I will not repeat information about her which you can find on Wikipaedia. But, briefly for those who have never heard of her ... Greer was one of the great names of Feminism from the 1960s onwards. Intelligent and articulate and academic, she was a name to conjure with ... and be threatened by.
Not now. She's gone off message. Or rather, 'Feminism' has itself mutated into positions which she never held, has never accepted, and sees no reason not to repudiate. As well as The Female Eunuch, the work by which she made her name, a book I don't think you will regret giving time to is her The Whole Woman.
Don't get me wrong. I am not parading Greer before you as some Victorian Convert to Righteousness. Reading her will not reinforce all your own convictions about things with regard to which you have strong feelings. For example, she has joined no anti-abortion organisation. She waves no pro-life banner. But read what she writes about Abortion ... and a lot of other things ... in TWW, and you'll see what a lot of acute good sense she talks about the Abortion industry as a way in which men exploit, demean, and make money out of women. I rather like her angry rhetoric about "the gynecological abattoir". (Incidentally, she praised the initiative of Cardinal Winning to give women in Scotland a genuine alternative to Abortion.)
Political Correctness throughout the Western World is particularly preoccupied at the moment with 'Transgender People'. And Dr Greer has maintained the simple and obvious position that a man, even if rendered incomplete and filled with female hormones, is not a woman. Greer is willing to use female pronouns for such an individual out of courtesy; she does not desire to prevent them from having the thing done to them; but she doesn't see why she should be forced to say that Black is White. She campaigned against the election of a 'transwoman' to be a Fellow of her College in Cambridge on the grounds that the Statutes prescribe that Fellows must be women ... and that the fellowship candidate wasn't. Total universal uproar. From being a Feminist Icon, transformation into Major Hate Figure.
Among us cispontines (go on ... admit that the term is rather neat), Feminism is currently riven. Our Green Party, and our Women's Equality Party, are both divided about whether they (exempli gratia) concede the right of women to have access to safe places from which penile humans are excluded; or whether a human who declares that he is a woman must be excluded from nowhere.
This does make life less drab. In The Times, most Saturdays, there is a column by a 'feminist' called Janyce Turner. Time was, when you would have assumed that you, reader, and I, disagreed with her. But her arguments and rhetoric about trans- and cis- are admirable.
I hate to criticise my superiors. But I rather wonder whether the Lowerarchy may have made a strategic error. Led by our Father Below, they may have thought that Gender Self Identification would be their master (er!) stroke.
But have they gone just that bit too far down the path of demanding submission to manifest contradictions?
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Professor Greer is rather well thought of in this household precisely because of her stance on the 'transgender' nonsense. As she plaintively remarked, in the matter of men who thought they were really women, "How do they KNOW?!" Of course, it sounded much more striking in 'Strine....
What a mad world. I don't know if I am allowed to link to the BBC here, but yesterday on the train I stumbled across this long article, and found it mesmerising, in the manner of a horror film, (well I could not get to the end as it need drastic editing). It paints a world we (you dear Father and your Readers) don't know, where people are pushed by peer-pressure into sexual activity, and then told with whom they may or may not act. It has become a mechanical social function, a combination of political solidarity and sexual power – where love, lust and even gratification seem to have been totally excluded as selfish, as hate-crimes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385
The poor young, stumbling along trying to make sense of life. They need all our prayers.
I don't have very much sympathy for feminists, in general, although I would concede that Greer seems less extreme than many of them. However, this transgender insanity is a logical offshoot of the, also insane, feminist agenda that men and women are equal, as in effectively the same. It seems unsurprising to me that equality in acts would lead some to conclude with equality in being.
I recall an article many years ago which quoted one of the Australian nuns who had educated Germaine Greer. She had very fond memories of her and referred to her as "that dear girl".
The silly cow didn't like Tolkien. That says it all.
AvB.
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