Germaine Greer

Smearing political opponents as sex criminals? I'll drink to that!

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“”Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn't polite to say so.

—Germaine Greer, 2009, making the same bajillion arguments as TERFs have for many years

Germaine Greer (/ɡrɪər/) (29 January 1939–) is an accomplished Australian radical feminist author, journalist, scholar, and kind of a creep. She wrote the important feminist tome The Female Eunuch, which decried the 1970s ideal of a "stable," suburban nuclear family as repressive of women, and dedicated her life to "women's liberation". Since then, however, Greer has mostly devolved into an attention-seeking troll through her increasingly contrarian and asinine hot takes.

She is currently emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Victim blaming and other asshattery

When she's not shitting the LBGTQ+ community or handwaving sexual abuse as "bad sex", Greer loves to write inflammatory op-eds and speeches for the purpose of pissing off the public and maintain her relevancy/image as a "provocateur".

During the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, Greer refused to sign a petition supporting Rushdie because she said it was “about his Rushdie’s own troubles”. She went on to say that Rushdie was “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin."

In September 2006, she wrote a rather callous think piece in The Guardian concerning the death of beloved wildlife conservationist Steve Irwin. While many mourned his tragic passing, Greer (echoing an infamous tweet by PETA that would be posted more than a decade later) dismissed Irwin as a "21-century version of a lion-tamer" who violated the personal space of animals for cheap entertainment while also declaring that "the animal world has finally taken its revenge." By the way, this piece was published just one day after Irwin was killed by a stingray.

Transphobia

As with many other powerful voices of the second wave of feminism, Greer has been a frequent and forceful critic of gender transition and transgender people generally, like her contemporaries Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys.

Greer holds views on transgender people that are common for transphobic individuals but compounded by a grounding in a rather simplistic interpretation of feminist theory. For instance:

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. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males. —Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, 1999

This excerpt from her book The Whole Woman is way off base. The procedures she describes are beyond current medical technology; it is literally impossible to meet the standard she arbitrarily imposes. Transgender women have actually died attempting to have uterine transplant procedures, and it is a common occurrence in post-op trans women to strongly desire the procedure, in some cases resulting in depression at the fact that medical science has not made it safely viable. Uterine transplantation has been performed successfully on at least one cisgender woman, meaning the day might soon come when a trans woman could likewise have a uterus, though this would not justify her bigoted gatekeeping. The first successful operation was performed in Turkey in 2011, but the patient - a cis woman - was not able to carry a pregnancy to term.

Like many of the allegations Greer makes about transgender women, her assertion that "No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant" is demonstrably false. Lili Elbe (Lili Ilse Elvenes) was probably the second identifiable individual ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery in a series of operations carried out in 1930 and 1931. The second of the four operations involved implanting an ovary. The fourth involved transplanting a uterus and was probably the cause of her death in September 1931. Part of the reason she gave for wanting to undergo such highly experimental surgery was her wish to marry a man - and bear children.

Her viciousness is rather aptly captured in this quote:

On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. “Thank you,” it breathed hoarsely, “Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!” I smirked and nodded and stepped backward, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly coated with pancake make-up through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem. I should have said, “You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.” — Independent magazine in 1989

See use of the words 'it', 'paw', 'burgeoning'.

Endosexism

Along with dehumanizing trans people, Greer's endosexism, i.e. prejudice against intersex people, is also evident throughout her writings. In her book The Whole Woman (1999), she calls women and girls with androgen insensitivity syndrome "damaged males", and goes on about how they shouldn't be considered women despite their sex assignment, external reproductive structures, upbringing, and/or identity; Greer justifies this exclusion on account of their chromosomes and internal reproductive structures (or lack thereof), but also contradicts herself on at least the chromosome thing since she even seems to hint that she believes people with Turner syndrome (one X chromosome, no Y chromosome) should not be considered women either.

Pedophilia

The Beautiful Boy (or sometimes The Boy in the British market) was written by Greer and published in 2003. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph prior to finishing the book, she complains about how disorganized her house is for about seven paragraphs before getting to the point: she is very interested in young boys.

Finishing the current book is more difficult than it should be, because I just can't let it go. Working on it has been the best fun in the world, because it is a book of pictures of ravishing boys. Ravishing pictures of ravishing boys. I know that the only people who are supposed to like looking at pictures of boys are a sub-group of gay men.

Well, I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys, real boys, not simpering 30 year-olds with shaved chests. The real snag is that everywhere I turn I find new pictures of absolutely outrageously lovely boys, and it's too late to get them into the book. But I keep downloading them, scanning them and printing them, just in case, and just for fun.

She used a photograph of a then-fifteen year old Bjorn Andresen (a Swedish actor most famous for his starring 1971 role in the Italian arthouse film Death in Venice) on the book cover, and upon learning of how his image was being used, he wasn't exactly thrilled to say the least. He claimed that neither Greer nor her publisher informed him the book's cover was going to use his photo, let alone bother to ask for his permission, and that if they did, they knew Andresen wouldn't allow it. Having experienced as a young boy the sort of ogling Greer promotes in the book, he also seemed to be pretty understandably disturbed by the book itself, with Andresen feeling used for "distasteful" ends while pointing out the irony of a woman who claims to fight against sexual exploitation flat out celebrating the objectification of underage boys as erotic muses.

In a glowing Telegraph review of the book itself, Greer is also quoted asserting the exact conditions under which a boy is the most attractive.

A boy is only a boy for a very brief space. He has to be old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal. The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat.

Yep, totally nothing creepy or weird going on here.

An article in The Age specifically refers to her interest as having been towards pre-adult boys and even references her confessed relationship with her own "boy", though she was unsurprisingly stingy on the details. The article also recalls an interview she gave on Canadian television where she was asked what attracted her to boys rather than men, in which she said: "Oh, everything - sperm that runs like tap water will do." She is quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as having said that "A woman of taste is a pederast - boys rather than men."

Although this book was seemingly written for less than honorable reasons, one of the ideas the book proposes is that the "less masculine" boys could "bring the sexes to a reconciliation" because of their supposedly intermediate status. This is mostly only unintentionally interesting: it begs the question as to why Greer had apparently never thought to apply this exact same logic to transgender people and what their cross-gender experiences might offer the world.

Accusations of sexism and undermining feminism

Despite her public reputation as a firebrand crusader for gender equality, several controversies in recent decades suggest that Greer may be turning against her own feminist principles and seems to have even embraced the same misogynist attitudes and beliefs she criticized during the height of the women's lib movement in the 1970s.

It began with Greer making crude, Trumpian comments on the appearances of prominent women in politics, starting in November 2008, where Greer mocked the now-former first lady Michelle Obama's election night outfit, calling the dress a "butcher's apron" and a "travesty". She also said her daughters' clothes were not "girly" enough. In the same month, she said Cheryl Cole could not be a feminist icon because "there's not enough of her - she's too thin" and that "a healthy girl is a fat-bottomed creature."

Greer was accused yet again of sexism and hypocrisy as a feminist when critiquing Australia's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard during a television debate in March 2012. Rather than discuss policy or even Gillard's political stances, Greer chose to mock the Prime Minister's fashion sense, and labeled her a "big arse" (which apparently isn't a compliment despite her previous standards of healthiness being a "fat-bottomed creature").

In regards to the issue of rape and sexual assault, Greer has also proven to be shockingly unsympathetic to the plight of victims and survivors. In May of 2018, while speaking at the Hay literary festival, Greer gave a speech that essentially trivialized rape as "bad sex" and downplayed the trauma of experiencing sexual violence, claiming most assaults "don't involve any injury whatsoever".

See also

• Toupee fallacy
• Trans-exclusionary radical feminism