British artist Gavin Turk once said that if you took a book and replaced each occurrence of the word ‘revolution’ with the famous poster image of Che Guevara, everyone would still understand the text. In the popular imagination, that image of Guevara and the idea of ‘revolution’ have become synonymous, even though most of us know little about him or his revolutionary exploits.

Any number of substitutions might work. For the word ‘hubris’, a picture of Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament giving his ‘God Save the Queen’ speech. For ‘Viagra’, the decrepit Hugh Hefner in his mouldy smoking jacket. And so on.

I suspect that if you replaced the word ‘feminism’ with the limbless female torso image from the cover of the 1971 paperback edition of The Female Eunuch, you’d get much the same result. And, just as it is with Guevara, the vast majority of people know very little about the precise contents of Germaine Greer’s most famous book.