Greer’s still rattling cages
Feminist firebrand’s new book on rape could prove to be her most enraging work
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Greer’s arrangement to speak at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival has been revoked, as has former senior Australian politician Bob Carr’s.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.
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 dustup, 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.
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.
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 do know the difference between rape 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.
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’s sexual aggression can destroy your confidence and cause lasting misery, as opposed to, “something that leaves no sign, no injury“.
Rape is a trauma, even the sneaky, unwanted sex a drunk girl can wake up to from a booze-induced coma, which she writes off as a lapse of her 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 we shouldn’t let our lives be spoiled by one bad experience, which wouldn’t happen in a perfect world.
I wonder how the Brisbane attendees 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.