On Germaine Greer

09/01/05

On Germaine Greer

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.”

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, 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’.”

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.