Greer, now 60, had been a rebellious if bright student who went on to become an intellectual celebrity who renounced the church, advocated rampant sexual freedom for women, trashed marriage and the family and fulminated against the imposition of Western values on indigenous peasant cultures throughout the world. In short, Greer had repudiated every value Mother Eymard had lived by and attempted to instill in her, but the nun nevertheless remembered her as "that wonderful girl." Likewise, Gloria Steinem recalls her with warmth, shrugging off the way Greer disparaged feminist activists in her fabulously successful 1970 book "The Female Eunuch" and despite the dismissive account Greer wrote for Harper's of the National Women's Political Caucus Steinem had fought to send to the 1972 Democratic Convention. Steinem reminisces about dining with Greer at a restaurant as the Australian loudly extolled the importance of vaginal secretions to the scandalized delight and fascination of a table of women. "I remember thinking it was a very valuable piece of information, being very grateful to her and wonderfully entertained at the same time," Steinem told Wallace. "She was terrific."

Clearly, Germaine Greer is one of those individuals to whom the ordinary rules of good conduct don't apply; that is, she hasn't been held to them by the rest of us, so powerful is her charisma, so winning her good looks. This charm, though, only imperfectly protects her work. Greer's latest opus, "The Whole Woman" -- trumpeted as her follow-up to "The Female Eunuch" -- is a bestseller in England, where the memory of Greer's first book has lingered longer than it has in the United States, but most critics, like the New Republic's Margaret Talbot (who calls Greer "the female misogynist"), are exasperated by Greer's disorganized, self-contradictory diatribe and disgusted by her positions on such issues as female circumcision (pro) and pap smears (con).

Members of the media, who once found Greer's long legs, bawdy braggadocio and paeans to group sex irresistible (Life magazine dubbed her a "saucy feminist that even men like"), are crestfallen to learn that she has recanted the doctrine of free love and now condemns all men as brutal, lazy sperm factories incapable of offering women emotional or sexual satisfaction. The bold liberationist who once scolded women for not stepping up to the plate and claiming the professional opportunities offered to them now bemoans weekly food shopping at the supermarket as "exhausting" and soul-killing work foisted upon victimized women by male authorities.

Find books by Germaine Greer at BARNES & NOBLE   Also Today In search of granny porn Over grilled chicken salad and shrimp tacos, former libertine Germaine Greer celebrates the "chocolate eros" of Sammy Sosa, the virtues of heart attacks and the red-hot libidos of circumcised Sudanese women.

What changed? Not all that much, actually. Greer insists that she hasn't done an about-face on any of her earlier positions, and in a weird way, she's right. She's simply followed her premises to the conclusions implicit in them from the very beginning. And her writing hasn't evolved much, either. It's rather that we -- her readers, her world -- have transformed around her. To be disappointed in "The Whole Woman" and to then go back and re-read "The Female Eunuch" in search of the Germaine Greer who fired up so many women in the 1970s is as disconcerting as seeing a horror movie that terrified you as a child only to realize that it's pitifully tame.

I can remember discovering "The Female Eunuch" in my early teens and finding it exhilarating and galvanic -- so much so that I held onto my copy of it for years. Wallace's sources tell her that when the book first came out it provoked knock-down, drag-out fights over dinner tables, that copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands, that one woman kept the book wrapped in brown paper and hidden among her shoes because her spouse forbade her to read it.

Nevertheless, and to my dismay, when revisited, "The Female Eunuch" turns out to be almost as thin a gruel as "The Whole Woman." Its occasional passages of stirring rhetoric or (more rarely) perceptive analysis float in a miasma of supposition, dubious research, trendy "revolutionary" posturing, the patent settling of personal grudges, strategic vagueness, U-turns in logic and arguments that are Potemkin Villages built out of sheer, unadulterated bravado. Greer can be flabbergastingly categorical, especially when she's wrong, whether she's attributing homosexuality to "the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role" or noting that ovaries and wombs almost always "go wrong." Worse, the book isn't anywhere near as fun as I remember it being, mostly because it lacks any sustained idea or vision, because it doesn't expertly track and stalk a conclusion the way all top-notch polemical writing does. Greer hasn't got the attention span to pull that off. "The Female Eunuch" is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive -- which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time.

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