|
09/01/05
On Germaine Greer
Sunday
Times
The chattering classes are aghast. Whatever
made her do it? Why, oh why, is Germaine Greer demeaning herself as a feminist
heroine by appearing on that ghastly reality show Celebrity Big Brother, with a
bunch of contestants whose brains, my dear, must have the cutting edge of a
rotten banana?
One critic confessed to being left shaken at
the “shock horror” appearance last week of the 65-year-old professor of
English literature and author of The Female Eunuch amid the likes of Brigitte
Nielsen, the Amazonian former wife of Sylvester Stallone, the model Caprice and
John McCririck, the racing pundit.
Flabbergasted misses the point. The most
pertinent question is why Greer didn’t opt for the rival series I’m a
Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, whose jungle camp is based near her
Australian property in Queensland. There, in her native clime, she could
demonstrate her extensive knowledge of plants, cooking, the rainforest and
snakes.
But isn’t her appearance on Big Brother’s
18-day orgy of bad taste a touch hypocritical? After all, Greer has written: “Watching
Big Brother is about as dignified as looking through the keyhole in your teenage
child’s bedroom door.” She added: “Reality TV is not the end of
civilisation as we know it; it is civilisation as we know it.”
Children are a burden, she wrote in The Female Eunuch.
A few years later, she declared they were a joy.
No one who has studied Greer’s form would
hold her to that. She has spent the past 40 years doing the opposite of what was
expected of her, no matter how many U-turns it might entail. Children are a
burden, she wrote in The Female Eunuch. A few years later, she declared they
were a joy. Sex is a weapon in the female struggle against oppression, she
asserted. Later she retracted, saying women might be better off without it.
The former stunner — who counts among her
lovers George Best, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Aitken, Warren Beatty
(whom she apparently found disappointing) and the late John Peel (who claimed
she forced him to have sex) — now advocates celibacy.
By offering Greer large sums of money to enter
the Big Brother house, the producers evidently expect her to have the same
galvanising effect as Janet Street-Porter in the recent I’m a Celebrity.
She might, with luck, undergo a psychological
meltdown like Vanessa Feltz, the journalist. But the hope is she will unleash
some of her lethal verbal invective. She called Victoria Beckham “a starved
carnivore” and described the writer of her unauthorised biography as “flesh-
eating bacteria”. In a broadside addressed to Tony Blair after Cherie suffered
a miscarriage, she said: “She’s 47 years old, she doesn’t practise
contraception because she’s a Catholic — stay off her.”
Greer reserved her most venomous put-down for
Suzanne Moore, her fellow columnist on The Guardian, after the latter commented
on an inaccurate report that Greer had had a hysterectomy at 25. Greer accused
her of having “hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three
inches of fat cleavage”.
Still, squandering such ammunition on C-list
celebrities ranks with mauling dead sheep. What is really in it for her? Money
is important: Greer always demands top rate so she can finance rainforest
rehabilitation on her Australian estate, although this time her chosen charity
is Buglife, the invertebrate conservation trust.
She is also an unashamed exhibitionist. Her
late-night performances on Newsnight Review have failed to reach the masses.
Fortunately, her penchant for grabbing the headlines has allowed her to
transcend such restricted forums. Some of her neighbours in Essex choked when
she called on them to embrace an expansion of Stansted airport. There was also
an outcry and accusations of encouraging paedophilia when she confessed that she
loved looking at pictures of “ravishing” young boys.
Sales of her book The Boy soared.
By coincidence, just as a heated national
debate began on crime and trespass in the countryside in 2000, she became
front-page news when she was held hostage in her home by a teenage student who
had become obsessed with her, crying “Mummy, Mummy” until the police
arrived.
On another occasion, she invited homeless
people to stay in her remote farmhouse, only for her private life to be exposed
by a tabloid news reporter posing as a tramp.
The Big Brother format encourages guests to
strip off and in this department, too, she has not been reticent. She has
exposed herself, photographically in counter-culture periodicals such as Oz and
Suck, and in memoirs such as her 1990 book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.
Big Brother’s producers must have been delighted when she admitted to
sleeping in the nude, adding: “It’s going to be hard to remember to cover my
bits.” She will doubtless be glad to repeat her well-chronicled experiences of
lesbian sex, rape, abortion, infertility and menopause.
Which Germaine Greer will emerge when the layers are peeled away? The
harridan with a viperish tongue? (“She is the rudest woman and has no social
graces at all,” says a commissioning editor.) Or the captivating university
lecturer? (One of her former students recalls: “She always filled the lecture
hall. She was rigorous, a perfect teacher who never dumbed down but remained
accessible and amusing.”)
She was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1939. Her father, once a dapper
sales rep for The Adelaide Advertiser, returned from the war so aged that his
wife failed to recognise him. He was withdrawn and his daughter despised him as
“a lounge lizard, a line-shooter, a jerk”. She dismissed her abusive mother
as “a woman who has done nothing but lie on beaches for 70 years”.
She began hatching plans to escape at the age of 12. At the Star of the Sea
convent, she was a tall and precocious girl who took the male parts in school
plays. “We were all sex-struck,” she said, “and that’s the nuns’ fault
entirely.”
By the age of 18 she was at Melbourne University, well known for carrying a
bag of coloured condoms. However, she was raped “by just the sort of boy my
mother would have liked me to marry”.
Moving to Sydney to teach, she joined a bohemian,
free-love group before deciding to study for an MA at Sydney University
Moving to Sydney to teach, she joined a bohemian, free-love group before
deciding to study for an MA at Sydney University, where Clive James was a
contemporary. In his memoirs he describes a thinly disguised Greer character as
striding forth “like a Homeric goddess” to deflower him. He escaped and hid
behind a tree.
Thanks to a Commonwealth scholarship, Greer arrived at Newnham College,
Cambridge, in 1964 to do a doctorate on Shakespeare’s comedies. She did not
find English men sexy, proclaiming them all “queer or kinky”. She told a
friend: “You know what the last pom (I went to bed with) said to me? ‘Let’s
pretend you’re dead’.”
Their marriage lasted three weeks, after which du Feu posed naked for Cosmopolitan.
At Cambridge she caused a stir by turning up to receive her PhD in a
microskirt and black stockings. Soon after, she married Paul du Feu, a building
worker with an English degree. Their marriage lasted three weeks, after which du
Feu posed naked for Cosmopolitan.
Greer went to teach at Warwick University and hit the jackpot in 1970 with
The Female Eunuch, which argued that marriage was slavery. It sold 1m copies.
With the royalties she bought a cottage in Tuscany and a five-storey house in
Notting Hill, London, that became a refuge for waifs and strays.
In her 1984 book, Sex and Destiny, she depicted western society as
anti-children, anti-family and sex-obsessed. Seven years later she charted her
menopause in The Change, which irritated some feminists by claiming sex was not
essential for older women.
For all her notoriety, she is a highly respected authority on 17th-century
literature and has always inspired affection — surprisingly, more among the
men she rails against than women.
Once she gave a lecture at Oxford, arguing that the female orgasm was not
only a facet of gender tyranny but was also vastly overrated. A male student
raised his hand. “About that overrated orgasm,” he drawled. “Won’t you
give a Southern boy another chance?” The speaker was a young Rhodes scholar
called Bill Clinton.
|