Germaine Greer (1970) contests the disembodied liberal notion of the individual and in fact regards it as responsible for dubious ideas about femaleness as ‘naturally’ inferior. Her highly constructionist view of bodies draws on what evidence was available to her thirty-five years ago to make many of the points we covered in Chapter 2. She concludes that the female/male dichotomy is central to our way of thinking, not our way of being (Greer, 1970: 25). Biological differences between the sexes are in fact minimal, she claims, and open to interpretation. She even uses the term ‘gender’ in achieving this, but there is little direct discussion of what gender might mean and how it might differ from ‘sex’. Nevertheless, she outlines ideas that were later detailed more thoroughly by Oakley and other social scientists:
The ‘normal’ sex roles that we learn to play from our infancy are no more natural than the antics of a transvestite. In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. (Greer, 1970: 29)
She argues that any sex differences that do exist are tiny and that bodily variations associated with males and females are probably largely created by the different social practices in which men and women engage. Bones are shaped by the different work and dress of women and men; curves arise from the conditions of women’s lives and are displayed by feminine modes of dress. Her arguments are seductive and indeed sociologists exploring everything from education (for example, Thorne, 1993), to work (for example, Adkins, 1995;Tyler and Abbott, 1998), to fashion (for example, Finkelstein, 1991), engage with very similar claims about the social shaping of gendered bodies and the extent to which people can resist.
Greer is adamant that women can resist, that they can live for themselves and not for men. However, she recommends individual resistance. More radical feminists tended to analyze women as a group or class who could be freed from the tyranny of beauty and other bodily oppressions only by broad social change (Spender, 1985: 58). Nevetheless, Greer’s polemic is fabulous, and at times evidence is presented and a careful analysis made. At other times she makes grand claims which are convincing but lack support. Her insights into the way that gender is socially constructed through bodies predict much of what a later sociology of the body will have to say, but these insights are often relatively undeveloped. For example she is rather selective in the social practices she refers to when illustrating the way gendered bodies are shaped. She talks of dress and cosmetics and work, but not of medicine or formal schooling. While her argument is compelling, it is neither as systematic, nor as carefully supported as sociological arguments, and therefore it is not entirely surprising that scholars would turn not to Greer but to later material on the social construction of bodies that has more detailed versions of some of the insights offered and is based on more rigorous analysis of empirical research or theorizing (see Brook, 1999; Howson, 2005). That is not to demean second-wave feminist knowledge on bodies.
Second-wave feminist understandings of bodies arose from a criticism of male dominance as natural, and a concern by women to gain knowledge about and better control of their bodies. As such, in addition to the ideas discussed above, second-wave feminists formed women’s health groups highly critical of medical models of the body. They offered alternatives to thinking about the body, ones that relied largely on women’s own embodied experiences. Such alternative knowledge was gathered in classic books such as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective Our Bodies Ourselves (Howson, 2004: 130—2). It was understandable given the lower status of women within society that political movement should focus on trying to remedy the inequalities to which women were subject, and that men’s bodies should be largely ignored. However, it was sometimes implied that men were unconcerned with their bodily appearance and that masculinity was given and unchanging. Such implications have since been challenged.