June 10, 1999
Web posted at: 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT)

This text contains profanity that may be offensive to some readers.

(CNN) -- Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny.

Unless Germaine Greer is the feminist in question.

Thirty years after "The Female Eunuch" galvanized the women's liberation movement, Greer has launched a fiery sequel assessing the state of womanhood and proclaiming that the time has come to get angry again.

She likes to talk about it, but writing about conversation with the liveliest, funniest, profanest 60-year old woman in the free world is a bit like trying to hum Mozart. Or transcribe one of Sam Kinison's most irreverent rants. You can't capture all of it. You just can't.

So rather than diminish the impact, and most of all the humor of her words with too much story and not enough Greer, it's best to let the woman fume unchecked. Be it on the topic of Ally McBeal, or the thrust of her new book, "The Whole Woman," or on the subject of the Kosovo war, Greer's intensity speaks for itself.

How would you like to be addressed and what would you like to talk about?

"Though I have a Ph.D., Americans refuse to call me doctor. They call me Ms. I've decided that being called Ms. is one of the punishments of being a feminist.

"I'm also a bit tired of the topic of female genital mutilation ... it's really peripheral to our society. It's seen as sensational, yes, but why? Why don't people want to talk about the mutilations going on in our society ... the body piercings, the shortening of clitoris' when they're thought to be too long ... the episiotomies. Normalization surgery. When a baby is born with genitalia thought to be ambiguous, doctors try to "tidy them up." People do grow into their genitalia. I have noticed this.

"In fact, even female genital mutilation is, in some parts of Africa, a cosmetic procedure. And the women are doing this to each other. As far as I can discover, the men are fairly innocent about it, they're really not sure ... especially as they don't spend a lot of time looking at women's genitals. But then I don't think American men do, either. They're not at all sure what there is down there."

In 'The Whole Woman' you call a prostitute with a drug habit the least free human on the planet. Who then would you consider the most free?

"People think that being rich and being able to earn your money constitutes freedom. But it's only freedom to gratify some of your desires. The truth about our life at the end of the 20th century is that your employer gets the best of it and you don't have the option of shortchanging that employer. You can't even ration the time you give that employer because somebody else is only too happy to take your place. There are very few mechanisms left for collective bargaining. We can no longer say: "We need three days off a week." They'll say: "You need three days off? We can find someone who needs no days off"!

"A good friend of mine who works in California had a mastectomy and had to hide it because no one would ever have invested in anything she did ever again. They knew she had a primary cancer and might very well have a secondary one. She wanted reconstruction so people wouldn't know because it's California ... you know? It was Braless Time. She was a filmmaker; her job was to spend other peoples money and she had to be there. The studio will out you through their insurance machine and if you don't pass muster, they won't give you the money. And so it goes ...

"So freedom, it's an interesting concept. Everybody in this country is in debt, and has to service those debts, those credit cards and mortgages. We're also surveilled the whole time...doesn't matter where we go or what we do, somebody is watching and recording it. To me it's truly amazing. Some old lady is beaten to death in a cottage in the country in England and we see on the TV that night, her last visit to the mall as she got cash from her cash card. These are her last known moments. Well, good Lord!

"As long as you don't do anything that puts pressures on the parameters that limit your freedom, you don't notice it. You're in prison but you haven't found the walls or the bars. As soon as you do make a move, for example, you decide to oppose the aerial bombardment in Yugoslavia -- you suddenly find you're in trouble."

Somewhat suprisingly, your book is funny ...

"Oh, tell that to Camille Paglia. Tell that to the 'New York Times!' I'm finding it very difficult to understand the frame of mind in which they read the book. They seem to be personally outraged.

"I mean, there is nothing more serious than humor. When you laugh at things, because it's the only way not to cry or bang your head against the wall. I'm also aware that, having been a tall, long-faced child, I've been entertaining people all my life and in a way I daren't be too serious with them. Although every now and then I do just get plain mad."

You said you wouldn't write this book. Why did you?

"I just couldn't stand it (the current state of feminist movement) anymore, the clichés were driving me nuts! "You've got abortion -- what more do you want?" Excuse me, you ... you bastard! How dare you ask me that question?! "You've got equal pay." Equal pay for what?! "Equal pay for work we consider to be of equal value." Yeah, but most of the work that women do, you consider to be of inferior value ...

"Because it's a nonfiction book, it's very vulnerable to litigation. Litigation these days is so off the wall! We've been dragged through whole process by some dame whose annoyed that she wasn't mentioned in the book. We've had to rewrite a section of the book ... we must have rewritten the thing ten times and it's just held everything up, cost everyone money ... I just wanted to say "Print and be damned! I'll see you in court."

"There was one Australian feminist (and we had a boyfriend in common so that might explain this) who claimed that when I wrote "The Female Eunuch" I was an erotomaniac and now, I was erotophobic. Very serious allegations made and I was going to mention that in the book. But then I thought ... Oh, but what's the point? Why do I need to call her on that? I'm big; I can handle that."

You sound like you could handle most anything.

"Oh, sure I'm tough, but I still create the same difficulties for myself. I still throw myself away on worthless men. Spend weeks obsessing about them when I know they're not thinking of me at all. Do you believe that? That makes me so mad I could spew."

What do you think of Ally McBeal?

"I have never been able to watch an episode. Because she's just so pathetic. I thought it was kind of funny when was it Time or Newsweek that ran the cover: "Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and ... Ally McBeal." What? A fictional character? Is this where we end up? And then Calista Flockhart turns out to be an emaciated elf who stands inside her clothes, she's so thin.

What did you learn while traveling the world?

"I lived in India for four months and when I came back to England I kept thinking that I was looking at a magazine. Everything was so shiny, and there was no dust and the whole place seemed to be under shrink-wrap and it seemed so unnatural. I'm interested in how in the poorer world women blossom and grow and have power at street level and are heads of big families. They can talk louder than we can! There's all kinds of big differences. I was looking for ways for women to be, I was looking for an alternative to Mrs. Thatcher and whoever the latest girlie role model was ... Steffi Graf or whoever.

"What was really important to me was to be observing a society where women were not sex objects, or at least not primarily. You are a sex object in the early years of marriage when you were having your babies but after that you become a different thing. You become a manager of a small domestic unit, and a coworker with other women and a preparer of primary foodstuffs and so on ..."

"In the book you say women, before they identify themselves as a wife, daughter or sister, should think of themselves as a woman. Why not first as a human?"

"Identifying yourself as a human being first will be important when we have an extraterrestrial force on earth. Then we'll have to assert our human-ness against their martian-ness or outergalactic-ness. But right now were still fighting our battles within this terrestrial system. There I think the important thing is that we do not identify with the crimes committed in names of our religion or country or political party. We need to actually see beyond that and say "Hang on a minute, you guys, you're actually beating up on women, when you smash up power generating systems and so on. You're throwing women into extreme jeopardy and add to that, that women are being raped. It's the women who end up being pushed across the country with babies in their arms with no idea where they're going or why or whose idea of a good idea this is.

"But we have to be thinking: is this all right for female soldiers on American aircraft carriers to be firing shells into Iraq, on Iraqi women? Or should we not say, "We will not do this! Mutiny!"

"But it's never going to work that way. Because you will be told that the Kosovo women and the Serbian women supported the war and I frankly just don't believe that. I believe the women are sickened to their hearts and I know when I've spoken in England many times against the war and afterwards the women come up to me and say, "What can we do?" and I say "What the ... can we do?" All we can do is create a human shield, to go to the bridges and stand there and say, "Don't bomb us"! But you know if we became such a nuisance, they'd bomb us too. They'd kill us without a pang."

"So is it hopeless?"

"It's not hopeless, it just takes time. Longer than anyone thinks ... not 50 years and not 100 years. Something more like 500 years. Partly because we don't know ourselves well enough to know what constitutes liberty for us. What would it look like? If we expressed our own sexuality instead of capitulating to the sexuality of the men we meet -- what would that look like? If we did the kind of work we thought was worth doing instead of the work that's available for us to do -- what would that be like? It's unimaginable.

"You'd think that if women would develop any kind of alternative power structure, they'd be able to develop defense skills, because we'd be protecting our own. Defense versus simple counterattack. The thing that women are slow to understand about men and warfare is that men enjoy it. It's so unthinkable. All their entertainment is predicated on warfare. They even talk about the stock market as warfare. It's all war, war, war. They really get off on it!

"You might say that 'it's all because of their hyperfertility. They are not really necessary, they are expendable and they fight until the strongest man impregnates the most women.' But we're not herds of deer. We're human beings. We also know that there are huge numbers of men whose stomachs are turned by this, and who opt out of it. Whether they became clergy, or ballet dancers or transsexuals.

"And if you listen to evolutionary psychologists, they'll tell us it's wired into all of us, that we women all go for the strong man, the victorious man. Well shit if that's it -- if that's as good as it gets ... I'm glad I'm going to ... die."

"You talk about women owning their own sexual desires. What's the difference between a slut and a sexually active woman?"

"A slut means a women who is dirty, and God knows that men can make us feel dirty just by retreating into past-orgasmic chill and we're sitting there feeling like a spittoon, thanks a lot.

"You can't be soiled and turned into a slut by sexual assault. A rape cannot soil you. I'm really anxious that we should stop implying that women who feel totally destroyed by rape are justified in that feeling. Isn't haven't your nose cut off worse? I think it's a very distorted act of homage to the penis ... and I'm not going to genuflect in front of that thing. I mean, I love it, it's the only part of the man that I understand, but I'm not going to turn it into the Great Baton."