present products like vaginal douches as a solution. Not only is this a largely imagined problem because it is a projected form of hatred toward the female body, but women face real danger in falling for these marketing schemes, as these products are often harmful to a user’s health. These products are stand-ins for real education about the female body. Teaching girls how to properly care for their vaginas would eliminate the imagined problem of vaginal odor because they would be familiar with the natural odor of a clean and healthy vagina; such teaching would also allow them to more easily know when to seek medical attention if the conditions of their vagina changed. These marketing tactics entrench notions of shame and secrecy surrounding female reproductive and sex organs, and they spread harmful myths about the female body and further widen the gap in proper medical treatment of women’s reproductive organs.

This same anti-capitalist rhetoric applies to Greer’s arguments about women as (sex) objects in society. Consumerist narratives allow for the equation of the objectified female body to the value of the products marketed to women. These practices converge with the systems of oppression that proliferate sexism, which is particularly visible in the development of the wedding industry. Because “the wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology” of marriage as the end goal for women (242), marriage has merged with consumerism to form an industry wherein women are both the prime audience for advertising and the final, mythologized product. Greer employs the Marxist technique of historical materialism in her assessment of marriage to illustrate how marriage has evolved in response to the material goods made available by capitalism.

A fundamental component of Greer’s Marxist values is her belief that the capitalist system is full of overt contradictions, and such contradictions further entrench existing power dynamics between men and women. This is a system that intentionally aims to maintain a power dynamic that disenfranchises women as (sex) objects. Under existing sociopolitical systems, “the conditioning for femininity which ought to increase the market value of the sex object can and does become the worst devaluation” because the system is inherently contradictive (99). It would appear that women should be able to leverage their status as sex objects because this is the only form of social capital they have full access to; however, because capitalism does not serve logic or morality and rather follows consolidation and privatization of wealth, a woman’s leveraging her status as a sex object cannot lead her to exercise greater agency in a system that attributes her value only in terms of her relationships to others.