A performance by Germaine Greer

I remember reading a chapter from The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer about a performance she did symbolising feminist perspective. The Female Eunuch argues that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. Greer is a famous Australian feminist and an academic who placed her vagina on display for anyone to come and observe. She did this (in very basic terms) to make a point that a vagina isn’t a mysterious, sexy, playboy toy for men to use but an ordinary body part like any other. Greer has made her vagina a strangely distorted figural sculpture. This doesn’t make men horny, for them this performance was grotesque, carnivalesque, a site of abjection and informe. Greer said, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."