SOURCE: “The Female Misogynist,” in The New Republic, May 31, 1999, pp. 34-40.

In the following review, Talbot offers negative evaluation of The Whole Woman, citing serious faults in Greer's “men-are-dogs” perspective and contradictory arguments that undermine the well-being of women.

I.

Whatever else Germaine Greer's new book will be called, it will almost certainly be called a work of feminism. There are reasons for this, but they have almost nothing to do with the book itself, which is a sour and undiscriminating litany of charges against men—all men, men as nature created them—wrapped around the willfully obtuse argument that little or nothing has improved for American and European women over the last thirty years. The Whole Woman presents men as irredeemable and equality as a hoax. For this reason, the book is just a sideshow, a shrill distraction from the humane and transformative and exhilarating vision of...