Germaine Greer

Prof. Germaine Greer
Greer in 2006
Born	January 29, 1939 Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Professor, columnist, freelance journalist
Nationality	Australian
Period	1970-present
Subject	English Literature, Women's issues
Literary movement	feminism

Germaine Greer (born January 29, 1939) is an Australian academic, writer, and broadcaster, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the 20th century.

Greer is Professor Emeritus of English literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick in England after having recently retired, and is the author of several highly acclaimed books. Greer's ground-breaking The Female Eunuch became an international bestseller when it was published in 1970, turning Greer overnight into a household name, and bringing her both adulation and criticism.

Her ideas have created controversy ever since. Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine called her "the ultimate Trojan Horse, gorgeous and witty, built to penetrate the seemingly unassailable fortress of patriarchy and let the rest of us foot soldiers in," describing her as "a joy to read, an eloquent maniac." Angela Carter described her as "a clever fool", while former British MP Edwina Currie called her "a great big hard-boiled prat".

"[Her] mind provokes us like no other," journalist Catherine Keenan wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, "but for all the wrong reasons."

Biography

Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. After attending a convent school, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, Melbourne, she won a teaching scholarship in 1956 and enrolled at the University of Melbourne. After graduation she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push, a group of intellectual left-wing anarchists who practised non-monogamy. The writer Christine Wallace describes Greer at that time:

For Germaine, [the Push] provided a philosophy to underpin the attitude and lifestyle she had already acquired in Melbourne. She walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, and set out to follow the Push way of life — 'an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn'. The Push struck her as completely different from the Melbourne intelligentsia she had engaged with in the Drift, 'who always talked about art and truth and beauty and argument ad hominem; instead, these people talked about truth and only truth, 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.' Her Damascus turned out to be the Royal George, and the Hume Highway was the road to it. 'I was already an anarchist,' she says. 'I just didn't know why I was an anarchist. They put me in touch with the basic texts and I found out what the internal logic was about how I felt and thought'.

In her first teaching job, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, gaining an M.A. in 1963 for a thesis on Byron. A year later, the thesis won her a Commonwealth Scholarship, which she used to fund her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England, where she became a member of the all-women's Newnham College.

Professor Lisa Jardine, who was at Newnham with her, recalled the first time she met Greer, at a college formal dinner:

The principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian accent reverberating around the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining 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 ... [W]e were ... astonished at the very idea that a woman could speak so loudly and out of turn and that words such as "bra" and "breasts' — or maybe she said "tits" — could be uttered amid the pseudo-masculine solemnity of a college dinner.

Greer joined the student amateur acting company, the Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. Using the nom de plume Rose Blight, she wrote a gardening column for the satirical magazine Private Eye, and as Dr. G, became a regular contributor to the underground London OZ magazine, owned by Australian writer Richard Neville. [1] The July 29, 1970 edition was guest-edited by Greer, and featured an article of hers on the hand-knitted Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick."

She received her Ph.D. in 1968 for a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies, and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick. The same year, in London, she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, but the marriage lasted only three weeks, and ended in divorce in 1973.

Following her 1970 success with The Female Eunuch, Greer left Warwick in 1972 after flying around the world to promote her book. She co-presented a Granada Television comedy show called Nice Time with Kenny Everett and Jonathan Routh, bought a house in Italy, wrote a column for The Sunday Times, then spent the next few years traveling through Africa and Asia, which included a visit to Bangladesh to investigate the situation of women who had been raped during the conflict with Pakistan. On the New Zealand leg of her tour in 1972, Greer was arrested for using the words "bullshit" and "fuck" during her speech, which attracted major rallies in her support.

In 1989, Greer returned to Newnham College, Cambridge as a special lecturer and fellow, but left after attracting negative publicity in 1996 for allegedly "outing" Dr. Rachel Padman, a transsexual colleague. Greer unsuccessfully opposed Padman's election to a fellowship, on the grounds that Padman had been born a man, and Newnham was a women's college. A June 25, 1997 article by Clare Longrigg in The Guardian about the incident, entitled "A Sister with No Fellow Feeling", disappeared from websites on the instruction of the newspaper's lawyers. [2]

Stephanie Merritt wrote in The Guardian:

She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (she was married for three weeks to a construction worker in the 1960s) and menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory ... In part, her ability to remain so prominently in the public consciousness comes from an astute understanding and well-established symbiotic relationship with a media as eager to be shocked as she is to shock.

The Female Eunuch

File:Femaleeunuch.gif

The cover to The Female Eunuch

Greer argued in her book, The Female Eunuch, that women don't realize how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. Christine Wallace writes that, when The Female Eunuch was first published, one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldn't let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables; and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). It arrived in the stores in London in October 1970. By March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages.

The book's main thesis is that the traditional, suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalizes them, rendering them "eunuchs". It is a "fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto," writes Laura Miller. "It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive — which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time." [3]

"The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told the New York Times, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, 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. It's a process that sacrifices vigor for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed." (March 22, 1971).

Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to her later book Sex and Destiny, 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 was demeaning and confining. Girls are feminized from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult feminity, 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:

The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilized conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish they did not have to invite wives is legion.

Greer argued that change had to come about by revolution, not evolution. Women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."

While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the New York Times that she had been a "supergroupie." "Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors," she said. "When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests."

Other publications

Her second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, was published in 1979. In the same year, she accepted a post at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma as the director for the Center of the Study of Women's Literature.

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, published in 1984, continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Greer's target again is the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behavior, and the commercialization of sexuality and women's bodies. Greer's apparent approval of life styles and family values in the developing world — the world is over-populated, she argued, only by Western standards of comfortable living — and of poverty in preference to consumerism, led her to endorse practices frequently at odds with the beliefs of most Western feminists. Female genital mutilation had to be considered in context, she wrote, and might be compared with breast augmentation in the West. The book consequently attracted a great deal of criticism.

In 1986, she published Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism, and The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written between 1968 and 1985. In 1989 came Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom she described as distant and unaffectionate, weak, craven, and feeble, which led to claims — as she knew it would, according to The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

In 1991, The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause, which the New York Times called a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book" became another influential book in the women's movement. In it, Greer tries to dispel myths about the menopause and ill health, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in The Age. "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." It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest" (The Age, July 13, 2002).

The Beautiful Boy, 2003

Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995 and, in 1999, two books: The Female Misogynist, in which she attacked both men and women for what she saw as the lack of progress in the feminist movement, and The Whole Woman. The chapter titles reveal the theme: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower." Greer wrote in the introduction: "The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man or like herself ... Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? ... [F]ake equality is leading women into double jeopardy ... It's time to get angry again."

In 2003, The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, which is illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty", alleging that Greer had appeared to reinvent herself as a "middle-aged pederast." [4] Greer described the book as an attempt to address 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" (Greer 2003). The boy pictured on the cover was Bjørn Andresen, who has said that the use of his picture is "distasteful", and he was not consulted about its use. [5] [6]

Christine Wallace's Biography

Germaine's biography was published in 1997 by Christine Wallace, also the writer of the biography Hewson: A Portrait. Greer resented the biography, Greer, The Untamed Shrew, stating that a biography of a living person is morbid and worthless, as it is incomplete and careless. Further stating in Four Corners on the ABC in September 1979:

I don't write about any living women...because I think that's invidious, there is no point in limiting her by the achievements of the past because she's in a completely different situation, and I figure she can break the moulds and start again.

Recent events in her life

On April 23, 2000, Greer was harassed in her home by a nineteen-year-old student from the University of Bath who had been writing to Greer. The student broke into her home in Essex, tied Greer up in the kitchen, and caused damage to Greer's home. Dinner guests eventually found Greer lying in a distressed state on the floor, with the student hanging onto her legs. BBC News reported that the student was originally charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and with false imprisonment, but those charges were dropped and replaced with the harassment charge. She admitted harassing Greer and was sentenced to two years' probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Greer was not hurt and told reporters: "I am not angry, I am not upset, I am not hurt. I am fine. I haven't lost my sense of humour. I am not the victim here."

In 2001, she attracted publicity again for a proposed treaty with Aboriginal Australia. In 2004, Australian Prime Minister John Howard called her "elitist" and "condescending" after she criticized Australians as "too relaxed to give a damn" and derided her native country as being "defined by suburban mediocrity."

She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney.

She has made eight appearances on the British television panel show Have I Got News For You since 1990, a record she holds jointly with Will Self. Her most memorable appearance was in 1995 when Ian Hislop quoted Greer's spat with a fellow broadsheet columnist, Suzanne Moore, which included a reference to Moore wearing, as Greer had written, "'fuck me' shoes". She was one of eight contestants in the 2005 UK series of Celebrity Big Brother. She had previously said that the show was "as civilized as looking through the keyhole in your teenager's bedroom door". She walked out of the show after five days inside the "Big Brother house", citing the psychological cruelty and bullying of the show's producers, the dirt of the house, and the publicity-seeking behavior of her fellow contestants.

In September 2006, Greer's column in The Guardian newspaper about the death of Australian Steve Irwin attracted criticism for what was reported as a "distasteful tirade". Greer said that "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". In an interview with the Nine Network's A Current Affair about her comments, Greer said she "really found the whole Steve Irwin phenomenon embarrassing and [that she was] not the only person who did, or indeed the only Australian who did" and that she hoped that "exploitative nature documentaries" would now end. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie labelled her comments "stupid" and "insensitive", one of a number of Australian political leaders to make similar comments. While several Australian newspapers reproduced part of her column they also published letters from readers incensed by her comments the following day. Other Australian commentators, such as P. P. McGuinness, the current editor of Quadrant, supported her comments..

In October 2006 Greer appeared twice in an episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras playing herself.

In the same month she presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the life of American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa. She confirmed that she had been a friend of Zappa's since the early 1970s and that his orchestral work "G-Spot Tornado" would be played at her funeral.

Trivia

Germaine Greer is the subject of a song called "Mother Greer" by Australian band Augie March.[7]

Referenced in Bridget Jones's Diary

A joke about Germaine Greer:

There where three people who all held world records and they wanted to check if they still held them so they went to the head office to find out. The first one went in who has the biggest feet in the world and came out and said "yep iv still got the biggest feet". The second one went in who was the tallest in the world and came out and said "yep im still the tallest in the world." The third one went in you was the ugliest in the world and came out and said "who the bloody hell is Germaine Greer".

Books by Germaine Greer

• Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way To Nationhood (2004), Profile Books, ISBN 1-86197-739-5
• Chico, El - El Efebo En Las Artes (2004), Grupo Oceano, ISBN 84-494-2600-6
• The Beautiful Boy (2003), Rizzoli, ISBN 0-8478-2586-8
• Libraries (2003), Lemon Tree Press, ASIN B0006S84S6
• Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Very Short Introductions series, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280249-6
• One Hundred Poems by Women (2001), Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-20734-0
• The Whole Woman (1999), this edition 2000, ISBN 0-385-72003-3
• The Change : Women, Aging and the Menopause, this edition 1993, Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-449-90853-4
• Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, 1989
• The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1986), this edition 1990, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87113-308-3
• Shakespeare (1986), Past Masters series, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-287539-6
• Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), this edition 1985, Olympic Marketing Corp, ISBN 0-06-091250-2
• The Obstacle Race:The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1980), this edition 2001, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, ISBN 1-86064-677-8
• The Female Eunuch (1970), this edition, Farrar Straus Giroux (2002), ISBN 0-374-52762-8

References

• Gibson, Owen. "Greer walks out of 'bullying' Big Brother", The Guardian, January 12, 2005
• Greer, Germaine. "Filth!", The Sunday Times, January 16, 2005
• Jardine, Lisa. Growing up with Greer, The Guardian, March 7, 1999
• Shukor, Steven. "From feminist sister to Big Brother housemate", The Guardian, January 7, 2005
• Weintraub, Judith. "Germaine Greer - Opinions That May Shock the Faithful", New York Times, March 22, 1971
• Pickering, Charlie. "Nasty Creatures Invading Our Habitat; When a recently deceased crocodile hunter meets a reptile of the press, it's hardly a fair contest.", City Weekly, September 14, 2006

Further reading

• The genius of Madonna