'Watching Germaine Greer get her comeuppance at the hands of an intolerant student campaign leaves a bittersweet taste in the mouth'
That Germaine Greer – leading inspiration for the poisonous incubus that has infested gender relations for the last 45 years – should now be on the receiving end of some of the battier excesses of the insane intolerance she has so signally promoted could be enough to persuade even Richard Dawkins of the power of intelligent design.
An online petition has been launched to prevent Greer – the 76 year-old Australian-born feminist writer and academic – from giving a lecture at Cardiff University, claiming that she promotes views that are “problematic” for transgender people.
The petition on Change.org, which has now attracted 1100+ supporters, was started by Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at the university’s students’ union. It alleges that Greer has “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobic altogether”.
These “problematic” views include remarks of Greer’s where she said that transgender women seem “like ghastly parodies” to natural-born females; that they can’t be real women because “they don’t know what it’s like to have a smelly vagina”; and that being a transgender woman was “a delusion”.
“Hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous," campaigners write in the petition. "Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate.”
Divine. Thank you, Lord. Allah is indeed merciful and mighty, exactly as advertised. Such odious bigotry towards the free and open expression of opinion is precisely what Germaine Greer deserves.
• Germaine Greer: online trolling shows men now even less tolerant of women
Nobody in our time has written more speciously and yet more influentially about relations between men and women. The author of The Female Eunuch, who wrote “Men are the enemy. They know it – at least, they know there is a sex war on, an unusually cold one,” also declared that women had to be at war with men because a strain of repressive violence ran through the very essence of male sexuality.
“The male perversion of violence is an essential condition of the degradation of women," she tried to explain. "The penis is conceived as a weapon and its action upon women is understood to be somehow destructive and hurtful.”
Ludicrous though it may now appear, such nutty-slack balderdash engendered an entire canon of feminist scholarship and opinion-making from 1970 onwards. It endures today in the Stalinist diction of the Change.org petition. The pseudo-Marxist idea that men, by their nature, constitute a class that oppresses women, as a class, was not original to Germaine Greer; but her inspired, opportunistic, wicked genius was to stoke up and set on fire the dreary class analysis of the whiny, moany sisters of the Left by applying the hot poker and bellows of Cosmopolitan’s sexy rhetoric, making out that a girl’s right to a fully satisfactory sex life was nothing less than a political, revolutionary issue.
As she said when she appeared with Norman Mailer in April 1971 in the “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” in New York’s Town Hall: “Sexual politics, by and large, has to do with the act of fucking being to the advantage of the one who fucks and the disadvantage of the one who is fucked.”
How these observations were meant to apply to the wider world of nature – how the mating rigmaroles of elephants, giraffes and hedgehogs were to be reformed to reflect a more equal social balance – was never to be made clear. But, so far as they concerned men and women, Greer had already spelt-out her revolutionary prospectus in the pages of Suck (the underground sex magazine she co-edited at the end of the 1960s). There she enjoined that the woman should habitually be on top. To make sure that the woman got the satisfaction which was her political due, the man was to pay unfailing, selfless attention to her clitoris throughout the act. Serious politics, you see.
If you go back almost 45 years to that New York debate – one of the seminal moments in the development of modern feminism – you will find that, while he was sweating and struggling manfully on stage to address a hideously hostile, jeering audience (of the order that Germaine Greer might face if she went to Cardiff), Norman Mailer did voice some thoughts that accurately foretold the totalitarian intolerance now expressed in the Change.org petition.
“If we get a left wing totalitarianism,” Mailer said, “that means the end of all of us because we will have nothing but scrambled minds trying to overcome the incredible shock that the destruction of human liberty came from the left and not the right, and it is this element in women's liberation that terrifies me.”
Norman Mailer discussed gender politics with Germaine Greer in the infamous 'Town Bloody Hall' debates
And here we are, Dr Greer. How do you like your creation, now that it has turned upon you?
The only disappointment is that her comeuppance should come from such a puny source as the women’s officer of the Cardiff student union. Unalloyed delight and true karmic justice would arrive only if the massed ranks of Corbynistas should commandeer the pages of The Guardian to denounce “the transmisogyny” of Germaine Greer’s “misgendering” thoughts on smelly vaginas.
We can but pray.
Source
The petition on Change.org, which has now attracted 1100+ supporters, was started by Rachael Melhuish, women’s officer at the university’s students’ union. It alleges that Greer has “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobic altogether”.
These “problematic” views include remarks of Greer’s where she said that transgender women seem “like ghastly parodies” to natural-born females; that they can’t be real women because “they don’t know what it’s like to have a smelly vagina”; and that being a transgender woman was “a delusion”.
“Hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous," campaigners write in the petition. "Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate.”
Divine. Thank you, Lord. Allah is indeed merciful and mighty, exactly as advertised. Such odious bigotry towards the free and open expression of opinion is precisely what Germaine Greer deserves.
• Germaine Greer: online trolling shows men now even less tolerant of women
Nobody in our time has written more speciously and yet more influentially about relations between men and women. The author of The Female Eunuch, who wrote “Men are the enemy. They know it – at least, they know there is a sex war on, an unusually cold one,” also declared that women had to be at war with men because a strain of repressive violence ran through the very essence of male sexuality.
“The male perversion of violence is an essential condition of the degradation of women," she tried to explain. "The penis is conceived as a weapon and its action upon women is understood to be somehow destructive and hurtful.”
Ludicrous though it may now appear, such nutty-slack balderdash engendered an entire canon of feminist scholarship and opinion-making from 1970 onwards. It endures today in the Stalinist diction of the Change.org petition. The pseudo-Marxist idea that men, by their nature, constitute a class that oppresses women, as a class, was not original to Germaine Greer; but her inspired, opportunistic, wicked genius was to stoke up and set on fire the dreary class analysis of the whiny, moany sisters of the Left by applying the hot poker and bellows of Cosmopolitan’s sexy rhetoric, making out that a girl’s right to a fully satisfactory sex life was nothing less than a political, revolutionary issue.
As she said when she appeared with Norman Mailer in April 1971 in the “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” in New York’s Town Hall: “Sexual politics, by and large, has to do with the act of fucking being to the advantage of the one who fucks and the disadvantage of the one who is fucked.”
How these observations were meant to apply to the wider world of nature – how the mating rigmaroles of elephants, giraffes and hedgehogs were to be reformed to reflect a more equal social balance – was never to be made clear. But, so far as they concerned men and women, Greer had already spelt-out her revolutionary prospectus in the pages of Suck (the underground sex magazine she co-edited at the end of the 1960s). There she enjoined that the woman should habitually be on top. To make sure that the woman got the satisfaction which was her political due, the man was to pay unfailing, selfless attention to her clitoris throughout the act. Serious politics, you see.
If you go back almost 45 years to that New York debate – one of the seminal moments in the development of modern feminism – you will find that, while he was sweating and struggling manfully on stage to address a hideously hostile, jeering audience (of the order that Germaine Greer might face if she went to Cardiff), Norman Mailer did voice some thoughts that accurately foretold the totalitarian intolerance now expressed in the Change.org petition.
“If we get a left wing totalitarianism,” Mailer said, “that means the end of all of us because we will have nothing but scrambled minds trying to overcome the incredible shock that the destruction of human liberty came from the left and not the right, and it is this element in women's liberation that terrifies me.”
And here we are, Dr Greer. How do you like your creation, now that it has turned upon you?
The only disappointment is that her comeuppance should come from such a puny source as the women’s officer of the Cardiff student union. Unalloyed delight and true karmic justice would arrive only if the massed ranks of Corbynistas should commandeer the pages of The Guardian to denounce “the transmisogyny” of Germaine Greer’s “misgendering” thoughts on smelly vaginas.
We can but pray.
Source
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