Germaine Greer: A Groupie in Women's Lib
by Robert Greenfield
First published in Rolling Stone in January 1971

"In America, the female liberation movement has two distinct facets," she says, suddenly serious. "There are the women who work on committees and make statements that are read into the Congressional Record. They work within the system, a system that oppresses the people. There are more radical women who band into all-female groups and learn Karate, violence... that's their trip, isn't it? They'll crush us at it. I dig the Redstockings. I think they're into something, real dialogue, allowing women to be true women. As for the others, the ones learning Karate, a high powered rifle does the job best. You have to touch someone to use Karate. If you're going to touch someone, you might as well make love to them."

posted by neel master at 8:01 PM

Hello readers. Sorry about the unannounced holiday reprieve. I hope all of you were as busy with your families and friends as I was.

My Christmas was pretty cool. Jason got me a Lydia Davis book, (interview and info) which I promptly misplaced. Luckily, not 24 hours later, I was in possession of another gift book with which to divert myself, this one from my father. A note: for reasons that should be fairly obvious, my family has mounted a mild but consistent effort to rid me of some of my personality quirks, among which they include my incessant socialist ranting. Toward this end, my father bought me Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, perhaps one of the most influential anti-collectivist texts of the century. I look forward to it, but reserve my most eager anticipation for the socialist rebuttal.

Ah, the problem with reading: books we like tend to resonate with us, and they can only resonate with us if they were in some sense already inside us just waiting to come out. Reading something you like is a largely confirmatory enterprise. I suppose I'm a positivist after all, because this makes me quite uncomfortable. It made Karl Popper uncomfortable, too. His discomfort with Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Adlerian psychology is what led him to pursue the development of a theory that attempted to demarcate scientific knowledge from other kinds. His principal problem with these social science theories was that confirmations lurked everywhere their believers looked for them. This has been my longstanding problem with social science, and one that I doubt I'll ever fully conquer. But let's pause here and see if we can find some sick Popper links.

We can! In fact, we have managed to find the exact essay to which I was referring above, which is called Science as Falsification. Let's quote it, shall we?

It was the summer of 1919 that I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories—the Marxist theory of history, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status. My problem perhaps first took the simple form, "What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton's theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?"

To make this contrast clear I should explain that few of us at the time would have said that we believed in the truth of Einstein's theory of gravitation. This shows that it was not my doubting the truth of those three other theories which bothered me, but something else. Yet neither was it that I nearly felt mathematical physics to be more exact than sociological or psychological type of theory. Thus what worried me was neither the problem of truth, at that stage at least, nor the problem of exactness or measurability. It was rather that I felt that these other three theories, though posing as science, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather than astronomy.

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest the truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analyzed" and crying aloud for treatment. (more)

posted by neel master at 10:46 AM