Did anyone know, inquired Germaine Greer, how she might contact a bookie?

"There's this one filly running in the Belmont Stakes," she explained. Her feminist heart was moved by the sole female in the recent race, and she was looking, if only half-seriously, to put her money where her mouth was.

At present, her mouth is in a state of public fury. Almost 30 years after Greer tossed a hand grenade on behalf of women's liberation and sexual freedom with the publication of her book "The Female Eunuch," she is once again lobbing firecrackers.

Women's lives are in many ways harder now, she contends in her new book, "The Whole Woman" (Alfred A. Knopf, $25). Women are exhausting themselves in a futile attempt to fit into a man's world, and starving themselves to be attractive to men, she writes, while men respond either with barely masked hostility or outright predation.

The problem is that instead of celebrating their differences from men, she writes, women have been pursuing equality with them, and failing to get it.

It is a grim view of the world. Women are wasting their time waiting to be rescued, apologizing, cleaning, shopping and "disciplining the recalcitrant body, fending off the diseases that it is heir to and making up for its inadequacies in shape, size, weight, colouring, hair distribution, muscle tone and orgastic efficiency."

Men?

"Men are freaks of nature, fragile, fantastic, bizarre," she writes. "To be male is to be a kind of idiot savant, full of queer obsessions about fetishistic activities and fantasy goals, single-minded in pursuit of arbitrary objectives, doomed to competition and injustice not merely towards females, but towards children, animals and other men."

Galloping wildly from reproductive technology to militarism to the Spice Girls, she sees defeat in some of the women's movement's most cherished gains.

Routine mammograms and Pap smears to detect breast and cervical cancer?

Scare tactics from a medical establishment bent on controlling women, says Greer, using 20-year-old statistics to argue that Pap smears are inaccurate.

Opposition to female genital mutilation?

"An attack on cultural identity" that denies Third World women the right to have their clitorises sliced off.

Abortion?

Legally necessary, but a "sad and onerous duty" a woman is forced into by men who refuse to use condoms or engage in non-reproductive varieties of sex.

Reviewers have attacked the book as shrill and illogical. But to Greer, it is a war cry in a battle that she sees as far from over.

A statuesque and tart-tongued 60, the Australian-born Greer spent a gregarious lunchtime expounding on women and men and her reasons for declaring the fight still on.

She was goaded, she said, by "lifestyle feminists," whom she defines as "people who say you can have it all, and it's your own fault if you don't.

"One of the things that bugs me is that women are really grateful for being allowed into the male establishment," she said. "And they just don't get it. They don't know how it works. Because they've never been inducted into the system.

"They actually think that if you work hard and do the job and do it well, that you'll be promoted, (but) that's got nothing to do with it. The way it works is that the top honcho does as little as possible and takes credit for what is done by his underlings, and that actually doing the work is a sign of weakness."

Greer says she doesn't hate men, she just doesn't understand them. "I think they're weird," she said.

True to her beliefs about women's preventive medical care, she admires men's refusal to be screened en masse for prostate cancer. "Men just say, `Piss off, we're not going to do that. We're not going to play at being sick or put ourselves in the posture of patients being jerked around by the medical/legal establishment. We'll decide when we need help,' " she said.

And women don't get off scot-free in "The Whole Woman." Take their herculean, and sometimes surgical, efforts to improve their appearances.

"Men do not seem to have demanded this of them; rather women seem to have bedizened themselves in an all-out last-ditch attempt to grab the attention of otherwise uninterested males," she writes.

And women can display an unfortunate lack of solidarity. "It seems there is never any shortage of women who will commit adultery with married men," she writes.

Surely Greer herself would never do such things?

Surely she might.

Because in one of the more remarkable aspects of Greer's life, she seems to be a magna cum laude graduate of the "do as I say, not as I do" school of life.

"I'm hopelessly indulgent to men," sighed the ur-feminist. "I've spent some of the best years of my life waiting for the phone to ring. It's the bane of my existence. `Why doesn't he call me?' The answer is always the same: Because he doesn't want to."

As for women who are willing to sleep with other women's husbands, Greer remarked in the course of discussing men's infidelity that "I've been the Other Woman all my life. I've heard that discourse about `my wife doesn't understand me' about a million times."

The contradictions multiply. She warns of the dangers to women in male aggressiveness and the "rather depressing evidence that women are as thrilled by male hardness as ever they were." But her own tastes in men would qualify as corroborating evidence.

"I don't just like men. I like men who are ridiculously testosteronified," Greer confessed. "I like jockeys, I like truck drivers, I like blue-collar workers, I like men who don't like women. You know that nice Jewish boy who just wants to make you happy? I just can't stand him."

Of course, Greer, who was championing women's sexual freedom when the current generation of sex-positive feminists was still in diapers, has occasionally come up with unique twists to her own abject behavior. She may have often waited by the phone, but one time during her "supergroupie" years, she went to a hotel where a rock band was staying and did the mattress quadrille with one of its members while she was waiting.

Still, why the disparity between her words and actions?

"I behave in ways I don't approve of," Greer sighed. "It drives me mad. I've left a lot of my life because of that. I don't like the way I'm acting; I become such a clinging, desperate individual, and I just leave."