Germaine Greer on Anarchist Feminism + A Critique of Greer’s Bad Takes

https://youtu.be/O4fFJ5DYuTE

Germaine Greer has identified as an anarchist ever since she was a student in university.

So, I decided to present a compilation of clips of Greer advocating for political policies and for a conceptual shift in political philosophy.

Sadly, due to some of the awful shit she has said and done, I think it’s important not to promote her without also including a critique.

Timecodes:

0:00 — Surveillance & Employment
1:20 — Purplewashing & Eco-Centrism
4:05 — Purplewashing & Anti-Imperialism
8:00 — Patriarchy & Anarchist Revolution
8:54 — Primary School Teachers Funding
10:15 — Free Education
13:00 — Domestic Labor, Emotional Labor & Sorrow
14:50 — Civility Politics
21:35 — A Critique of Greer’s Bad Takes

Sources:

Professor Germaine Greer — An Insight — Full Interview

Germaine Greer Meets the Archivists

Town Bloody Hall (C.Hegedus, D.A.Pennebaker -1971)

To Germaine Greer, Shitlord Feminist: F@ck Off

Further Reading:

Greer on Revolution; Germaine on Love

Remember the Ladies: Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer — New World Encyclopedia

Surveillance & Employment

I hope that students are into some of the most radical thinking that’s going on, most of which is probably anarchist. Which is talking about alternatives to authoritarian government, but in fact, while all this goes on, the government actually becomes more and more and more and more authoritarian. And every year that passes increases the amount of control exercised by the government over individual people, and one of the things that used to distress me as students were always begging for more in the way of surveillance. We want more cameras because the women are afraid of being attacked at night. We want more lights. We want. More. I’d be going round with the peashooter. Getting rid of the lights so we can have some darkness and some sanity.

But, it depends whether students feel deeply insecure, and I think they do. Usually what happens when jobs get harder to get is students get conservative and just want a job qualification? They certainly don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to develop revolutionary ideas. They just want to know that they won’t starve to death.

Purplewashing & Eco-Centrism

The sexual revolution has not begun. We are still in the prodromal stages. There’s going to be a big struggle and we don’t even know quite what the struggle is going to be about because we haven’t finished or arrived at any consensus about what the problem actually is, of whether it’s possible for men and women to. Treat each other decently. It doesn’t look possible. You know if you think that two women a week in this country are killed by their partner. You’ve got to think of something terribly wrong, but of course if you can say to somebody get ****** and mean it as an insult, then obviously your head’s in a bad place where ******* is concerned so. How can we get the sadism out of it? How can we become potent rather than vicious? Do we know how to do this? Have we even begun to figure out? Why we all we seem to be able to do to each other is hurt each other. I never wanted equality. I think it’s a meaningless idea and nonsensical idea. I certainly don’t want the life of of an organization, man. I don’t want the life of a corporate lawyer or a bond trader or or. Even a diplomat or a parliamentarian, because you’re simply recycling the same injustice and misery. So what I look forward to is a complete reversal of priorities so that the things we take for granted. As being trifling like housekeeping become major. For example. We need to housekeep this planet. We need to really bring in principles of domestic economy that we’re not behaving in a way which is depleting the resources of the planet, reducing its biodiversity, which is our real inheritance. Everything else is nonsense. All the great houses and silliness, even the works of art, are nothing compared to biodiversity. But in order for that to become so important that people will accept a fall in their standard of living and and live in a more frugal and or stay away, we’ve really got to have a completely different mindset. Consumerism’s got to be as no no as drinking and driving.

Purplewashing & Anti-Imperialism

Audience question: In the 47 years since you wrote the female unit, there’s been an massively increased rate of women’s participation in all facets of Western developed world. I heard you mentioning Theresa May in less than generous terms earlier, and my partner is absolutely certain, as is my older sister. That Hillary Clinton lost the election not because she was a bad candidate, but because she was a woman. So my question is a serious question, and it gives you the opportunity. To look back over the last 47 years and tell us what you think has has really changed for women and what hasn’t changed for women in that? Period.

Germaine Greer: Look, it’s a huge question, but let me simplify it in a way what everybody has accepted is the idea of equality. Feminism that women should earn the money that men, and this, they’re hypnotised by this question. And as far as I’m concerned, equality is a profoundly conservative aim. It will change nothing. We now live in a world where war is made against civilian populations, whereas women and children who are the principal. Casualties in places like Syria, whether they’re being driven ahead of the storm or whether they’re in collapsing buildings or bombed schools, or all the rest. That war is now completely made of the rich with their extraordinary killing machines destroying the poor who had no comeback. And if women women want to be in the army, women want to be in government. Women want to be in the corporate world. They won’t get to the top unless they are already organization people. Mrs. Thatcher is the most warlike Prime Minister the English have ever had and she is guilty and will remain guilty of a massive war crime which she got away with. And more crimes are being committed every day by us, but we don’t end up in court. Our people end up in court and we can beat the crap out of. Women are drawing level with men in this profoundly destructive. World that we. Even and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the wrong way. We are getting nowhere and to say we’re going to have a female Prime Minister upon the fact that you should be aware that Theresa May got this job because whoever has it will never rule the country again. That’s a traditional poisoned chalice. But this is that. Tried to poison chalice as well. They got her to do their dirty work and then she done it. They strung her out like a a piece of trash. She left the white. She left Downing St. in tears. She must be the only Prime Minister who has ever reduced to that. As far as. I’m concerned right now we’re getting nowhere. If we’re going to change things. I think we’re going to have to start creating a women’s policy that is strong, that has its own ways of operating that makes contact with civilians in places like Syria that actually begins to show a network that challenges the right of destructive. Everything has to change, but we knew that at the beginning, if it if what happens when women join the army is that they discover that the army is no place for a sane human being, and we can move on from there. But right now. Looking distinctly grim.

Patriarchy & Anarchist Revolution

Audience question: I’d like to. Ask Germain Greer whether she thinks that there’s a relationship between the way sexuality and the relationship between men and women has evolved, namely that masculinity is based on dominance over women, power over women. Ultimately, violence over women, and the fact that our civilization has been one. In which men have always driven to have power over other men, and this has led again to violent men.

Greer: I think the whole problem is that we all realise one way or another where we’ve been ruled by force and the world has been ruled by force as long as anyone can remember and if we are on the brink of a revolution. And it’s that or dead. Then it must be that the only revolution which will exchange the rule of force for something else for a more intricate and sophisticated social order built on some much more complicated interaction of faculties and people.

Primary School Teachers Funding

It’s really difficult to think of a teacher these days who hasn’t been exposed to feminism and hasn’t absorbed some part of the feminist agenda. There are working women for a start. They’re working in an industry that has been controlled historically by men and also. An industry in which the female dominated part of the profession is very much. Inferior to the male dominated? Well, there’s almost no part of teaching. Now that’s male dominated. But if you think that. The primary school and preparatory school teachers are paid much less than teachers higher up the scale. This has got something to do with the fact that it’s seen as a female domain and. I I would hope that teachers are beginning to see that that’s ridiculous, because elementary schooling is what everything else is based on. Get that right, get children used to learning and understanding that they’re stuck to be found out out there. And it’s fun doing it. Once you’ve done that. It’s it’s plain sailing, but one has. To be done.

Free Education

Customers and clients students come to university to buy something. What they’re buying is knowledge, the commodification of knowledge. God, what a disgusting idea that is. It’s horrible, isn’t it? If it if it means anything good, it means that as. A client or a customer? A student has a right to demand a certain level of service, and I would say that in many places where I have taught students did not get that level of service they they were taught in a way that was. Palpably uninterested in them, because the people who taught them were busy working on their book or their whatever. And you went and knocked on their door and you were interrupting their. Train of thought. And you were not a part of their train of thought. You’re an inconvenience I taught at the university where, for example, the the person who’d been hired to teach the 18^th century literature wouldn’t teacher because he was writing a book. And he said it was too difficult to students, couldn’t do the 18^th century. It required too much of them. So I said OK, I’ll teach it. Typical woman. I’ll do it. And then even more stupid, I said. I’m going to. Do 2 lectures a week instead of one. That means 20 lectures instead of 10 and and I want you to come to them. And I set out a hole. Map of the 18^th century from the beginning to the end, and we had a great time doing it and they were roaming off all over the place reading spend Syrian stanzas and Ossian and I talk Mystics and madmen, which was Claire and. And. Blake and Christopher smart. It’s only one hour to teach 3 amazing lunatics. And the kids had a grand time with it and did very well in the exams. And there’s none of that goes on. Well, if that means now, you know that students can go and say I’m not going to go to lectures if all I’m gonna get is a lecture that was written 10 years ago, that he’s just reading his old notes and and doesn’t make eye contact with anybody, he doesn’t understand where anybody’s coming from. This is not good enough. If that’s what it means. But I very much doubt that it does mean that.

Domestic Labor, Emotional Labor & Sorrow

When The Female Eunuch was written. All I could think of was that I was going to see it on the remainder tables in Great Russell St. as I went past on my way to the British Museum to study and then I would have embarrassed myself and everybody else because the book would be a total flop and in fact it really was a total flop because it was very badly. Published in England. But when the Americans got hold of it and the rest is history.

I haven’t changed my mind about anything in the book. I would. I would change the emphasis now. I mean, when I was a 30 year old heterosexual, sexually active woman who was still negotiating the Rapids of sexual encounters and all that sort of thing. So. I was more caught up in things about appearance and and the dynamic of male female interaction and so forth. Then I would be now.

I mean now I wrote another book called The Whole Woman, which deals with other things that I would probably think now are more important, like women’s sorrow, woman’s grief and what it’s like to be steadily rejected by the people you’ve spent your whole life loving and serving, which is the fate of most elderly women. You know, I go into these facilities where old ladies are left to gently rot. And you sometimes wonder if what they’re shouting is Fuck! They’re so angry because they gave it their best shot and they got dumped.

Civility Politics

The one thing I really don’t want the archives to be is self justification. You can make whatever judgment you want of the way I’ve behaved once I am no longer here, I am yours to reinterpret and I can’t control that and I don’t want to control it. I am... I’m an old-fashioned libertarian, which means that I’m actually an anarchist. I do not believe in censorship of any kind. And that includes pornography and all the rest, which makes us come up against other feminists in this regard. But we have been controlled by having our lips taped shut for generations. Why would I say tape somebody else's mouth shut? I want to hear your reality, I’ll fight it if I must, but I won’t ban it and I won’t silence you. And I won’t want a safe place where I can say I can avoid being offended. I’m offended every day. The Sun newspaper ascends me every day. The Guardian ascends me even more. Because it is the world’s most hypocritical of newspapers, it is the Sainsbury’s of newspaper. It is just like all the. Other newspapers that it pretends that it’s something different and that really gets up my nerves, so I’m prepared, I mean. I think let me tell you why I don’t want to explain. I will never write an autobiography. My assistant keeps saying because occasionally I give her a little tidbit to keep her going. And she will say, oh, you have to write a book, you have to write a book. And I say it. No, the autobiography won’t be written. I will never write it. And I was really upset for Doris Lessing. Great writer, Nobel Prize winner. And her reaction when she was told. She said. Ohh. God. And I know that’s turning up like ohh God, you give me the one. Prize I didn’t want. That’s life, but she perpetuated to people who started to pressure her about her biography. She capitulated by writing one. Don’t do it. A biography is always self justifying. You are. Explaining yourself and in a way I I suppose I do subscribe to that notion that says never, apologize, never explain. Do what it is you have to do and hope that eventually someone will understand why you did it that way. But don’t ask pardon and don’t excuse yourself. And if you’ve got it wrong. Now some of you may know, for example, that one day the Guardian rang me up and said Steve Owens just been killed by a by a Stingray. And are you upset? And I said. No. And they said, are you surprised? And I said no. And they were absented they. Said why aren’t you? Surprised and upset. And I said because he. Had it coming. So I tried to explain that he treated animals without respect that he created ridiculous fantasies about them having. Wicked intentions being vicious and cruel, and that he was leading. Understanding of the natural world into an impasse, a ridiculous impasse and I was kind of relieved, really, that the stairways had been made to do the job. And the result of that was a huge draw full of hate mail, which I think perhaps the archivists haven’t found, but it was very interesting because people would come up to me in the street. They can’t come up, make a I think you were quite right about Steve. Which and now I realise there’s more than one kind of censorship that people were afraid to say, that he was an embarrassment. And then of course, after at least two months, academe tiptoed into the limelight and said, Ohh, we tend to think that maybe. He had in some way and then managed to say what I’d said two months before in words of one syllable, they managed to obfuscate in words of 25 syllables. But it came to the same thing in the end, and I think it’s true to say that that way of dealing with native Australia, Natural Australia is no longer acceptable, that we no longer fantasise about the intentions of animals who were harassing and and corralling and sentencing to death in. Dreadful ways. The reason for the archives there is not to give a picture of me, but to try and give a picture of the moment. Because it would be encapsulated in all kinds of ways, it would have been described as the various cliches and people would have no way of knowing what it actually felt like at the time. And when people write, when a mother writes a letter to me telling me what a ****. My daughter has become because of my writing. That itself is interesting. It’s interesting that the mother would be so disloyal to her own daughter, but then my job is to write back to her and say, is it any surprise to you? That your daughter behaves the way she does when you’re prepared to write to a total stranger in these terms. Now those letters will turn up in time. The important thing about them. I mean there, I know. But the important thing about them is not that I wrote them. That’s not the issue about them. What is really important about them is the two different ways of thinking about things that are coming into sharp. Conflict. At this point, there are all kinds of letters like that. The letters from ordinary people are more important to me than the letters from celebrities, of which there are very few, in fact.

A Critique of Greer’s Bad Takes

Chrisiousity: Greer is a turf, a trans exclusionary radical feminist. She is a particularly vulgar and dehumanizing one at that, yet some turfs may couch their rhetoric and platitudes about not hating trans people. Just, I don’t know, loving women or care. I I don’t know. Some such thing, but that is not Greer. She’ll talk about men cutting their ***** off. And if you listen to her rhetoric, you’ll see soon enough that it’s not just hateful, but it kind of makes no sense. Like, where is she coming from? Sometimes she seems to say that trans women are men who are willing to take one for the team in a pretty extreme way. That is, that they are willing to undergo surgical transformation. To erase women to phase them out somehow and keep them out of the halls of power by usurping them or. Or or maybe not. Maybe is it that they desire female subjugation? It’s a sex thing, or maybe that they do think they are women, but only because women are to them a non gender. Oh, wait, no, no, it’s actually, it’s just that it isn’t fair for people who have lived as a man. Enjoyed some degree of male privilege to then transition because reasons. Honestly, it’s rather hard to make heads or tails of these many contradictory ideas, which seem more like throwing **** at the wall and seeing what sticks than anything else. But then prejudice is never about logic, and it shows isn’t about considering what the other is going through an empathic person. I’d say that yes, a transgender woman might get some male privilege points prior to their transition or prior to coming out. But at what cost? How much psychic pain, dysmorphia and stigma from society might they have to deal with? And who the hell would want that? I’ll take sis woman any day, regardless of its problems. Better to have to try to convince people of my worth as a woman than have to convince them that I am 1. And in any case, what does fair have to do with anything? It’s not fair. You are a woman. What? And if you’re wondering what she has to say. About trans men. Not a whole hell of a lot.

She has also come out against things like abortion and contraception because there are male interventions and reproduction, but also she considered IVF and only decided against it because she thought she was too old. So I guess that intervention is OK. She says speaking out against FGM (female genital mutilation) is an attack on cultural identity and all these things make no sense in terms of her overall message of taking control of one’s sexuality as a woman.

Now let’s talk about her book about how pretty boys are, shall we? Yay. Ohh. The beautiful boy featured a lot of pictures of teenage boys and was intended to advance women’s reclamation of their capacity for and write to visual pleasure, which is creepy. OK, let’s not split air. Freaking creepy. Also creepy was that she used the picture of actor Bjorn Anderson from when he was 15 and he didn’t want her to. She cared nothing for exploiting his image, bringing up difficult memories that he had, or exploiting him for his looks, using him as an object of. Fetishistic visual pleasure against his consent, she. Didn’t give a. Get this from a woman who said that nature had gotten revenge on Steve Irwin on the occasion of his death because he exploited nature in his documentaries. So you know, again, sometimes it’s OK to exploit things and sometimes it’s not. And it seems to depend on what’s best for career. The book also has a quasi defense of sex tourism, which is beyond any kind of pale in my it’s just just no, just no. Just ******* no for ***** sake. No.

But look, let’s face facts. This crap is all because she’s a prejudice asshole with a pronounced lack of empathy. She’s just a smarter, better educated brand of shit-lord, a reactionary troll with an academic pedigree. Has that come across yet? Has anyone have I made that clear that this is a pattern? There is nothing here that I’m talking about that’s not pretty well known. Public record stuff, a lot of it you could probably get off of Wikipedia and yet, and yet there are people who think we need to keep platforming her and naming her Australian of the year and shit.

And so this leads me to the current uproar around her comments on rape. Look, she said awful things about rape, sexual assault, and the me too movement before, for instance, calling women victimized by Harvey Weinstein. Career rape peas and whatnot. But let’s talk about. The specific things that she said, and these have been widely reported, but in no particular order and different outlets have reported different things. So from a recent speech that she gave. So I’m just going to sort of read through different quotes that have been reported in different places, and then we’ll talk about it.

I want to turn the discourse about rape upside down. We are not getting anywhere approaching it down the tunnel of history, centuries of writing and thinking about rape as inflicted by men on women have got us nowhere. Pipe should be viewed as a log. Easy, careless and insensitive act.

OK.

Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal rights, he is ****** her. It will never end up in a court of law. Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime and some rapes are, think about it as. Nonconsensual. That is bad sex, she says that the penalty could be 200 hours of community service. If we’re going to, say, trust us, believe us, if we do say that our accusations should stand as evidence, then we have to reduce the tariff for rape. She also thinks, though, that the punishment could be an R tattooed on the rapists hand, arm or preferably cheek bad sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love. Most rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever. Ever. We are told that it’s a sexually violent crime, an expert like Quentin Tarantino will tell us that when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violence and throwing them down. It’s one of the most violent crimes in the world, bullshit Tarantino group says the cultures, ideas about rape and make the experience more traumatic for women than it needs to be. Society wants women to believe that rape will destroy them. We haven’t been destroyed. We’ve been bloody annoyed is what we’ve been.

She cites a study that found that:

70% of rape victims suffer post traumatic stress disorder, compared with 20% of conflict veterans. What the hell are you saying something that leaves no sign, no injury, no nothing is more damaging to a woman than seeing your best friend blown up by an IED is to a veteran. She also thinks that some. Rapes are violent and in those cases the perpetrator should be punished more harshly. But it should be about the violence.

She thinks that instead of long trials and debates about what happened behind closed doors, the idea is reducing the punishment for rape but make it easier for women to get their claims through.

It is moments like these I could hear the feminists screaming at me. You’re trivializing. Great. Well, I’ll tell you what you might want to believe that the penis is a lethal weapon and that all women live in fear of that lethal weapon. Well, that’s ********. It’s not true. We don’t live in terror of the penis. A man can’t kill you with his penis.

And then she brought up her own personal experience again as a way of dissuading people from criticizing her and saying things like,

well, you know, the man that wrote her said she should say **** me, **** me a dozen times. I don’t think I said it, but maybe I did. How would that look on my mobile phone in court? Saying **** me.

Alright, so I think that’s enough for us to tear apart. This is, you know, again not the only time, she said. The inflammatory things about rape, but reading through these quotes, you know, I find myself rather agreeing with one attendee to the talk who said it appears she’s making **** up as she goes along, and that seems to be exactly what she’s doing. Again. Just like with her quote, analysis of trans and non binary people. Which I think is utter ********. She’s just saying it. It’s just all nonsense, every bit of it. It’s like. All right. So for instance, you could say, oh, rape and sexual assault are still a problem and we haven’t fixed it yet, even though we’ve been trying to. Well, yeah. I mean, isn’t that exactly like every other social problem we’re dealing with? Like, do we just give up? Let’s not talk about poverty. More obviously, we’ve talked about it before and done things before and there are still poor people, so let’s never worry about it again, let’s not talk. About racism anymore, racism has been a problem. Apparently we’re just ******. Like, that’s not how these things work. Also, her absurdity that women aren’t afraid of penises. Yeah, we never said we were. We’re not afraid of the penis. We’re we don’t want to be violated against our consent. We don’t want other people taking our bodily autonomy away from us. We don’t want to be forced to do sexual things we don’t want to do. We want to be able to say no. You know, that’s what we want. That’s what the woman in bed with a man wants. Is he gonna roll over and demand his conjugal rights? Well, maybe that will end up in court. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe it’s a matter of teaching people about the importance of consent. Maybe it’s about getting rid of this idea that anybody has a conjugal right to anybody else’s body? Maybe it’s about tearing that page out of our societies book and not just giving up. Not that any of what she says makes sense. Our accusation will stand on evidence whether or not we’re talking about rape or mugging or any other crime. Testimonial evidence is evidence, the barriers that we talk about aren’t necessarily barriers to the legal process so much as the ways that this is being handled, the rape kits that are allowed to languish, these sexist notions that women just run around lying about rape and sexual assault all the time, that’s what we have to tackle. That’s what we have to attack. That’s the bullshit that we have to get through. To call non consensual sex bad sex. It’s not fucking sex, it’s rape and. And let’s not ******* Greer. ******* Greer, alright? Or not. I don’t care if there’s tenderness or if somebody says “Ohh I love you” while they rape me. I care about the consent. That’s what we’re talking about. And you know, sometimes she’s saying that women can just brush off rape like it’s yesterday’s bad news. Like an episode of Bad Weather. But then she talks about court proceedings as if they are going to be so incredibly traumatic. We can’t expect women to go through them. This is nonsense. It makes no. Sense, look, rape sucks. Nobody wants to be raped and beaten if you can. If you had to choose between the two, you would not want to take these savage beating as well as the rape, but the ideally, those aren’t your choices. You know the the choices are just not to be raped or beaten, right? And that should that horrible thing happen to you. You should be able to go to the law enforcement and not have to deal with. Tears of sexism and denial that other people would not face in similar he said she said kinds of crimes like mugging, right? That’s the whole point. Really, a lot of this is exactly the same kind of garbage argument that you get from rabid MRA’s. You know her ‘bad sex’ is just bringing up thunderfoot videos to me, it’s all this. It’s all crap. It’s not based in anything. She outright sees that the studies don’t agree with her, that rape is, in fact, traumatic. People. Yeah, it’s true that Once Upon a time, rape was considered more of a crime of property. That is to say, one man harmed or tainted another man’s property, more so than it was considered a crime against the woman herself. And that sucks. And that has already, I think, changed a great deal in our culture. And needs to change more. We need to confront these ideas of rape victims being considered tainted or damaged goods. Right, so that’s fine. And we can do that and it’s gonna take a while and it’s not going to be easy. And there’s going to be fighting, but just... her acting like Quentin Tarantino is the one that pushes. It’s pushing this. Ohh yeah. Quentin Tarantino. He he’s the world’s leading rape expert. He’s he’s the one everybody goes to. Are you fucking kidding me? Just shut up, girl, and I’m done. Alright, I’m. I’m done.