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Germaine Greer

The author Germaine Greer (born 1939) was born in Australia and lived in England. The publication of her book The Female Eunuchin 1970 established her as a writer and as an authoritative commentator on women's liberation and sexuality.

Germaine Greer was born on January 29, 1939, in Melbourne, Victoria, and was educated at the Star of the Sea Convent, Gardenvale. Her father was a newspaper executive and she came from a middle class background. She completed an honors arts degree at Melbourne University in 1959 and a Masters degree with first class honors at Sydney University in 1962 before going as a Commonwealth Scholar to Newnham College, Cambridge, where in 1967 she wrote her doctorate on Shakespeare's early comedies.

In 1970 the publication of The Female Eunuch made her a public figure in the United States, Australia, Britain, and Europe (where it was widely translated) and identified her with the new women's liberation movement which was then emerging in the West. While the media saw Germaine Greer as the high priestess of "women's lib" and her book as its bible, Greer herself was quick to repudiate these descriptions, although it was apparent that The Female Eunuch was a significant catalyst in the popularization of ideas about women's liberation. Greer saw her book as part of a second wave of feminism.

The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch is witty, polemical, and erudite, especially in Greer's excursions into the literature of romance and the language of abuse. In it she attacked the social conditioning of women in which the roles and rules taught from childhood to "feminize" girls also deform and subjugate them.

While feminists since Mary Wollstonecraft have explored the limitations placed by society on women's knowledge, behavior, and education, Greer looked at the mystery and shame surrounding knowledge of women's bodies and the constrictions placed on their sexuality. Women, she argued, are conditioned under pressure from the "feminizers" to abandon their autonomy and embrace a stereotyped version of femininity. The result is helplessness, resentment, a lack of sexual pleasure, an absence of joy.

The Female Eunuch also examines the women's movement in the United States and in Britain. Greer was critical both of the idea that emancipation can be achieved by women adopting male roles or merely by economic change. Nor did she believe in the possibility of women's self-determination within the nuclear family. Two themes here point toward Greer's later book Sex and Destiny: her belief that the suburban, isolated, and consumer-oriented nuclear family is both constraining for women and an undesirable environment in which to bring up children, and her dislike of the way Western industrialized society "manufactured" and therefore confined sexuality.

A Controversial Life Style

In developing these ideas and in writing about sexuality in a way that was both intellectual and explicit Greer took advantage of and helped to create a new permissiveness in publishing and in public discussion about sex. While increasingly involved in mainstream journalism as a freelance writer and in television, Greer also had a background in underground magazines and in struggles against censorship. She was an original contributor to the Australian magazine OZ (and later as "Rose Blight" wrote a regular gardening column for Private Eye). While promoting The Female Eunuch in Australia and New Zealand in 1972 she was a witness for the defense in two obscenity trials in which the offending publications included counter-culture magazines and the novel Portnoy's Complaint. In New Zealand she was charged with using indecent language at a public meeting in the Auckland Town Hall. Censorship was one of the reasons she gave at that time for her decision not to live and work in Australia.

Greer's intellectual background was molded by the libertarian and anarchist ideas of the group in Sydney known as The Push, who drank, at that time, at the Royal George Hotel and who were influenced by the ideas of Sydney University professor of philosophy John Anderson. Greer described it this way: "When I first came to Sydney what I fell in love with was not the harbour or the gardens or anything else but a pub called The Royal George, or, more particularly with a group of people who used to go there every night … and sit there and talk…." Richard Neville, editor of OZ, saw her not as part of an Oxbridge liberal-intellectual tradition but as "a militant anti-authoritarian, trained in Australia…. The regular diet of reasoned anarchy, sexual precosity and Toohey's Bitter helped mould her unique shock style."

Germaine Greer's three-month visit to Australia in 1971-1972 was the first since her departure to study at Cambridge. She continued to live for the most part in Britain, becoming a well-known Australian expatriate, whose comments on her place of birth (its men, its "stupifying dullness") were anxiously awaited by the local press on each of her intermittent visits. In 1968 in London she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, a union which ended in divorce in 1973.

Between 1967 and 1972 she lectured in English literature at the University of Warwick. After the publication of The Female Eunuch she lectured on the American circuit, wrote a column in the London Sunday Times, and between 1972 and 1979 worked as a free-lance journalist, reviewer, and broadcaster. Part of her time she spent at her house in Italy. In 1979 Greer became a professor in the Graduate Faculty of Modern Letters at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and she later became director of that university's Center for the Study of Women's Literature, positions she relinquished to return to full-time writing and broadcasting. In 1984 she described herself as having given up teaching except for lecture tours and visiting fellowships.

The Obstacle Race

Germaine Greer's second major book was a work of feminist scholarship which attracted less public attention than her earlier work but which explored a kindred theme. In The Obstacle Race (1979) she looked at the work and fortunes of women painters. She did not begin with what she called the false question based on the prejudices of the layman: "Why were there no great women painters?" Instead, she asked, "What has women's contribution been to the visual arts; why if there were some women artists were there not more; how good were those women who did succeed in earning a living by painting?" Greer's intention was to discuss women painters not as individuals but as a group sharing common difficulties.

In an encyclopedic study of European and American artists she allowed only one woman the status equivalent to that of "Old Master," the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose achievements and struggles she described in a chapter entitled "The Magnificent Exception."

Women artists, she found, were not always ignored, but excessive praise could be even more damaging if it served to confine women to a separate sphere of womanly art in which qualities despised in the work of men were encouraged. Rosa Bonheur was described as "the best female painter who ever lived," but her reputation failed to survive changes in taste. The Obstacle Race reasserts the argument of Greer's earlier book: to express themselves fully, to be "truly excellent," women had to struggle against the confines of the conventional female role.

Sex and Destiny

Germaine Greer's next book, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), is a detailed and polemical assault on Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and children. Her antagonism to the nuclear family, to government intervention in sexual behavior and fertility, and to the commercialization of sexuality and her endorsement of traditional communities were all apparent in The Female Eunuch. In 1972 Greer went to Bangladesh to investigate the situation of women raped during the conflict with Pakistan. In 1972 the Australian government gave - and subsequently withdrew - a grant to enable her to make a series of films on human reproduction. After that she spent considerable time in India.

Greer's approval of Third World life styles, of traditional values and customs in preference to those of the West, and of poverty in preference to materialism led her, in Sex and Destiny, to endorse practices which are frequently in conflict with the beliefs of Western feminists. As its author stated, Sex and Destiny does not attempt to resolve all the problems it raises, but it does seek "to gore the reader slightly with its horns."

More Recent Publications

In 1989 Greer authored Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a combination biography, diary and travelogue that traced her efforts to discover her father's true identity. Two years later came the release of The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause (1991), in which she explored medical theories and treatments that she contended were often contradictory, excessive and potentially dangerous.

Greer also assembled a collection of her essays and wrote two books providing literary criticism. The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1986) was a compilation of newspaper and magazine essays authored between 1968 and 1985, some of which were originally rejected by publishers. In Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995) she advanced the theory that not only have women poets been exploited by men, but they have been a party to their own downfall. She also authored Shakespeare (1986), another work of literary criticism.

In 1989 Greer became a special lecturer and unofficial fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Though her idiosyncratic lifestyle remained unchanged, she acknowledged one adjustment in a 1995 interview published in Elle magazine: "The great liberation of my past ten years is that I've stopped thinking about men."

Further Reading

Most of the biographical information about Germaine Greer, as well as critical discussions of her work, can be found in newspaper and magazine articles and interviews; David Plante, Difficult Women (1983) contains a memoir; Feminist Writers (1996) provides a capsule summary of her life and work; Who's Who of Australian Women (1982) contains biographical information and details of Germaine Greer's minor publications; Julie Rigg and Julie Copland (editors), Coming out! Women's Voices, Women's Lives (1985) includes an interview recorded in Australia in January 1979; a brief interview appears in Elle magazine (November 1995).

 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Greer, Germaine,
1939–, Australian feminist and writer. She moved to England (1964), earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge, and taught at the Univ. of Warwick (1967–73). Her book The Female Eunuch (1970), an analysis of attitudes toward women and a call for an end to sexual repression, made her a leading spokeswoman for feminism. She has also written The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause (1992).
 
Quotes By: Germaine Greer

Quotes:

"The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living."

"The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn."

"Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe."

"Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities . To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it."

"The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation."

See more famous quotes by Germaine Greer

 
Wikipedia: Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer at the "Humber Mouth" Hull literature festival 2006
Born: January 29, 1939
Melbourne, Australia
Occupation: academic writer
Nationality: Australian
Writing period: 1970-present
Subjects: English literature, feminism, art history

Germaine Greer (born January 29, 1939) is an Australian-born writer, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the 20th century.[1][2][3]

Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her ground-breaking The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, turning her overnight into a household name and bringing her both adulation and criticism. She is also the author of Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), and most recently Shakepeare's Wife (2007).

Biography

Early life

Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. Her father was a leading Australian insurance executive, who served as a Wing Commander in the wartime RAAF. After attending a private convent school, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, Melbourne, she won a teaching scholarship in 1956 and enrolled at the University of Melbourne. After graduating with a degree in English and French language and literature, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push, a group of intellectual left-wing anarchists many of whom practised polygamy. Christine Wallace, in her unauthorised biography, describes Greer at this time:


For Germaine, [the Push] provided a philosophy to underpin the attitude and lifestyle she had already acquired in Melbourne. She walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, and set out to follow the Push way of life — 'an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn'. The Push struck her as completely different from the Melbourne intelligentsia she had engaged with in the Drift, 'who always talked about art and truth and beauty and argument ad hominem; instead, these people talked about truth and only truth, insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies — or bullshit, as they called it.' Her Damascus turned out to be the Royal George, and the Hume Highway was the road to it. 'I was already an anarchist,' she says. 'I just didn't know why I was an anarchist. They put me in touch with the basic texts and I found out what the internal logic was about how I felt and thought.[4]

By 1972 Greer would identify as an "anarchist communist", close to Marxism. [5]

In her first teaching job, Greer lectured at the University of Sydney, where she also gained a first class M.A. in romantic poetry in 1963 with a thesis titled The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode. A year later, the thesis won her a Commonwealth Scholarship, which she used to fund her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England, where she became a member of the all-women's Newnham College.

Professor Lisa Jardine, who was at Newnham at the same time, recalled the first time she met Greer, at a formal dinner in college:


The principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian accent reverberating around the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched white cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression ... [W]e were ... astonished at the very idea that a woman could speak so loudly and out of turn and that words such as "bra" and "breasts' — or maybe she said "tits" — could be uttered amid the pseudo-masculine solemnity of a college dinner.[6]

Greer joined the student amateur acting company, the Cambridge Footlights, which launched her into the London arts and media scene. Using the nom de plume Rose Blight, she also wrote a gardening column for the satirical magazine Private Eye, and as Dr. G, became a regular contributor to the underground London Oz magazine, owned by Australian writer Richard Neville.[7] The July 29, 1970 edition was guest-edited by Greer, and featured an article of hers on the hand-knitted Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick."

In 1968 she received her Ph.D. in Elizabethan drama with a thesis titled The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's early comedies, and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick. The same year, in London, she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, but the marriage lasted only three weeks, during which, as she later admitted, Greer was unfaithful several times.[8] The marriage finally ended in divorce in 1973.

Prominence

Following her 1970 success with The Female Eunuch, Greer left Warwick in 1972 after flying around the world to promote her book. She co-presented a Granada Television comedy show called Nice Time with Kenny Everett and Jonathan Routh, bought a house in Italy, wrote a column for The Sunday Times, then spent the next few years travelling through Africa and Asia, which included a visit to Bangladesh to investigate the situation of women who had been raped during the conflict with Pakistan. On the New Zealand leg of her tour in 1972, Greer was arrested for using the words "bullshit" and "fuck" during her speech, which attracted major rallies in her support.

Later career

In 1989, Greer returned to Newnham College, Cambridge as a special lecturer and fellow, but left after attracting negative publicity in 1996 for allegedly "outing" Dr. Rachel Padman, a transsexual colleague. Greer unsuccessfully opposed Padman's election to a fellowship, on the grounds that Padman had been born a man, and Newnham was a women's college. A June 25, 1997 article by Clare Longrigg in The Guardian about the incident, entitled "A Sister with No Fellow Feeling", disappeared from websites on the instruction of the newspaper's lawyers.[9]

Stephanie Merritt wrote in The Guardian:

She has been in the business of shaking up a complacent establishment for nearly 40 years now and was employing the most elemental shock tactic of getting naked in public both long before and long after it ever crossed Madonna's mind. She has repeatedly written about her own experiences of lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility, failed marriage (she was married for three weeks to a construction worker in the 1960s) and menopause, thereby leaving herself open to claims that she shamelessly extrapolates from her own condition to the rest of womankind and calls it a theory ... In part, her ability to remain so prominently in the public consciousness comes from an astute understanding and well-established symbiotic relationship with a media as eager to be shocked as she is to shock.[6]

Greer's last academic appointment had been as a Professor in the Department of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

Works

The Female Eunuch

See also: The Female Eunuch
The cover to The Female Eunuch
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The cover to The Female Eunuch

Greer argued in her book, The Female Eunuch, that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves. Christine Wallace writes that, when The Female Eunuch was first published, one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldn't let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables; and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). It arrived in the stores in London in October 1970. By March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages.

"The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told the New York Times in 1971, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed."[10]

Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to Sex and Destiny fourteen years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children; and that the manufacture of women's sexuality by Western society was demeaning and confining. Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy:


The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilised conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish they did not have to invite wives is legion.

Greer argued that change had to come about by revolution, not evolution. Women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."

While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the New York Times that she had been a "supergroupie." "Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors," she said. "When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests."

Other publications

Her second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, was published in 1979. This work details the life and experiences of female painters until the end of the nineteenth century. It also speculates on the existence of women artists whoae careers are not recorded by posterity.

Also in 1979, she accepted a post at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma as the director for the Center of the Study of Women's Literature.

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, published in 1984, continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Greer's target again is the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. Greer's apparent approval of life styles and family values in the developing world — the world is over-populated, she argued, only by Western standards of comfortable living — and of poverty in preference to consumerism, led her to endorse practices frequently at odds with the beliefs of most Western feminists. Female genital mutilation had to be considered in context, she wrote, and might be compared with breast augmentation in the West. The book consequently attracted a great deal of criticism. Pamela Bone wrote in The Australian:


Consider this: a struggling, screaming little girl is held down by several people (usually women) while another woman cuts through her clitoris and inner labia, with the intention of ensuring this girl will never experience sexual pleasure; and the world's most famous feminist, to whom much is owed, I don't deny, can compare this practice to adult women choosing, for whatever silly reason, to decorate their sexual parts with metal. [2]

In 1986, Greer published Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism, and The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written between 1968 and 1985. In 1989 came Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom she described as distant and unaffectionate, weak, craven, and feeble, which led to claims — as she knew it would, according to The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

In 1991, The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause, which the New York Times called a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book" became another influential book in the women's movement. In it, Greer tries to dispel myths about the menopause and ill health, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in The Age. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression , despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable." It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest" (The Age, July 13, 2002).

The Beautiful Boy, 2003
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The Beautiful Boy, 2003

Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995 and, in 1999, the whole woman, intended as a sequel to The Female Eunuch, in which she attacked both men and women for what she saw as the lack of progress in the feminist movement, and the whole woman. The chapter titles reveal the theme: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower", mirroring the arrangement of chapters in the earlier book. Greer wrote in the introduction: "The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man or like herself ... Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? ... [F]ake equality is leading women into double jeopardy ... It's time to get angry again."

In 2003, The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, which is illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty", alleging that Greer had appeared to reinvent herself as a "middle-aged pederast." [2] Greer described the book as an attempt to address women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure" (Greer 2003). The boy pictured on the cover was Björn Andresen, who has said that the use of his picture is "distasteful", and he was not consulted about its use. [3] [4]

Other media

A biography by Christine Wallace, Germaine Greer, The Untamed Shrew, was published in 1997. Greer responded that biographies of living persons are morbid and worthless, because they can only be incomplete. She said: "I don't write about any living women ... because I think that's invidious; there is no point in limiting her by the achievements of the past because she's in a completely different situation, and I figure she can break the moulds and start again."[11]

In 1999, she sat for a modest nude photograph by the respected Australian photographer Polly Borland.[5] The photo was part of a National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 2000. It later appeared in a book titled Polly Borland: Australians.[12]

Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine called Greer "the ultimate Trojan Horse, gorgeous and witty, built to penetrate the seemingly unassailable fortress of patriarchy and let the rest of us foot soldiers in," describing her as "a joy to read, an eloquent maniac." Angela Carter described her as "a clever fool", while former British Conservative MP Edwina Currie called her "a great big hard-boiled prat".[6][opinion needs balancing]

"[Her] mind provokes us like no other," journalist Catherine Keenan wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald, "but for all the wrong reasons." [13]

In early 2000, Greer claimed at a press gathering in London that she never set foot in Australia before receiving the permission of the "traditional owners of the land" at Sydney Airport. In an embarrassing turn of events, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council spokesman Paul Molloy later claimed that she had never asked permission, despite visiting Sydney several times in recent years, and in any case there was no single group of elders that could give such permission to enter Australia. [6]

On April 23, 2000, Greer was harassed in her home by a nineteen-year-old student from the University of Bath who had been writing to Greer. The student broke into her home in Essex, tied Greer up in the kitchen, and caused damage to Greer's home. Dinner guests eventually found Greer lying in a distressed state on the floor, with the student hanging onto her legs. BBC News reported that the student was originally charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and with false imprisonment, but those charges were dropped and replaced with the harassment charge. She admitted harassing Greer and was sentenced to two years' probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.[14] Greer was not hurt and told reporters: "I am not angry, I am not upset, I am not hurt. I am fine. I haven't lost my sense of humour. I am not the victim here."[15]

In 2001, she attracted publicity again for a proposed treaty with Aboriginal Australia. In 2004, Australian Prime Minister John Howard called her "elitist" and "condescending" after she criticised Australians as "too relaxed to give a damn" and derided her native country as being "defined by suburban mediocrity."[16]She called Australia a sports-obsessed suburban wasteland devoid of cerebral stimulation. This prompted a lot of reaction, including reaction from Prime Minister John Howard who called her comments "pathetic".

Since 1990 she has made eight appearances on the British television panel show Have I Got News For You, a record she holds jointly with Will Self. Her most memorable appearance was in 1995 when Ian Hislop quoted Greer's spat with a fellow broadsheet columnist, Suzanne Moore, which included a reference to Moore wearing "fuck me shoes".

Greer was one of nine contestants in the 2005 series of Celebrity Big Brother UK. She had previously said that the show was "as civilised as looking through the keyhole in your teenager's bedroom door". She walked out of the show after five days inside the 'Big Brother house', citing the psychological cruelty and bullying of the show's producers, the dirt of the house, and the publicity-seeking behaviour of her fellow contestants.[17] However since then she has appeared on spin-off shows Big Brother's Little Brother and Big Brother's Big Mouth.

In September 2006, Greer's column[18] in The Guardian newspaper about the death of Australian Steve Irwin attracted criticism for what was reported as a "distasteful tirade".[19][20] Greer said that "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". In an interview with the Nine Network's A Current Affair about her comments, Greer said "I really found the whole Steve Irwin phenomenon embarrassing and I'm not the only person who did"[21] and that she hoped that "exploitative nature documentaries" would now end.[22] Queensland Premier Peter Beattie labelled her comments "stupid" and "insensitive",[23] one of a number of Australian political leaders to make similar comments. While several Australian newspapers reproduced part of her column they also published letters from readers incensed by her comments the following day. Other Australian commentators, such as P. P. McGuinness, the current editor of Quadrant, supported her comments.[24] In a mixed newspaper opinion piece she repeated her criticism of Irwin while saying that it was "disgraceful that it has taken the Australian national portrait gallery six months to" exhibit a portrait of "this most famous Australian". [7]

In October 2006 Greer appeared twice in an episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras playing herself.

In the same month she presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the life of American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa.[25] She confirmed that she had been a friend of Zappa since the early 1970s and that his orchestral work "G-Spot Tornado" would be played at her funeral.

In August 2007 Greer made comments regarding Princess Diana, calling her a "devious moron", a "desperate woman seeking applause", "disturbingly neurotic" and "guileless".[26]


In popular culture

  • Greer is the subject of a song called "Mother Greer" by Australian band Augie March. [8]
  • She is referenced in Bridget Jones's Diary.
  • Greer is quoted in track one of Sinéad O'Connor's album Universal Mother. The track is called "Germaine" and quotes a Greer oratory about matriarchy and fraternity.
  • Greer was also featured in the 1992 Frank Sidebottom song, Germaine's a Pain, which featured the rhyming couplet, her lips pursed with a sneer, I'm forever troubled by Greer. It did not chart, but quickly sold out its first vinyl pressing of 36[citation needed]. Every 7" sleeve contained a different glossy black and white photo of those in the public eye, past and present, that Greer disliked. All were daubed with derogatory words and deliberately misplaced phalli.
  • In 2002, Was the subject of a comedic sketch on satirical news show "CNNNN" in which a mock contest, named "What will that crazy old Germ say Next?" attempted to say the next crazy comment she would say.
  • The 2008 Beeban Kidron film Hippie Hippie Shake, based on Richard Neville's memoir, features Emma Booth playing Greer, who expressed her displeasure at being depicted in the film in The Guardian.[27]

Books

  • Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way To Nationhood (2004), Profile Books, ISBN 1-86197-739-5
  • Chico, El - El Efebo En Las Artes (2004), Grupo Oceano, ISBN 84-494-2600-6
  • The Beautiful Boy (2003), Rizzoli, ISBN 0-8478-2586-8
  • Libraries (2003), Lemon Tree Press, ASIN B0006S84S6
  • Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Very Short Introductions series, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280249-6
  • One Hundred Poems by Women (2001), Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-20734-0
  • the whole woman (1999), this edition 2000, ISBN 0-385-72003-3
  • The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause, this edition 1993, Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-449-90853-4
  • Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, 1989
  • The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1986), this edition 1990, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87113-308-3
  • Shakespeare (1986), Past Masters series, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-287539-6
  • Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), this edition 1985, Olympic Marketing Corp, ISBN 0-06-091250-2
  • The Obstacle Race:The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1980), this edition 2001, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, ISBN 1-86064-677-8
  • The Female Eunuch (1970), this edition, Farrar Straus Giroux (2002), ISBN 0-374-52762-8

References

Specific
  1. ^ Jardine, Lisa. "Growing up with Greer", The Guardian, March 7, 1999.
  2. ^ a b Bone, Pamela. "Western sisters failing the fight", The Australian, March 8, 2007.
  3. ^ "Germaine Greer," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
  4. ^ Wallace, Christine, (1997), Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, this edition, Faber & Faber, 1999, ISBN 0-571-19934-8
  5. ^ Greer on Revolution Germaine on Love. Overland 50/51 Autumn 1972 (Recorded February 1972). Retrieved on 2007-08-16. “"I am much more political now than I was then [i.e. than when a Sydney Libertarian] - I'm an anarchist still, but I'd say now I am an anarchist communist which I wasn't then .....The libertarians may have a good deal of intellectual prestige in Sydney, but seeing that they speak in self-evident truths and tautologies most of the time it's not difficult for them to get intellectual recognition. What disappoints me most about all the radical groups in Australia is that they have not yet managed to make the Marxist dialogue a part of the cultural life of the country as a whole, which it is say for example in India - it's something you expect to see discussed in the daily papers."”
  6. ^ a b c
  7. ^ Oz magazine richardneville.com.au
  8. ^ Enough Rope Andrew Denton, ABC TV, September 15 2003, Retrieved on February 8 2007.
  9. ^ In the news:1997 Press For Change.org.uk
  10. ^ New York Times, 22 March 1971
  11. ^ Four Corners, ABC, September 1979.
  12. ^ [1]Polly Borland: Australians
  13. ^ Catherine Keenan. "A new outbreak of Germ's warfare", Sydney Morning Herald, August 28, 2004.
  14. ^ 'Infatuated' student harassed Greer, BBC News, July 4, 2000. Retrieved on 1 November, 2006.
  15. ^ Sapsted, David. "Stalker jumped on Greer crying 'Mummy, Mummy'", The Daily Telegraph, July 5, 2000.
  16. ^ "Outrage as Greer brands Australians dull as Neighbours", The Scotsman, January 28 2004. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
  17. ^ "Germaine Greer: Filth!", The Sunday Times, January 16 2005. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
  18. ^ Greer, Germaine. "That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin", The Guardian, 2006-09-05. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. 
  19. ^ Hudson, Fiona. "Feminist Greer slams Steve's antics", News Limited, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. 
  20. ^ "Greer draws anger over Irwin comments", The Age, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. 
  21. ^ "Australian feminist Greer attacks Croc Hunter", Daily News & Analysis, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. 
  22. ^ "Greer not surprised Irwin "came to grief"", Reuters, 2006-09-06. Retrieved on 2006-06-06. 
  23. ^ Holloway, Grant. "Storm breaks over attack on Irwin", CNN, 2006-09-07. Retrieved on 2006-06-07. 
  24. ^ McGuinness, P. P. "Germaine Greer is right, Irwin took silly risks", Crikey, 2006-09-07. Retrieved on 2006-09-10. 
  25. ^ Freak Out! The Frank Zappa Story, BBC Radio 4, October 7 2006. Retrieved on 1 November 2006.
  26. ^ Greer launches another attack on Diana. smh.com.au 2007-08-26
  27. ^ Greer, Germaine. "Hippie Hippie Shake is back, and the flesh-eating bacteria turn to me", The Guardian, 16 July 2007. Retrieved on 27 September 2007.
General
  • Gibson, Owen. "Greer walks out of 'bullying' Big Brother", The Guardian, January 12, 2005
  • Greer, Germaine. "Filth!", The Sunday Times, January 16, 2005
  • Jardine, Lisa. Growing up with Greer, The Guardian, March 7, 1999
  • Pickering, Charlie. "Nasty Creatures Invading Our Habitat; When a recently deceased crocodile hunter meets a reptile of the press, it's hardly a fair contest.", City Weekly, September 14, 2006
  • Shukor, Steven. "From feminist sister to Big Brother housemate", The Guardian, January 7, 2005
  • Weintraub, Judith. "Germaine Greer - Opinions That May Shock the Faithful", New York Times, March 22, 1971

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