What Greer seems to want to honour in The Whole Woman is the sorrow and the pity of something like the womanly apprehension of the world. It is well Germaine Greer is so tough and so witty because the burden of The Whole Woman is heavy. There is a lot in this book about unrequited love. She also believes that men are in flight from communicative sex as they are in flight from everything womanly. Boyish, hipless girls have left the broad hips and full bosom 'as monstrous as motherhood'.
Men are in a thrall to progressively infantile pornographic ethos.
Motherhood today, according to Greer, is regarded as a personal indulgence and children as a drain on resources and a clog to pleasure. Governments and local councils fear 'feckless girls and their bastards'. Greer says that where in The Female Eunuch she had argued that motherhood should not be seen as a substitute career in fact motherhood should be seen as a genuine career option and mothers should be paid by the state, whether to stay home and look after children or to pay for their childcare needs if they are to work. In none of this do men lift much of a press. Greer is inclined to think the radical lesbians may have been onto something when they thought women's and men's sexuality was asymmetrical and in her 'wise old woman' stance Greer is pretty wry about genital sex.