GERMAINE GREER AT THE STAPLEFORD GRANARY
Germaine G
Germaine Greer doesn’t like being called a legend. She made that clear at last night’s two hour trawl around her life. Yet how to describe someone who has changed the way women think about themselves and how they are perceived.? The Female Eunuch rocked the established view of what femininity is and has sold 30 million copies world wide – Germaine even saw a pirate copy on the pavement stall of a street vendor in India – she bought it of course.
She is an activist, an intellectual with degrees from Melbourne Sydney and Cambridge a teacher in the best universities – she even lectured to the Venetians in Italian- campaigner and a conservationist– yet she recalled with a thrill the first time someone described her as what she truly believes herself to be. It was Normal Mailer of all people . He announced in his basso profundo American growl ”Of course Germaine is sensitive. She is a writer.”
Yet for this true polymath writing means exploration. She has produced books on art, on architecture, on identity and human behaviour. Her recent ‘On Rape’ featured in an article in the London Review of Books “By Professor Dame Mary Beard” drawled Germaine wearily,” She totally misunderstood the whole thing “
In recent years this fearless warrior for women has come under the critical eye of contempoary feminists who dislike her approach to the new definiitions of man and womanhood. She had little time to discuss this
‘ I don’t do gender. I am concerned with endometriosis , with the problems that being a woman physically involves, with provision for childbirth, for care of women’s health .Why is there so much money available for sport , billions apparently when the wellbeing of women and children goes unheeded ?”.
Her books subsequent to The Female Eunuch , apart from her aesthetic and art genres, go straight to the heart of the problems of fertility, of women’s suffering in the world and the lives they lead, mostly miserable.
Sex and Destiny her follow up argument to The Female Eunuch takes on the low priority given to women where it matters the most. And all of her long life she has used her keen intelligence and brilliant writing ability to promote the true emancipation of women, although she does wonder how it will come about.
She never gratuitously disparages men – even the most difficult among them. “I liked Norman Mailer” she said of her famous debate with him, made into a film held up for seven years when Germainie refused to sign it off on grounds of control. Once she discovered there was to be a hostile version of their New York clash, she pre-empted the damage by immediately releasing the film. Strategic as well as savvy , the footage now is entertaining evidence of her bravery and cool unde fire. “Feminists of the time refused to share a podium with him but I decided I would. I respected his writing and he respected mine.”
Contrary to the shorthand caricature of Germaine Greer she has never been a man-hater “I think corporate men are trapped in a system. ‘I am a liberation feminist’ she told her audience at the Stapleford Granary .
I believe her.. Always outspoken, often unwelcome and radical, she has always been about logic on the quest to find a just and fair solution to the world’s inequalities between the sexes. She sees the injustice towards women globally as one of the open sores in our progress as human beings. Abuse of women is at the centre of her passionate advocacy and she is bewildered and baffled that so little progress happens and women appear to collude in their own oppression, by for instance, aborting girl babies over boys – a phenomenon which has spread from Asia to Australia, and now Europe “Mystifyingly it is most prevalent in Lichtenstein” she tells us..
Germaine Greer may not want to be a legend, but as the most fearless and clever advocate of women’s rights ever in the history of the world, as brilliant and stylish as ever at the age of eighty, she most certainly is just that.
