I have a right to be annoyed

Ihalf wish Germaine Greer wouldn’t, but after so many years of generating outrage she’s gained too much momentum. I wish because behind even the loonier things she says there’s – on some level – a point that deserves attention. Besides which, I’m in favour of anyone who challenges orthodoxy instead of just giving up, which most of us do, wearily, to avoid an inevitable quarrel.

Greer’s arrangement to speak at the coming Brisbane Writers’ Festival has been revoked, as has former senior Australian politician Bob Carr’s. He’s in the bad books over his stance on Palestinian statehood, so he’d be an embarrassment to have around. Writers’ festivals, with their audiences of predominantly eager middle-class women, need protection from him and his wicked words.

Greer, never one to avoid a dust-up, was set to rattle the cage too with her latest book, On Rape, produced in time to challenge the #MeToo movement.

I doubt that I know any woman who hasn’t been sexually harassed, or many that haven’t been raped if you include male ‘‘friends’’ who crossed a boundary when you were in some way vulnerable. Greer’s first book, The Female Eunuch, encouraged women to acknowledge those predatory experiences for what they were, and called out men for their sexual aggression and sense of entitlement.

But that was then. In the decades since, she has probably lost her fan club over books like the one suggesting older women enjoy pin-ups of pubescent boys the way men do pubescent girls. As if. This is where women who’ve had children give upon her. But the rape book could prove to be her most enraging. I foresee ritual book burnings.

Rape, she says, is not a ‘‘spectacularly violent crime’’ but often ‘‘lazy, careless and insensitive’’ sex. She argues that it leaves no sign or injury, and that ‘‘a man can’t kill you with his penis’’. Women who’ve been raped, Greer says, ‘‘haven’t been destroyed. We’ve been bloody annoyed is what we’ve been.’’ Well, no actually. We’ve been raped, that’s what we’ve been. We do know the difference between that and bad sex.

Women were trivialised, badgered, insulted and disbelieved in rape cases for so long that it was a battle to get them to trial, and then to bring in longer sentences to show we took rape seriously. We’re not ready for Greer’s ‘‘harden up’’ message, or to agree to shorter sentences in cases where it’s a woman’s word against a man’s, and the woman must be believed. If this indeed happens.

‘‘A man can’t kill you with his penis,’’ Greer says, a flippant enough line to spring between a couple of gin and tonics. But a man’s sexual aggression can destroy your confidence and cause lasting misery, as opposed to ‘‘something that leaves no sign, no injury’’. What is she thinking?

Rape is a trauma, even the sneaky, unwanted sex a drunk girl can wake up to from a boozeinduced coma, which she writes off as a lapse of her own judgment. It would be good if such experiences didn’t have a lasting effect, and it would be nice if she didn’t take all the blame on herself.

Maybe Greer means that we shouldn’t let our lives be spoiled by one bad experience, which wouldn’t happen in a perfect world. But we live in this one, as do the women who’ll flock to the Brisbane event. I wonder how they feel about being patronised by the organiser’s decision to protect them from an elderly woman who says naughty things.

I’d be furious. I have a right to be bloody annoyed, and Greer’s just the person to help me exercise it.