Germaine by Elizabeth Kleinhenz

Author:Elizabeth Kleinhenz
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: SOC022000, SOC010000, BIO007000, BIO000000, POL052000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-10-29T04:30:00+00:00

7

Recalibration

Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child . . . For the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman.

Isaiah 54:1

In her third major book, Sex and Destiny, which was first published in 1984, shortly after she returned from Tulsa to resume her life in England, Germaine Greer faced up to the challenges that confront women as they approach middle age. Now in her fifth decade, she wanted not only to express her views on women as they reached that stage of life, but also to apply her blowtorch to larger questions about human fertility, sterility, abortion, birth control and, for her, the very personal dilemma of ‘barrenness’.

Her repeated use of this word, ‘barrenness’, together with much of the content and mood of Sex and Destiny, is reflective of her religious upbringing. As always, she detested orthodoxies and was appalled at the thought of women’s lives being controlled by the men of the Catholic Church. She was never about to return to her roots and speak up in support of the Pope, but by the time she sat down to write Sex and Destiny, in the early 1980s, she had come to the other side of a personal rebellion and wanted to share the lessons she had learned. In her youth she had joyfully defied the repressive beliefs of her religion and culture, but now, as she faced the physical and emotional consequences of her adventures, she needed to explore what it had all meant. Was unrestrained sexual freedom really in the best interests of women? Was loss of fecundity – barrenness – the price to be paid for denying the natural connection between sexual congress and new life? How could she explain to herself and her sisters not only her own personal disappointment and despair at the loss of her fertility, but the dangers confronting unwitting young women who were setting off on the path she had so recently travelled?1

With apparent but by no means exclusive reference to her own experience, she describes in Sex and Destiny many of the physical problems that can make a woman infertile: fallopian tube obstruction, pelvic inflammatory disease as a result of infection, abdominal surgery, abortions, curettes, and insertion, expulsion or removal of an IUD. She covers the lifestyle factors of smoking, alcohol abuse, medications, stress and the postponement of pregnancy until later in a woman’s reproductive life, and does not forget to mention the expensive medical interventions that exist to counteract the loss of fertility, with their false hopes and promises.

Like a caring mother or older sister, she sets out to inform young women about the possible negative consequences of recreational sex. She found examples galore and lists them all. One is infection by the gonorrhoea bacillus, which, she explains, is a malign organism that is ‘uncommonly well adapted for dwelling in humans’ and may be asymptomatic. Other organisms with similar effects include the Chlamydiae species of bacteria and common fungal infections like Candida albicans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.