Germaine Greer

[[File:Germaine_Greer.jpg|thumb|right|165px|Smearing political opponents as sex criminals?  I'll drink to that!]]{{gender}}
{{cquote|Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though [[Political correctness|it isn't polite to say so.]]|4=Germaine Greer, 2009, making the same bajillion arguments as TERFs have for many years<ref>Germaine Greer, [http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/20/germaine-greer-caster-semenya ''Caster Semenya sex row: What makes a woman?''], ''[[The Guardian]]'', 20 August 2009.</ref>}}

'''Germaine Greer''' ({{IPAc-en|g|r|ɪər}}) {{lived|29 January 1939}} is an accomplished [[Australia]]n [[radical feminist]] [[author]], journalist, scholar, and self-described pedophile. She wrote the important feminist tome ''{{wpl|The Female Eunuch|The Female Eunuch|,}}'' which decried the 1970s ideal of a "stable," suburban [[nuclear family]] as repressive of women, and dedicated her life to "women's liberation". Since then, however, Greer has mostly devolved into an attention-seeking [[troll]] through her increasingly contrarian and asinine hot takes. She is considered as the grandmother of all [[TERF]]s.

She is currently emeritus professor in English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick, [[United Kingdom|UK]].<ref>[http://www.egs.edu/library/germaine-greer/biography/ "Germaine Greer - Biography"], The European Graduate School.</ref>

==Victim blaming and other asshattery==
When she's not shitting on the LBGTQ+ community or handwaving sexual abuse as "bad sex", Greer loves to write inflammatory op-eds and speeches for the purpose of pissing off the public and maintain her relevancy/image as a [[Asshole|"provocateur"]].

During the controversy surrounding [[Salman Rushdie]]'s novel ''{{wpl|The Satanic Verses||,}}'' Greer refused to sign a petition supporting Rushdie because she said it was “about his Rushdie’s own troubles”.<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses ''How one book ignited a culture war'']</ref><ref name='independent'>[http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/today-everyone-wants-to-defend-salman-rushdie-it-was-not-always-like-that-8168064.html ''Today everyone wants to defend Salman Rushdie. It was not always like that'']</ref> She went on to say that Rushdie was “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with [[Racism|dark skin]]."<ref name='independent'/><ref>[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/05/salman-rushdie-ian-mcwean-martin-amis-satanic-verses-fatwa ''A Fundamental Fight'']</ref>

In September 2006, she wrote an incredibly callous think piece<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/australia</ref> in ''[[The Guardian]]'' concerning the death of beloved wildlife conservationist {{wpl|Steve Irwin||}} after he was impaled in the chest by a stingray during a filming excursion in the Great Barrier Reef. While many mourned his tragic passing, Greer (echoing an infamous tweet by [[PETA]] that would be posted more than a decade later<ref>https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/02/23/peta-steve-irwin-tweet-group-faces-fire-conservationists-birthday/2962313002/</ref>) dismissed Irwin as a "21-century version of a lion-tamer" who violated the personal space of animals for cheap entertainment while also declaring that "[[Blaming the victim|the animal world has finally taken its revenge]]."<ref name='news'>[http://www.news.com.au/national/germaine-greers-big-mouth/news-story/02bf9ebb35280a5a7926870aa1527aab ''Germaine Greer's big mouth'']</ref><ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/australia ''That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin'']</ref> By the way, this piece was published just one day after Irwin was killed. For anyone morbidly curious to see how far some people are willing to go to defend morally abhorrent behavior supposedly in the name of “feminism”, there somehow exists an academic paper from 2019 that quite literally conflates the online harassment and vitriol women experience on a daily basis to the public backlash against Greer over the Steve Irwin op-ed, claiming Greer was attacked for critiquing Australian culture’s “nationalistic misogyny” rather than the fact she was praising an horrific freak accident as some kind of twisted “just deserts”-type punishment.

==Transphobia==

As with many other veterans of second wave [[feminism]], Greer has been a frequent and [[Trans-exclusionary radical feminism|hostile critic]] of [[gender transition]] and [[transgender]] people generally, like her contemporaries [[Janice Raymond]] and [[Sheila Jeffreys]].

Greer holds views on transgender people that are common for [[transphobia|transphobic]] individuals but compounded by a grounding in a rather simplistic interpretation of feminist theory. For instance:
{{quotebox|Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males. —Germaine Greer, ''The Whole Woman'', 1999}}

This excerpt from her book ''The Whole Woman'' is way off base. The procedures she describes are ''beyond current medical technology''; it is ''literally impossible'' to meet the standard she arbitrarily imposes. Transgender women have actually died attempting to have uterine transplant procedures, and it is a common occurrence in post-op trans women to strongly desire the procedure, in some cases resulting in depression at the fact that medical science has not made it safely viable.<ref>http://www.secondtype.info/pregnant.htm</ref> Uterine transplantation has been performed successfully on at least one cisgender woman, meaning the day ''might'' soon come when a trans woman could likewise have a uterus, though this would not justify her bigoted gatekeeping. The first successful operation was performed in Turkey in 2011<ref>[http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/10/01/169542.html ''World's first womb transplant in Turkey promises hope for women'']</ref>, but the patient - a cis woman - was not able to carry a pregnancy to term.

Like many of the allegations Greer makes about transgender women, her assertion that "No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant"<ref>[https://newrepublic.com/article/123544/what-we-knew-of-the-sexes What We Knew of the Sexes]. New Republic. November 14, 2015.</ref> is demonstrably false. Lili Elbe (Lili Ilse Elvenes) was probably the second identifiable individual ever to undergo [[sex reassignment surgery]] in a series of operations carried out in 1930 and 1931. The second of the four operations involved implanting an ovary. The fourth involved transplanting a uterus and was probably the cause of her death in September 1931. Part of the reason she gave for wanting to undergo such highly experimental surgery was her wish to marry a man - and bear children.<ref>[https://books.google.com.au/books?id=guI1CwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false ''Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change''] by Lili Elbe, Edited by Niels Hoyer, Canelo, 2015. Previously Published as ''Man Into Woman: The First Sex Change, a Portrait of Lili Elbe: the True and Remarkable Transformation of the Painter Einar Wegener; ISBN-13: 9789333656917 (Hardcover).'' Page three of the introduction has all the pertinent details in one passage.</ref>

Her viciousness is rather aptly captured in this quote:

{{quotebox|1=On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. “Thank you,” it breathed hoarsely, “Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!” I smirked and nodded and stepped backward, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly coated with pancake make-up through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem. I should have said, “You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.” — Independent magazine in 1989}}

See use of the words 'it', 'paw', 'burgeoning'.

==Endosexism==
Along with dehumanizing trans people, Greer's endosexism, {{IdEst}} prejudice against [[intersex]] people, is also evident throughout her writings. In her book ''The Whole Woman'' (1999), she calls women and girls with androgen insensitivity syndrome "damaged males", and goes on about how they shouldn't be considered women despite their sex assignment, external reproductive structures, upbringing, and/or identity; Greer justifies this exclusion on account of their [[chromosome]]s and internal reproductive structures (or lack thereof),<ref name="TWW99">{{Cite book |last=Greer |first=Germaine |url=https://archive.org/details/wholewoman00germ/page/74/mode/2up?q=AIS&view=theater |title=The Whole Woman |date=1999 |publisher=A.A. Knopf |isbn=978-0-375-40747-5}}</ref>{{rp|74–77}} but also contradicts herself on at least the chromosome thing since she even seems to hint that she believes people with Turner syndrome (one X chromosome, no Y chromosome) should not be considered women either.<ref name="TWW99"/>{{rp|79}}

==Pedophilia==
''The Beautiful Boy'' (or sometimes ''The Boy'' in the British market) was written by Greer and published in 2003.<ref>https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Beautiful_Boy.html?id=Zh7qAAAAMAAJ</ref> In an interview with the ''[[Daily Telegraph]]'' prior to finishing the book, she complains about how disorganized her house is for about seven paragraphs before getting to the point: she is ''very'' interested in young boys. 
{{quotebox| Finishing the current book is more difficult than it should be, because I just can't let it go. Working on it has been the best fun in the world, because it is a book of pictures of ravishing boys. Ravishing pictures of ravishing boys. I know that the only people who are supposed to like looking at pictures of boys are [[Homophobia|a sub-group of gay men]].

Well, I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys, real boys, not simpering 30 year-olds with shaved chests. The real snag is that everywhere I turn I find new pictures of absolutely outrageously lovely boys, and it's too late to get them into the book. But I keep downloading them, scanning them and printing them, just in case, and just for fun.<ref>https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3307166/Country-notebook-beautiful-boys-cause-bedlam.html</ref>}} 

She used a photograph of a then-fifteen year old {{wpl|Bjorn Andresen}} (a [[Sweden|Swedish]] actor most famous for his starring 1971 role in the Italian arthouse film {{wpl|Death in Venice (film)|''Death in Venice''}}) on the book cover, and upon learning of how his image was being used, he wasn't exactly thrilled to say the least. He claimed that neither Greer nor her publisher informed him the book's cover was going to use his photo, let alone bother to ask for his permission, and that if they did, they knew Andresen wouldn't allow it. Having experienced as a young boy the sort of ogling Greer promotes in the book, he also seemed to be pretty understandably disturbed by the book itself, with Andresen feeling used for "distasteful" ends while pointing out the irony of a woman who claims to fight against sexual exploitation flat out celebrating the objectification of underage boys as erotic muses.<ref>https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/im-not-germaines-toy-says-cover-boy-20031018-gdhlyf.html</ref><ref>https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/oct/16/gender.film</ref><ref>https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/im-not-germaines-toy-says-cover-boy-20031018-gdhlyf.html</ref>

In a glowing ''Telegraph'' review of the book itself, Greer is also quoted asserting the exact conditions under which a boy is the most attractive.
{{quotebox| A boy is only a boy for a very brief space. He has to be old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is [[Child_sexual_abuse|mostly illegal]]. The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat.<ref>https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3604427/The-brief-beauty-of-the-child.html</ref>}} Yep, totally nothing creepy or weird going on here.

An article in ''The Age'' specifically refers to her interest as having been towards ''pre-adult'' boys and even references her confessed relationship with her own "boy", though she was unsurprisingly stingy on the details. The article also recalls an interview she gave on [[Canada|Canadian]] television where she was asked what attracted her to boys rather than men, in which she said: "Oh, everything - sperm that runs like tap water will do."<ref>https://www.theage.com.au/national/a-feminist-buoyant-in-her-passion-20030705-gdvzqq.html</ref>
She is quoted by the ''Sydney Morning Herald'' as having said that "A woman of taste is a [[Pedophilia|pederast]] - boys rather than men."<ref>https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/its-all-in-the-delivery-20080315-gds5fm.html</ref>

Although this book was seemingly written for less than honorable reasons, one of the ideas the book proposes is that the "less masculine" boys could "bring the sexes to a reconciliation" because of their supposedly intermediate status. This is mostly only unintentionally interesting: [[Hypocrisy|it begs the question as to why Greer had apparently never thought to apply this exact same logic to transgender people and what their cross-gender experiences might offer the world]].

==Accusations of sexism and undermining feminism==
Despite her public reputation as a firebrand crusader for gender equality, several controversies in recent decades suggest that Greer may be turning against her own feminist principles and seems to have even embraced the same misogynist attitudes and beliefs she criticized during the height of the women's lib movement in the 1970s.

It began with Greer making crude, [[Donald Trump|Trumpian]] comments on the appearances of prominent women in politics, starting in November 2008, where Greer mocked the now-former first lady [[Michelle Obama]]'s election night outfit, calling the dress a "butcher's apron" and a "travesty". She also said her daughters' clothes were not "girly" enough.<ref name='news'/><ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/17/michelleobama-fashion ''If Michelle Obama's such a great dresser, what was she doing in this red butcher's apron?'']</ref> In the same month, she said {{wpl|Cheryl Cole}} could not be a feminist icon because "there's not enough of her - she's too thin" and that "a healthy girl is a fat-bottomed creature."<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/nov/25/women-equality</ref> 

Greer was accused yet again of sexism and hypocrisy as a feminist when critiquing Australia's first female Prime Minister [[Julia Gillard]] during a television debate in March 2012. Rather than discuss policy or even Gillard's political stances, Greer chose to mock the Prime Minister's fashion sense, and labeled her a "big arse" (which apparently isn't a compliment despite her previous standards of healthiness being a "fat-bottomed creature").<ref>[http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/germaine-gree-you-lost-me-at-big-arse/ ''Germaine? You lost me at "big arse" …''] </ref><ref>[http://lipmag.com/opinion/women-being-mean-to-women-still-sexist/ ''Women being mean to women: still sexist'']</ref>

In regards to the issue of rape and sexual assault, Greer has also proven to be shockingly unsympathetic to the plight of victims and survivors. In May of 2018, while speaking at the Hay literary festival, Greer gave a speech that essentially trivialized rape as "bad sex" and downplayed the trauma of experiencing sexual violence, claiming most assaults "don't involve any injury whatsoever".<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/31/germaine-greer-rape-violence-prosecution
</ref>

== See also ==
*[[Toupee fallacy]]
*[[Trans-exclusionary radical feminism]]

==References==
{{reflist|2|80%}}
{{Down Under}}
[[Category:Australians]]
[[Category:Authors]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Paedophilia]]
[[Category:Sexism]]
[[Category:TERFs]]
[[Category:Trolls]]

Categories: Australians, Authors, Living people, Paedophilia, Sexism, TERFs, Trolls