Germaine Greer doesn’t realise we’re not all tough Aussie birds like she is

GERMAINE GREER once told me she feared becoming her mother, whom she described as ‘a little crazy’ and soft in the head. ‘ She’ll have to be locked up sooner or later,’ was how she described the woman who beat her on the face with a stick when she was a child.

relatives thought that Peggy Greer was just mad, but her daughter thought her mother had a personality disorder that meant she didn’t believe that other people existed.

Before she was moved into a nursing home, Peggy lived alone in incredible squalor in a house silted up with halfeaten sandwiches and dirty clothes, where she would get stuck in the bath for days on end.

i recall Greer’s uncontrollable laughter when she told me about the bath.

Crazy? insensitive to the feelings of others? marooned in a sea of dirty laundry? ring any bells this week?

With the unerring stride of the serial controversialist, Greer once more waded into the rape debate like a gunslinger marching into Dead end Gulch.

The 79-year-old dismissed the violence of some rapes, suggesting that the crime could be punished by 200 hours of community service instead of lengthy jail sentences. For more serious attacks — the severity somehow calculated on her imaginary rape- o-meter — she suggested that culprits could have an ‘r’ tattooed on their face.

in fact, she called for an overhaul of the criminal justice system, saying that most rapes did not involve any injury and were merely ‘lazy, careless and insensitive’.

rape is often not violent, but merely bad sex, was her message.

Well, she has certainly changed her tune. a quarter of a century ago, writing in the mail, Greer said that ‘to be raped by a husband is the worst rape of all’ and was dismissive of judges who suggested that being raped by a stranger was worse than date rape.

THIS week, she went on about the penis and how it wasn’t a lethal weapon — i’ll spare you the details. anyway, you can imagine how this new tack has gone down with today’s sisterhood, a group whose default victim settings ring alarm bells at even the merest whiff of the hint of a suggestion that women are anything but oppressed sufferers in a society engineered to demean them at every turn.

To them, Greer has become a bogeywoman, a monster guaranteed to enrage with her incendiary comments.

recent provocations have included her insistence that women who were intimate with harvey Weinstein because he promised them a film role had no cause for complaint; that transgender women are not real women; and her feeling that meghan would soon become ‘bored’ with the royal Family and ‘run for the hills’.

She’s also been vociferous about the need for women to take responsibility by not placing themselves in no- exit situations with men and by not drinking too much so as to keep safe.

i have no argument with the latter, and feel there’s at least a kernel of truth in everything Greer says, but the sisters have no mercy. This week, many have called for the author of The Female eunuch to stop calling herself a feminist, while others have slyly hinted that she is suffering from dementia.

not only is that patronising and cruel to dementia sufferers, it is unfair to Greer herself.

She is not like her mother, and she has not suddenly gone mad — Greer has been saying similar stuff for decades.

She herself was violently raped aged 18 and ‘beaten half-unconscious’ afterwards — but hey. With the vaunting ego of the true narcissist — her real flaw, i think — she cannot allow for the feelings of others. She doesn’t understand how, if rape didn’t destroy her life, it could destroy someone else’s.

if anything, it is her callous misunderstanding of trauma that does her the least favours.

rules must protect the weakest in society, and those rules can’t be dismissed by hard-headed aussie birds like Greer who just pulled on their knickers and got on with life.

no woman should be asked or expected to tolerate the casual — or otherwise — abuse of their person.

however, once the outrage about her more outlandish statements dies down, isn’t there something in what she says about the reporting of sex crimes and the struggle to get attackers convicted? The whole thing is, indeed, a mess. The collapse of a series of high-profile rape cases recently because of evidence disclosure failures has exposed the desperation of the Crown Prosecution Service to increase rape conviction rates — even at the expense of innocent men.

in the end, unless there is overwhelming physical evidence of duress, it is simply a question of consent — his word against hers. and that is the problem.

Greer suggests that if we stopped pathologising rape and started thinking about it differently, then perhaps more juries would be willing to convict.

i’m not sure the answer is to trivialise rape or to tattoo an ‘r’ on a rapist’s cheek — and not only because in some sections of society it wouldn’t be long before it was seen as a badge of honour.

however, i don’t think Greer is mad or bad because her opinions don’t conform to acceptable Leftist dogma. She has merely opened a new seam of debate — and there’s nothing wrong with that.