Germaine Greer

Melbourne

Greer was born in Melbourne to a Catholic family, the elder of two girls followed by a boy. Her parents, South African-born Eric Reginald ("Reg") Greer and Margaret ("Peggy") Mary Lafrank, had married in March 1937; she was a milliner and he a newspaper-advertising salesman.^{[10][lower-alpha 3]}

The family lived in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, at first in a rented flat in Docker Street, near the beach, then in another rented flat on the Esplanade.^[12] In January 1942 Greer's father joined the Second Australian Imperial Force; after training with the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked on ciphers for the British Royal Air Force in Egypt and Malta.^[13] Greer attended St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943—the family was by then living at 57 Ormond Road, Elwood—followed by Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham, and Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea.^[14]

In 1952 Greer won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; a school report called her "a bit of a mad-cap and somewhat erratic in her studies and in her personal responses".^[15] She abandoned the Catholic faith, a year after leaving school, as a result of finding the nuns' arguments for the existence of God unconvincing.^[16] According to Greer, her mother had what was probably Asperger syndrome and as a result they had a difficult relationship; Greer left home because of it when she was 18. In 2012 she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth".^[17]

University

Melbourne and Sydney

From 1956 Greer studied English and French language and literature at the University of Melbourne on a Teacher's College Scholarship, living at home for the first two years on an allowance of £8 a week.^[18] Six feet tall by the age of 16,^[4] she was a striking figure. "Tall, loose-limbed and good-humoured, she strode around the campus, aware that she was much talked about," according to the journalist Peter Blazey, a contemporary at Melbourne.^[19] During her first year she had some kind of breakdown as a result of depression and was briefly treated in hospital.^[20] She told Clyde Packer in an interview in the 1980s that she had been raped during her second year at Melbourne, an experience she described in detail in The Guardian in March 1995.^[21][22]

Just before she graduated from Melbourne in 1959 with an upper second, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians. "[T]hese people talked about truth and only truth," she said, "insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies—or bullshit, as they called it."^[23] She had significant relationships there with Harry Hooton^[24] and Roelof Smilde, both prominent members of the Push. She shared an apartment with Smilde on Glebe Point Road, but the relationship did not last; Wallace writes that the Push ideology of "free love" involved the rejection of possessiveness and jealousy, which naturally worked in the men's favour.^[25]

When the relationship with Smilde ended, Greer enrolled at the University of Sydney to study Byron,^[26] and became "famous for her brilliantly foul tongue".^[27] One of her friends there, Arthur Dignam, said that she "was the only woman we had met at that stage who could confidently, easily and amusingly put men down. We weren't used to it."^[28] She became involved in acting at Sydney and played Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children in August 1963.^[29] That year she was awarded a first-class MA for a thesis entitled The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode,^[30] and took up an appointment at Sydney as senior tutor in English, with an office in the university's Carslaw Building.

Cambridge

The MA won Greer a Commonwealth Scholarship with which she funded further studies at the University of Cambridge, arriving in October 1964 at Newnham College, Cambridge, a women-only college. Initially joining a two-year BA course, she managed to switch after the first term ("by force of argument", according to Clive James) to the PhD programme to study Shakespeare, supervised by Anne Barton.^[31]

Cambridge was a difficult environment for women. As Christine Wallace notes, one Newnham student described her husband receiving a dinner invitation in 1966 from Christ's College that allowed "Wives in for sherry only".^[32] Lisa Jardine first encountered Greer at a formal dinner in college. The principal had asked for silence for speeches. "As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice":

At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression.^[33]

As soon as she arrived, Greer joined the student acting company, the Footlights, to play in its 1965 revue, My Girl Herbert,^[34] alongside Eric Idle, John Cameron, Christie Davies and John Grillo.^[35] A critic noticed "an Australian girl who had a natural ability to project her voice".^[36] Joining on the same day as Clive James and Russell Davies,^[37] Greer was one of the first women to be admitted as a full member, along with Sheila Buhr and Hilary Walston.^{[38][lower-alpha 4]} The decision to extend membership to women has been attributed to Tim Brooke-Taylor,^[39] and to Eric Idle, the Footlights president. Greer's response to being accepted was reportedly: "This place is jumping with freckle-punchers. You can have it on your own."^[40]

She lived for a time in the room next to James at Friar House on Bene't Street, opposite The Eagle. Referring to her as "Romaine Rand", he described her room in his memoir of Cambridge, May Week Was In June (1991):

Drawing on her incongruous but irrepressible skills as a housewife, she had tatted lengths of batik, draped bolts of brocade, swathed silk, swagged satin, niched, ruffed, hemmed and hawed. There were oriental carpets and occidental screens, ornamental plants and incidental music. The effect was stunning. ... Romaine, however, once she had got her life of luxury up and running, did not luxuriate. She had a typewriter the size of a printing press. Instantly she was at it, ten hours a day. Through the lath-and-plaster wall I could hear her attacking the typewriter as if she had a contract, with penalty clauses, for testing it to destruction.^[41]

Greer was awarded her PhD in 1968 for a thesis entitled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies.^[42] In 1986 she had a Past Masters series book, Shakespeare, published by Oxford University Press, and in 2007 Bloomsbury published her study of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife.^[43]

Teaching, marriage

From 1968 to 1972, Greer worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Warwick in Coventry, living at first in a rented bedsit in Leamington Spa with two cats and 300 tadpoles.^[44][45] In 1968 she was married for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. She met Paul du Feu, a King's College London English graduate who was working as a builder, outside a pub in Portobello Road, London, and after a brief courtship they married at Paddington Register Office, using a ring from a pawn shop.^[45][46]

The relationship lasted only a few weeks; Greer wrote that she spent their wedding night in an armchair, because her husband, drunk, would not allow her in bed.^[47] She said she had been unfaithful to him seven times in three weeks of marriage.^[48] In 1972 du Feu posed for British Cosmopolitan, apparently their first almost-naked centrefold, then moved to California and in 1973 married Maya Angelou; they divorced in 1981.^[47][49]

Writing and broadcasting

In addition to teaching, Greer was trying to make a name for herself in television, often appearing with friends from the Cambridge Footlights. In 1967 she appeared in the BBC shows Good Old Nocker and Twice a Fortnight and had a starring role in a short film by Martin Sharp and Bob Whitaker, Darling, Do You Love Me (1968).^[50][51] From 1968 to 1969 she featured in a Granada Television slapstick show, Nice Time, with Kenny Everett, Sandra Gough and Jonathan Routh.^[52] One set of outtakes found in Greer's archive at the University of Melbourne features her as a housewife bathing in milk delivered by Everett the milkman.^[50]

At the time Greer was spending two days a week in Manchester filming, two days in London in a white-washed bedsit on King's Road, and three days in her flat in Leamington Spa while she taught at Warwick.^[44] She was also writing The Female Eunuch. In 1968 she had had lunch with Sonny Mehta, co-founder of a new publisher, Paladin, whom she knew from Cambridge. When he asked her for ideas for new books, she repeated a suggestion of her agent's, which she had dismissed, that she write about female suffrage. The very idea of it made her angry and she began "raging" about it. "That's the book I want," he said. He advanced her ₤750 and another ₤250 when she signed the contract.^[53] She told the Sydney Morning Herald in July 1969 that the book was nearly finished and would explore, in the reporter's words, "the myth of the ultra-feminine woman which both sexes are fed and which both end up believing".^[44] At around this time (January 1971), Greer told Rolling Stone that she was an admirer of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in New York in January 1969 by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone.^[54]

Oz and Suck

Greer began writing columns as "Dr. G" for Oz magazine, owned by Richard Neville, whom she had met at a party in Sydney.^[55] The magazine's July 1970 edition, OZ 29, featured "Germaine Greer knits private parts," an article from Oz's Needlework Correspondent on the hand-knitted Keep it Warm Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick".^[56] Keith Morris photographed her for the magazine in 1969; the 35 black-and-white images of her that Morris took include her posing with Vivian Stanshall and pretending to play a guitar.^[57] As "Rose Blight", she also wrote a gardening column for Private Eye.^[58]

Greer was co-founder in 1969 of Suck: First European Sexpaper (1969–1974), along with Bill Daley, Jim Haynes, William Levy and Heathcote Williams. Its purpose was to create "a new pornography which would demystify male and female bodies"; the first issue was reportedly so offensive that Special Branch raided its London office in the Arts Lab in Drury Lane and closed its postbox address.^[59] According to Beatrice Faust, Suck published "high misogynist SM content", including a cover illustration, for issue 7, of a man holding a "screaming woman with her legs in the air while another rapes her anally".^[60] Greer's contributions, often under the byline "Earth Rose" or "Dr Gee",^[61] included an interview (first published in Screw, a pornographic magazine) entitled "I Am a Whore".^[4] The magazine published a full-page photograph of her "stripped to the buff, looking at the lens through [her] thighs", she wrote in 2007.^[62] Criticized by feminists for her involvement with Suck, in May 1971 Greer told an interviewer for Screw:

There's a big cleft between sexual liberation and women's liberation. My sisters get mad at me when I say gay liberation is part of our whole movement, and we've got to combine them. They want me to wear pants and be unavailable, and carry a jimmy to bash people over the head with if they feel my ass in the street. They get mad at me for calling myself superwhore, supergroupie, and all that stuff. They think I'm cheapening myself, I'm allowing people to laugh at me, when the whole point is that if my body is sacred and mine to dispose of, then I don't have to build things around it like it was property that could be stolen.^[63]

The Female Eunuch (1970)

Launched at a party attended by editors from Oz,^[65] The Female Eunuch was published in the UK by MacGibbon & Kee on 12 October 1970.^[66] "The cunt must come into its own", it advised.^[67] According to Greer, McGraw-Hill paid $29,000 for the American rights and Bantam $135,000 for the paperback.^[54] The book has never been out of print.^[4] Wallace writes about one woman who wrapped it in brown paper and kept it hidden under her shoes, because her husband would not let her read it.^[68]

Arguing that the suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses and devitalizes women, the book became an international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement.^[6] It was an important year for feminism. In August 1970 Kate Millett's Sexual Politics had been published in New York, the "first book-length exposition of second wave radical feminist theory"; on 16 August the Women's Strike for Equality was held throughout the US; and on 31 August Millett was on the front page of Time magazine (although in December 1970 Time said she was discredited as a spokesperson for feminism by the disclosure that she was bisexual).^[69] Dressed in a monk's habit, Greer took part in the first Women's Liberation March in the UK, on 6 March 1971, when 2,500 women marched in central London.^[70]

By March 1971 The Female Eunuch had been translated into eight languages and had nearly sold out its second printing.^[68] McGraw-Hill published it in the US on 16 April that year.^[73][74] Greer was the toast of New York; her book launch in the city had to be rescheduled because so many people wanted to attend.^[75] A New York Times book review described her as "[s]ix feet tall, restlessly attractive, with blue-gray eyes and a profile reminiscent of Garbo".^[73] Her publishers called her "the most lovable creature to come out of Australia since the koala bear".^[76]

A Paladin paperback followed, with cover art by British artist John Holmes, influenced by René Magritte,^[71] showing a female torso as a suit hanging from a rail, a handle on each hip.^[77] Clive Hamilton wrote that it was "perhaps the most memorable and unnerving book cover ever created".^[71] Christine Wallace described it as "one of the most intriguing and instantly recognizable images in post-war publishing. A naked, headless, legless mature female torso with a handle sprouting from each hip hangs by the shoulders on a pole like some fibreglass cast on an industrial production line." According to Wallace, Holmes' first version was a faceless, breastless, naked woman, "unmistakably Germaine ... hair fashionably afro-frizzed, waist-deep in a pile of stylised breasts, presumably amputated in the creation of a 'female eunuch' based on an assumed equivalence of testicles and mammary glands".^[78]

In the book Greer argued that "women have very little idea of how much men hate them", and how much women are taught to hate themselves.^[79] Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to Sex and Destiny 14 years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children, and that the manufacture of women's sexuality by Western society is demeaning and confining. Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy.^[80] "Like beasts", she told the New York Times in 1971, "who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action."^[73] The American feminist Betty Friedan, she wrote, "represents the cream of American middle‐class womanhood, and what she wants for them is equality of opportunity within the status quo, free admission to the world of the ulcer and the coronary."

In the UK Greer was voted "Woman of the Year" in 1971; in the US the following year, she was "Playboy Journalist of the Year".^[75] Reviewing the book for The Massachusetts Review in 1971, feminist scholar Arlyn Diamond wrote that, while flawed, it was also "intuitively and brilliantly right", but she criticized Greer for her attitude toward women:

Having convincingly and movingly shown how women are castrated by society, turned into fearful and resentful dependents, she surprisingly spends the rest of her book castigating them as the creators of their own misery. There is a strange confusion here of victim and oppression, so that her most telling insights into women's psychic lives are vitiated by her hatred for those who lead such lives. Feeling that women are crippled in their capacity to love others because they cannot love themselves, she feels that women must despise each other. Perhaps this self-contempt explains the gratuitous nastiness of her cracks about faculty wives, most wives, all those who haven't reached her state of independence, and her willingness to denigrate most of the members of the Women's movement she mentions. ... The lack of "sisterhood" she shows, of love for those who never chose to be eunuchs and who are made miserable by their sense of their own impotence is more than obtuse and unpleasant, it is destructive.^[81]

The Female Eunuch was reissued in March 2002 at the instigation of Jennifer Baumgardner, a leading third-wave feminist and editor of the Feminist Classics series at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.^[82] According to Justyna Wlodarczyk, Greer emerged as "the third wave's favorite second wave feminist".^[83]

Celebrity and journalism

Much in demand, Greer embraced the celebrity life. In 1971 she appeared on the cover of Life magazine, under the title "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like".^[84] She guest-presented The Dick Cavett Show in New York, and in April that year she famously debated Norman Mailer (whose book The Prisoner of Sex had just been published) in "Dialogue on Women's Liberation" at the Town Hall in New York. Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan sat in the audience, while Greer shared the stage with Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos.^[4][7] Filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary Town Bloody Hall (1971).^[7]

Greer became a columnist for the London Sunday Times in June 1971. Later that year her journalism took her to Vietnam, where she wrote about "bargirls" made pregnant by American soldiers, and to Bangladesh, where she interviewed women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.^[7] She resigned her teaching position at Warwick in 1972.^[85] That year Kenneth Tynan, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, commissioned her to work on a translation of Aristophanes's Lysistrata.^[86] First performed in 411 BCE, the play explores an attempt by women to force the end of the Peloponnesian War by going on sex strike. The project was not produced,^[86] but it found belated appreciation in 1999, when the script was re-worked and produced by Phil Willmott as Germaine Greer's Lysistrata: The Sex Strike.^[87][88]

External media

Audio
"This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement", Greer debates William F. Buckley Jr., The Cambridge Union, 1973.[89]
Video
Greer at the Town Hall, New York, 30 April 1971.

In August 1973 Greer debated William F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union on the motion "This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement". "Nothing I said," Buckley wrote in 1989, "and memory reproaches me for having performed miserably, made any impression or any dent in the argument. She carried the house overwhelmingly."^[90]

Greer, then 37, had an affair in 1976 with the novelist Martin Amis, then 26; the affair was discussed publicly in 2015 after she sold her archives (consisting of 478 archive boxes) to the University of Melbourne. In the boxes Margaret Simons discovered a 30,000-word letter to Amis, which Greer began on 1 March 1976 while in the British Airways Monarch lounge at Heathrow Airport, and continued during a lecture tour in the United States, but apparently never sent: "As the miles add up, I find this letter harder and harder to write. My style falters and whole paragraphs emerge as dry as powder. Yesterday I left this book in a taxi cab and would have lost it if the driver hadn’t driven back ... with it. As for you, my darling, I see you very rarely. Even in my dreams you send me only your handmaidens."^[91]

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1982)

Greer's second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979), covered its subject until the end of the 19th century, and speculated on the existence of female artists whose careers were not recorded.^[92][93] That year Greer was appointed director of the Center of the Study of Women's Literature at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in 1982 she founded the Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, an academic journal that highlights unknown or little-known women writers.^[94] In the first issue Greer wrote that she wanted the journal to focus on the "rehabilitation of women's literary history".^[95] She would spend five months a year in Tulsa and the rest in the UK.^[96]

She continued working as a journalist. In 1984 she travelled to Ethiopia to report on the famine for the Daily Mail and again in April 1985 for The Observer. For the latter, she took photographs with an Olympic automatic camera and drove 700 km to Asosa, a city to which the Ethiopian government was moving people from the famine areas. The Observer did not publish the two 5,000-word articles she submitted; in her view they did not agree with her pro-government perspective. The New Worker published them instead. In September 1985 she travelled again to Ethiopia, this time to present a documentary for Channel 4 in the UK.^[7]

Sex and Destiny (1984)

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984) continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, and family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Her targets again include the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. She argued that the Western promotion of birth control in the Third World was in large part driven not by concern for human welfare but by the traditional fear and envy of the rich towards the fertility of the poor. The birth control movement had been tainted by such attitudes from its beginning, she wrote, citing Marie Stopes and others. She cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.

Move to Essex

In 1984 Greer bought The Mills, a Georgian farmhouse on three acres of land in Great Chesterford, Essex (near Cambridge), where she planted a one-acre wood, which she said made her prouder than anything else she had done, and tried to keep "as a refuge for as many other earthlings" as she could.^[97][98] The Mills was still Greer's home for part of the year when she put it up for sale in 2018;^[97] as of 2016 she was spending four months a year in Australia and the rest in the UK.^[99]

Her book Shakespeare (her PhD topic) was published in 1986 by Oxford University Press as part of its Past Masters series. The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of her articles written between 1968 and 1985, also appeared that year. In June 1988, along with Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Ian McEwan, Margaret Drabble, Salman Rushdie, David Hare and others, she became part of the "20th of June Group", which supported civil liberties in England that the group felt were being eroded; this was shortly after Section 28 was introduced, which prevented schools from teaching homosexuality as a normal part of family life.^[100]

In 1989 came Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom Greer portrayed as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to the inevitable claim that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men. She became a special lecturer and bye-fellow that year of Newnham College, Cambridge,^[58][101] a position she held until 1998,^[85] and founded Stump Cross Books, based at The Mills, which published the work of 17th- and 18th-century female poets.^[102] She also returned to the University of Warwick as a professor in the English and Comparative Studies department.^[101]

She was appearing regularly on television in the UK and Australia during this period, including on the BBC's Have I Got News for You several times from 1990. In 1998 she wrote an episode, "Make Love not War", for the television documentary series Cold War, and the following year sat for a nude photograph by the Australian photographer Polly Borland.^[103] A 1994 interview with Greer in The Big Issue, in which she said she would share her home with anyone willing to follow her rules, was interpreted as an open invitation to the homeless, and led to her being swamped by reporters and low-flying aircraft. One of the journalists, an undercover Mail on Sunday reporter, managed to gain entry and avail himself of her hospitality for two days, which included Greer washing his clothes and teaching him how to bake bread.^[104] After the newspaper published a three-page spread, the Press Complaints Commission found it guilty of subterfuge not in the public interest.^[105]

The Change (1991 and 2018)

Natalie Angier, writing in The New York Times, called The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause (1991) a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book ... tantalizingly close to being a potential feminist classic on a par with The Female Eunuch." In it, Greer writes of the myths about menopause—or as she prefers to call it the "climacteric", or critical period.^[106] "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in The Age in 2002. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable".^[107] The book, including the medical information, was updated and reissued in 2018.^[108]

Slip-Shod Sibyls (1995)

Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995) is an account of women who wrote poetry in English before 1900, and an examination of why so few have been admitted to the literary canon.^[109] Her conclusion is that women were held to lower standards than men (hence the "slip-shod" sibyls of the title, quoting Alexander Pope), and the poetic tradition discouraged good poetry from women.^[110] The book includes a critique of the concept of woman as Muse, associated with Robert Graves and others; a chapter on Sappho and her use as a symbol of female poetry; a chapter on the 17th-century poet Katherine Philips; two chapters on Aphra Behn and one on Anne Wharton; and material on Anne Finch, Letitia Landon and Christina Rossetti. It includes an epilogue on 20th-century female poets and their propensity for suicide: "Too many of the most conspicuous figures in women's poetry of the 20th century not only destroyed themselves in a variety of ways but are valued for poetry that documents that process."^[111]

The Whole Woman (1999)

A sequel to The Female Eunuch, The Whole Woman was published in 1999 by Doubleday, one of seven publishers who bid for the book; Greer was paid an advance of £500,000.^[112] In the book Greer argued that feminism had lost its way. Women still faced the same physical realities as before, but because of changing views about gender identity and post-modernism, there is a "new silence about [women's] visceral experiences [that] is the same old rapist's hand clamped across their mouths". She wrote: "Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete."^[113]

Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners. It's time to get angry again.^[113]

Her comments on female genital mutilation (FGM) proved controversial, particularly that opposition to it is an "attack on cultural identity", just as outlawing male circumcision would be viewed as an attack on Jews and Muslims.^[114] Greer wrote that feminists fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries should be supported, but she explored the complexities of the issue and the double standards of the West regarding other forms of bodily mutilation, including that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended surgery at that time on baby girls with clitorises over three-eighths of an inch long. She questioned the view that FGM is imposed by men on women, rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen.^[115]

On gender

In The Whole Woman, Greer argued that, while sex is a biological given, gender roles are cultural constructs. Femininity is not femaleness. "Genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity," she wrote.^[116] Girls and women are taught femininity—learning to speak softly, wear certain clothes, remove body hair to please men, and so on—a process of conditioning that begins at birth and continues throughout the entire life span.^[117] "There is nothing feminine about being pregnant," she told Krishnan Guru-Murthy in 2018. "It's almost the antithesis of that. There's nothing feminine about giving birth. It's a bloody struggle, and you've got to be strong and brave. There's nothing feminine about breastfeeding. God knows it drives everybody mad; they want to see nice big pumped-up tits, but they don't want to see them doing their job."^[118]

Greer's writing on gender brought her into opposition with the transgender community. In a chapter in The Whole Woman entitled "Pantomime Dames", she wrote: "Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women, men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex."^[119] Her position first attracted controversy in 1997, when she unsuccessfully opposed the offer of a Newnham College fellowship to physicist Rachael Padman, arguing that, because Padman had been born male, she should not be admitted to a women-only college.^[120] She reiterated her views several times over the following years,^{[lower-alpha 5]} including in 2015 when students at Cardiff University tried unsuccessfully to "no platform" her to stop her from speaking on "Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century".^[123] Greer responded by reaffirming, during an interview with Kirsty Wark for BBC Newsnight, that she did not regard transgender women as women; she argued that the nomination of Caitlyn Jenner for Glamour Woman of the Year had been misogynist.^[124] Over 130 academics and others signed a letter to The Observer in 2015 objecting to the use of no-platform policies against Greer and other feminists with similar views; signatories included Beatrix Campbell, Mary Beard, Deborah Cameron, Catherine Hall, Liz Kelly, Ruth Lister, the Southall Black Sisters, and Peter Tatchell.^[125]

On rape

Me Too movement

Greer has commented several times on the Me Too movement. In November 2017 she called for women to show solidarity when other women are sexually harassed.^[135] Just before she was named Australian of the Year in Britain in January 2018, she said she had always wanted to see women react immediately to sexual harassment, as it occurs. "What makes it different is when the man has economic power, as Harvey Weinstein has. But if you spread your legs because he said 'be nice to me and I'll give you a job in a movie' then I'm afraid that's tantamount to consent, and it's too late now to start whingeing about that."^[136] In May that year, she argued—of the high-profile cases—that disclosure was "dishonorable" because women who "claim to have been outraged 20 years ago" had been paid to sign non-disclosure agreements, then had spoken out once the statute of limitations had lapsed and they had nothing to lose.^[137]

The Boy (2003)

A book of art history, The Boy (2003)^[48]—published in the United States as The Beautiful Boy—was illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Observer called "succulent teenage male beauty".^[138] Greer described the book as an attempt to address modern women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure".^[139] The cover photograph, by David Bailey, was of 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in his character of Tadzio in the film Death in Venice (1971). The actor complained about Greer's use of the photograph.^[140]

"Whitefella Jump Up" (2003)

Greer has published several essays on Aboriginal issues, including "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood", first published in Quarterly Essay in August 2003,^[141] and later as a book in the UK.^[142][143] In the essay she wrote that she had understood little about Aboriginal issues in her early years, but in England she saw from the perspective of distance that "what was operating in Australia was apartheid". On returning to Australia in late 1971 she made an effort "to see as much as I could of what had been hidden from me", travelling through the Northern Territory with activist Bobbi Sykes.^[144]

Greer argued that Australians should re-imagine the country as an Aboriginal nation. "Jump up" in Australian creole can, she wrote, mean "to be resurrected or reborn"; the title refers to occasions when Aborigines apparently accepted whites as reincarnated relatives. Suggesting that whites were mistaken in understanding this literally, she argued that Aborigines were offering whites terms on which they could be accepted into the Aboriginal kinship system. The essay argues that it may not be too late for Australia as a nation to root itself in Aboriginal history and culture. She wrote:

Though I can claim no drop of Aboriginal blood, twenty years ago Kulin women from Fitzroy adopted me. There are whitefellas who insist that blackfellas don't practise adoption; all I can say is that when I asked about the possibility of assuming Aboriginality, the Kulin women said at once 'We'll adopt you.' 'How do you do that?' I asked, hoping I wouldn't be required to camp in some bleak spot for a month or two, and be painted or smoked and cut about. 'That's it,' they said. 'It's done. We've adopted you.' Since then I have sat on the ground with black women and been assigned a skin and been taught how to hunt and how to cook shellfish and witchetty grubs, with no worse punishment for getting it wrong than being laughed at.^[145]

Greer's essay On Rage (2008) dealt with the widespread rage of indigenous men.^[146] Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton argued that Greer was making excuses for bad behaviour.^[147] Greer returned that year to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a special supervisor.^[85]

White Beech (2013)

In 2001 Greer bought 60 hectares (150 acres) of land in Australia for $500,000 at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley, near the Natural Bridge section of Springbrook National Park in South East Queensland. Formerly rainforest, the land had been used as a dairy farm, banana plantation and timber source. In 2013 she published White Beech: The Rainforest Years about her Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme, her effort to restore the land to its pre-European-settler state.^[148][149] Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a charity Greer registered in England in 2011, funds and oversees the project.^[150]

The book describes about how she discovered an uncommon White Beech tree (Gmelina leichhardtii), and that the chemical 2,4,5-T (an Agent Orange ingredient) had been sprayed in the area for years to thin the hardwood and control the weeds.^[151] She wrote that "entering fully into the multifarious life that is Earthling's environment, while giving up delusions of controlling it, is a transcendental experience". Her sense of space, time and self changed: "My horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared."^[152]

Notes

References

Works cited

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