It's time to get angry again. Greer's writings usually reflect the experience of educated, White, middle-class women and this book is no exception. However, one does get the impression that, thirty years on, she is conscious of the narrowness of this experience and attempts to draw more broadly from the experiences of women of colour. Reading the book as a migrant woman living in White society, I admired her principled feminist politics and passions and identified strongly with the main themes in the book. According to a British study this leads to severe depression and some 25 percent of the cases attempt suicide.
Women spend hundreds of womanhours trying to achieve the perfect hairless body form.
They are expected to struggle daily, waxing their legs, plucking their eyebrows and containing their pubic hair to achieve pubic baldness-all of which would be considered to be pathological behaviour in men. Fat, as the women's liberation movement in the 1970s claimed, is still a feminist issue. That good ol' dimply fat, which in previous phases of human history and in older cultures was considered to be a mere physical attribute of women and men, has now been rendered disgusting by modern-day marketing schemes. When the 1996 Miss World contest was staged in Bangalore, India, the cheapest seats sold at a price of 2,000 rupees, and 10,000 state troops were sent out to quell the protestors outside, who were holding an alternative pageant featuring Miss Poverty and Miss Illiteracy. The beauty myth is, of course, an Anglo-capitalist stereotype.