page_title: Germaine Greer
section_title: Oz and Suck
hierarchical_section_title: Germaine Greer / Early career and writing / Oz and Suck
caption_attribution_description: English: Issue 19 of OZ magazine in the UK, early 1969, showing Germaine Greer and Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
context_page_description: Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the later half of the 20th century.
  Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia and her home in Essex, England.
  Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch, made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, the book offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entails.
  Her work since then has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including Sex and Destiny, The Change, The Whole Woman, and Shakespeare's Wife.
context_section_description: Greer began writing columns as "Dr. G" for Oz magazine, owned by Richard Neville, whom she had met at a party in Sydney. The Australian Oz had been shut down in 1963 after three months and the editors convicted of obscenity, later overturned. Neville and his co-editor, Martin Sharp, moved to London and set up Oz there. When Neville met Greer again, he suggested she write for it, which led to her article in the first edition in 1967, "In Bed with the English". Keith Morris photographed her ("Dr G, the only groupie with a PhD in captivity") for issue 19 in early 1969; the black-and-white images include one of her posing for the cover with Vivian Stanshall and another in which she pretends to play the guitar. The July 1970 edition, OZ 29, featured "Germaine Greer knits private parts", an article from Oz's Needlework Correspondent on the hand-knitted Keep it Warm Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick". As "Rose Blight", she also wrote a gardening column for Private Eye.
  In 1969 Greer was co-founder of an Amsterdam-based pornography magazine, Suck: The First European Sex Paper (1969–1974), along with Bill Daley, Jim Haynes, William Levy, Heathcote Williams and Jean Shrimpton, the stated purpose of which was to create "a new pornography which would demystify male and female bodies". The first issue was reportedly so offensive that Special Branch raided its London office in the Arts Lab in Drury Lane and closed its postbox address.
  According to Beatrice Faust, Suck published "high misogynist SM content", including a cover illustration, for issue 7, of a man holding a "screaming woman with her legs in the air while another rapes her anally". One of Greer's biographers, Elizabeth Kleinhenz, wrote that almost nothing was off limits for Suck, including descriptions of child abuse, incest and bestiality. Greer's column, "Sucky Fucky" by "Earth Rose", included advice to women about how to look after their genitals and how they ought to taste their vaginal secretions. She published the name of a friend, someone she knew from her time with the Sydney Push and to whom she later dedicated The Female Eunuch: "Anyone who wants group sex in New York and likes fat girls, contact Lillian Roxon." During a 1970 Amsterdam film festival organized by Suck, the judging panel, which included Greer, gave first prize to Bodil Joensen for a film in which a woman has sex with animals. Suck reproduced one interview with Greer (first published in Screw, another pornographic magazine), entitled "I Am a Whore".
  In parallel with her involvement in Suck, Greer told Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone in January 1971 that she was an admirer of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in New York in January 1969 by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone. Criticized by feminists for her involvement with Suck, in May 1971 she told an interviewer for Screw:
  There's a big cleft between sexual liberation and women's liberation. My sisters get mad at me when I say gay liberation is part of our whole movement, and we've got to combine them. They want me to wear pants and be unavailable, and carry a jimmy to bash people over the head with if they feel my ass in the street. They get mad at me for calling myself superwhore, supergroupie, and all that stuff. They think I'm cheapening myself, I'm allowing people to laugh at me, when the whole point is that if my body is sacred and mine to dispose of, then I don't have to build things around it like it was property that could be stolen.
  Greer parted company with Suck in 1972 when it published a naked photograph of her lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face peering between her thighs. The photograph had been submitted on the understanding that nude photographs of all the editors would be published in a book about a film festival. She resigned, accusing the other editors of being "counter-revolutionary". Greer said later that her aim in joining the editorial board had been to try to steer Suck away from exploitative, sadistic pornography.
caption: Greer on the cover of Oz magazine, early 1969, with Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
exif: {}