Why do people dislike Germaine Greer?

[morescrummythanyummy]

I have a friend who is TWAW and "be kind". I am GC. We are both aware of the other's views from a couple of discussions and have sort of tacitly mutually decided to stay away from further debates on this topic. She reads her kids Harry Potter, so she isn't rabidly activist, but works for a charity that has been stonewalled and exists in a bit of an echo chamber in her day to day life (she would probably say the same about me in looking on mumsnet!). . However, my friend has voiced a quite profound dislike for GG a couple of times in passing on related/political topics, in a way that suggests that this is what "right thinking"'people should think. I don't want to press her on it, because I don't really want to enter into a debate or open a can of worms. She is a lovely person and I really value her friendship. Is GG despised by some because she is outspoken in being GC/terfy or for other reasons? Just quite helpful to know!!

[SammyScrounge]

I have never forgotten the first time I saw her - on a TV discussion programme. The other guests were men, well known pundits paid to give opinions.
And Germaine,without even breaking sweat, wiped the floor with them. I didn't know women could be like that. She is incisive, witty and original and outrageous sometimes to make people think. I loved her nerve and her cheek as well as her quirky glam.
I was disgusted when she was no-platformed by a uni student body recently .Imagine those silly wee biddies being so hostile to her. They could have had an entertaining evening and a thought provoking one. But they went home and read their 'Woke Guide For The Intellectually Challenged' and were comforted.

[AmaryllisNightAndDay]

Surely that relates in large part to our conceptualization - but how much of that is constructed socially?

Good question. My take is that the virginity/purity aspect of rape is mostly socially constructed but the violation aspect isn't. It cuts across societies, it's not learned, it's experienced right there in the reptile brain, along with the survival reactions fight, flight, or freeze.

[moomintrolls]

She told this story about when she was raped, and people really didn't like it. I do believe it's one of the most pervasive issues with her.

She basically said it's nothing, it's done and then her male friend took revenge on the guys, which for her was done and dusted, and to get upset about rape is just being moany an one should get over it.

I watched her say it, and I believe I've paraphrased well and conveyed her meaning.

Personally I don't mind when people share their takes on things, their views, their outcome or summation of their own experience of something. So I have no issue with it. I don't really like censorship in general. I kind of want to get all the available information, you know?

If that's how she feels then that's completely her right, and her right to express it when asked. That's my view.

But many found what she said abhorrent.

[MagnoliaTaint]

To make something good and helpful out of such a terrible experience is genuinely inspiring. Thank you.

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

Ach! It's almost like it happened to another person now. Though it is why I do the charity work I do.

It was odd to be wearing a FitBit whilst typing that though. Made it very clear that any equanimity I thought I felt remains a facade! Mmm!

[AmaryllisNightAndDay]

That is very powerful Samphire I am sorry it happened and I admire your courage to see it through court and to speak about it now.

[MagnoliaTaint]

Samphire.

[RufustheFloralmissingreindeer]

I’m sorry samphire 💐

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

@RufustheFloralmissingreindeer

No i agree with you samphire

its just a hard subject to discuss

I am tapping 60, I am fidning it easier to discuss, might have finally found my distance. Thought typing that post did raise my heart rate quite a bit. FitBit has definitely noticed!

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

Why is rape in particular more likely to be damaging than being beaten or murdered? More complicated in some cases, maybe, but worse? Surely that relates in large part to our conceptualization - but how much of that is constructed socially?

May I?

I have been beaten, left with my face pulped and a couple of broken fingers. That was humiliating. People could see what had happened and the bruising took months to disappear. My sense of self took a couple of years to return and my feeling of safety out alone, even in daylight, took a few years to re-solidify, But I did get over it. Moving a hundred miles or so helped.

I have been raped. The bruised didn't show. There was little actual physical harm. But my mental state was absolutely shattered. I was overpowered, held down and physically rammed. Held in a dark alley for what seemed like hours with his hand around my neck, spitting in my face, pumping away at me. I thought I was going to die, I wished I was going to die. Then he stood up, thanked me and left me in the floor, my clothes in shreds. The only way I could get to help was to further humiliate myself.

I don't care how society saw me. At the time all I felt was battered, utterly violated, absolutely helpless. I had some small consolation at court when it turned out I really had fought back, I had bitten him on the face, scratched him, apparently he was deaf for a few days as I hit his ear with a knee or an elbow. He was easily identified by the police because of his injuries. But he still managed to hold me down with one hand and violate me and then casually thank me for the shag!

So yes. I can say from experience that rape is/can be worse, far more internalised and long lasting.

[RufustheFloralmissingreindeer]

I mean in general

its hard to discuss without upsetting people one way or the other

and thats partly down to society and the whole ‘fate worse than death’ thing

[RufustheFloralmissingreindeer]

No i agree with you samphire

its just a hard subject to discuss

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

@RufustheFloralmissingreindeer

Maybe she meant that we need to repalce the prison sentence after a court case with a branding!

oh yes i deffo think that was her plan

I quite liked the vigilante approach, like tar and feathering, ducking stools, grabbed by the yokels and made to repent!

But I suppose i did really understand what she meant.

[MangyInseam]

@AmaryllisNightAndDay

None of this really is a response to what I said, you've just picked out random sentences.

I usually highlight the points I'm arguing with, so you can see if I have misunderstood. As I misunderstood that your friend was raped by a woman. And when I said "male rape" I meant rape of men and with a penis. Society isn't too positive about that either. Often considers it worse than a man raping a woman in fact.

The rapist, btw, was a woman, which is the way the law is written where I live.

Ah that's my confusion. It's not that way here. As far as I know the law where I live wouldn't consider that rape at all. So we may be at cross purposes.

My basic point was that when you tell people they are fragile in certain ways, and there is a lot of social messaging around that, you can create fragility. In the same way that if we tell women their virginity is all-important, and that rape makes them inpure, many will believe it.

Why is rape in particular more likely to be damaging than being beaten or murdered? More complicated in some cases, maybe, but worse? Surely that relates in large part to our conceptualization - but how much of that is constructed socially?

[RufustheFloralmissingreindeer]

Maybe she meant that we need to repalce the prison sentence after a court case with a branding!

oh yes i deffo think that was her plan

[MangyInseam]

@SamphirethePogoingStickerist

Wasn't her point then that rape is not the horrendoulsy violent obvious thing that is depcited on television but is often the 'mundane' act between two people who know, even love each other because of poor communication, lack of knowledge, fear of breaking uo a family?

I was with her for part of it, that as a society we do absolutely bugger all to persuade men that no means no, is not just 'playing difficult to get' etc and even les to persuade women that they can take real life action, from a kick in the bollocks to packing up and leaving immediately, breaking up a family to do so. .

Our usual discourse around rape is of helpless women and all powerful me; that women bear the shame of a 'broken' family and that should not be.

But then she sort of tainted it by blaming women for not acting, for expecting help. That was one of the many times I had to agree to disagree, or suspect that I had misunderstood, not seen a connection - or that she was simply pushing buttons harder that day than others.

She does seem to have lost patience with today's women - all the #MeToo movement did for her was entrench the poor helpless little woman trope. And she blames them, becuase blaming the men is fucking obvious!

My sense is that part of what she wants is for women to take responsibility for their own actions and decisions. Which is not to say they are at fault when bad things happen, though the two are often equated, sometimes I think cynically.

In a marriage or lt relationship for example, in the kind of scenario you are talking about, if a woman wants to say no to sex, she does need to communicate that clearly. And I think the corrolory of that is she is also in a position to decide to have sex even if in some ways she'd prefer not to, (say, to make her partner happy) and that decision is also a kind of responsibility we have to take on ourselves. There can be a kind of immaturity or attempt to pass the buck when we don't take responsibility for our own decisions, which also leads to an inability to say what we want clearly, and then it becomes more and more difficult to look at sexual assaults clearly.

As far as how the law should respond, for an academic thinking out of the box is always useful, it's where better ideas come from. We know that sexual assault and rape are difficult to prosecute, and some of the reasons are inherent in the nature of sexual activity - we can't easily change them. Maybe a better way would look to circumvent that. Arguably that is part of the reason that in the past, when there were few technological helps in policing, social norms played a larger part in attempts to regulate sexual misconduct.

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

True. I suspect any sisterhood I ever felt was due to my agreeing with something she said, rather then her giving a fuck about what I thought!

[AmaryllisNightAndDay]

She does seem to have lost patience with today's women

She was never patient with women. There's the same impatience back in "The Female Eunuch" too.

She's never been what you'd call a "sisterhood" feminist.

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

I can't count the number of times I have read or heard something of hers and thought WTF? And gone back after a few months or years and seen what she meant, the thing I missed. So yes, Germaine, the grass is whatever colour you tell me it is!

Maybe she meant that we need to repalce the prison sentence after a court case with a branding! I kow I got the central tenet of her message, all else is up for grabs! Having been through such a court case I know I only survived it because I was absolutely numb to proceedings and my now DH didn't waiver in his support.

[Brefugee]

I often think the problem with having people like GG around is that these days everyone seems to think that they must be practically perfect in every way and never have evolved any of their thinking - so that if GG said something a bit rubbish and shocking as a much younger woman and has revised her thinking now, she isn't worth reading. And, of course more likely these days, that they have refined their thinking in a way that a lot of people don't find palatable now.

Or that they have a massive body of brilliant work and have one set of comments taken out of context (or are even still in context) and therefore everything they have written is wrong.

We no longer seem to be able to accept these brilliant thinkers warts and all.

Churchill was a brilliant orator, did a lot of pretty clever and good things during the war. But he was an alcoholic, narcisstic (sp?) carmudgeon who most people wouldn't get along with perfectly. But he is allowed to be lionised despite that. (it could be down to sex, who knows).

I loved the Female Eunuch when i read it in the 70s, i keep meaning to give it a re-read to see if i still agree with the bits i agreed with then, and disagree with the bits i disagreed with then.

But i do think the thing that people who dislike her really hate is that she doesn't give a flying fuck about their opinion. And for a lot of her critics that is like actual pain.

[RufustheFloralmissingreindeer]

Ive not got one single issue with branding the fuckers

none at all

but there would still be a court case and probably as equally vile to the victim as the current ones are, there are other issues with this i feel but i really can’t be arsed to go into detail because I firmly believe people are entitled to their opinions

personally my issue was more the comments on ptsd…but again, I wouldn’t have a pop at her about them because again she is entitled to her opinion (and to be honest if that woman argued that grass wasnt green I would probably leave her presence unable to argue to the contrary 😀)

[AmaryllisNightAndDay]

None of this really is a response to what I said, you've just picked out random sentences.

I usually highlight the points I'm arguing with, so you can see if I have misunderstood. As I misunderstood that your friend was raped by a woman. And when I said "male rape" I meant rape of men and with a penis. Society isn't too positive about that either. Often considers it worse than a man raping a woman in fact.

The rapist, btw, was a woman, which is the way the law is written where I live.

Ah that's my confusion. It's not that way here. As far as I know the law where I live wouldn't consider that rape at all. So we may be at cross purposes.

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

@unici5

I don't know. I was in the audience at a panel discussion she was on several years back and she told a story about going away with a group of old friends and hearing one of them being very clearly raped by her husband (screaming and crying) in the night after they all went to bed. Her takeaway was that her friend seemed ok in the morning, so how bad could it have been?

It doesn't directly undo a long career, but it certainly left me disgusted.

Wasn't her point then that rape is not the horrendoulsy violent obvious thing that is depcited on television but is often the 'mundane' act between two people who know, even love each other because of poor communication, lack of knowledge, fear of breaking uo a family?

I was with her for part of it, that as a society we do absolutely bugger all to persuade men that no means no, is not just 'playing difficult to get' etc and even les to persuade women that they can take real life action, from a kick in the bollocks to packing up and leaving immediately, breaking up a family to do so. .

Our usual discourse around rape is of helpless women and all powerful me; that women bear the shame of a 'broken' family and that should not be.

But then she sort of tainted it by blaming women for not acting, for expecting help. That was one of the many times I had to agree to disagree, or suspect that I had misunderstood, not seen a connection - or that she was simply pushing buttons harder that day than others.

She does seem to have lost patience with today's women - all the #MeToo movement did for her was entrench the poor helpless little woman trope. And she blames them, becuase blaming the men is fucking obvious!

[SamphirethePogoingStickerist]

@RufustheFloralmissingreindeer

Yes I don’t think that helped in the popularity stakes

although im absolutely positive that she doesnt give a shit

i agree with some of what she says and disagree vehemently with other things but thats the same with most people and their opinions

That seems to have been one of the moments that gave SM warriors the edge. Same as her speech at Hay a few years ago - I was there, the way she said things changed their meanings entirely from the bluntly written word.

But the rape thing, she is right - if you start from the real world, how things actually are, in a country where rape may as well have been legalised.

The penis is a thin skinned appendage = thin skinned = easy to shame

So, rather than insisting on taking the penis and its owner to court, where names are kept secret and little is ever printed, = little shame leaks out into the wider world and tales can be spun for friends and family; why don't we scorch an R into the penis owners forehead? Let him talk his way out of that.

The threat of that, the visible shame of that, might be more effective at reducing rape than the remote possibility of a court case, let alone the even more remote chance of a conviction.

Why? Because the penis is a thin skinned appendage = easy to shame.

But so many people refused to see what she meant and she was vilified for one half of the suggestion - let's not prosecute rapists - with no real thought given to the real life effects of the other part - shame the fuckers for life!

She was trying, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to shame the CPS, courts, police etc. But it was easier to ridicule her, to vilify her than to listen and think...

That and she is a rude, crude, loud woman who doesn't fit into patriarchy's woman shaped box, not even the one they keep for clever women!

[MangyInseam]

The rapist, btw, was a woman, which is the way the law is written where I live.