The Whole Woman: Germaine Greer

[poliphilo]

Greer is furious at the world as it is- and with good reason. She is as much contrarian as feminist. There's not a received opinion she isn't itching to refute, not a party line she doesn't want to scuff. Be careful, you right-thinking liberals, of assuming she's your ally; she doesn't always think what you think she's going to think. She takes an almighty swipe at transsexuals, she puts the case for female genital mutilation. Her fury at the way women are treated by the system is almost matched by her exasperation at women for being such saps. 

Comments

Re: 1800

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like her. She makes me think. I haven't read The Boy but I might if it comes my way.

Re: 1800

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One of the points she makes in the book is that male sexuality is very different from female sexuality- less aggressive, less fixated on "scoring", less dangerous. I presume she'd deploy arguments along those lines in her defence.

Re: 1800

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think Greer would argue that male sexuality and female sexuality were very different. That's what she says in The Whole Sexuality, anyway.

Yeah, life's not fair...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

She is ignorant and casually vicious. She doesn't just take a "swipe" in print: she campaigned vociferously to get one of her colleagues sacked for being trans. Find that refreshing if you like. Ditto the Norman Bates comparisons. Do you really find them thought-provoking, rather than hate-speech a la EDL? Really?

Do you know any women with AIS? Does she? If you are interested, read this page, and especially the links at the bottom. Like most charlatans, she isn't half as impressive when she's confronted with people who actually know something about the subject.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I didn't say I agreed with her. Nor did I use the word "refreshing".

"Pantomime Dames" is one chapter/essay in a book that contains 30. I agree with much of the rest.

I hadn't heard of AIS before.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I find that her point about everyone who is not a perfectly masculine male being defaulted to female is a thought provoking one. Thus making "female" a kind of dustbin gender that has to accept anyone who doesn't fit the male ideal.

However, on the whole these days I find myself disagreeing with Greer more than I agree with her. Though I did like her book about the menopause. The Change was so dismal that in a strange way, it was immensely cheering.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I find that her point about everyone who is not a perfectly masculine male being defaulted to female is a thought provoking one. Thus making "female" a kind of dustbin gender that has to accept anyone who doesn't fit the male ideal.

I think many feminists (myself included) would accept that. The move from that commonplace observation about the modus operandi of patriarchy to setting oneself up as kind of judge and jury at the gates of womanhood - in many respects simply mirroring the very practices one is supposedly objecting to - is vile even on paper, but much more so when she carries it into the real world in order to persecute women, as she has done.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Sh might be a reasonable sociologist and I do agree that many woman are saps, who collude with their own oppression and objectification. But she's not much of a biologist and when she tries to be, she's so wrong. She doesn't understand that there is a whole host of intersex conditions where it is hard to guess how a child might gender identify when older, so it is a mistake to assign a gender and surgically enforce it before the child is old enough to have an opinion. She's still thinking simplistically, in a binary way, and she still makes the error of thinking that chromosomes are the sole definer of sex.

I don't know why she feels the need to be so dogmatic about trans sex people, who can be who the hell they want to be, an it harm none. It certainly shouldn't make any difference to her. Her transphobia makes a major hole in Greer's credibility.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There's a whole section of feminist thought that's extremely transphobic. I remember being given a book to read in the 80s called The Transsexual Empire- or something along those lines- which was basically going "Help, the transwomen are taking over the world!" I thought it was slightly over the top.

I reckon Greer is dogmatic because being dogmatic gets you noticed. She's in a long line of populist controversialists. If she wrote balanced, scholarly essays nobody- except fellow specialists- would read her.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I quite agree with your second paragraph. That is exactly why she's a charlatan - being noticed is more important to her than integrity (moral or intellectual).

The Transsexual Empire is notorious for many things, not least its complete erasure of trans men.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'd been dealing- as a priest- with a trans woman who had problems with self harming and my then wife's lesbian girlfriend gave me a copy of Transsexual Empire
as an unsolicited gift. I've no idea why.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I was involved in the campaign against that appalling book.

Oh suuuure! We're a tiny minority and we're aiming to take over womanhood and the world while we're at it, all in cahoots with teh evil pshrinks and medics.

Paranoid delusion just about sums it up as it sums up so much of this sort of thinking.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There was a fair bit of paranoia in '80s feminism. I was around it quite a bit and- as a member of the oppressing sex- did my best to make allowances.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Come to that, there's a fair bit of paranoia in present day feminism- some people are still claiming we're out to take over the world.

It's a pretty clever trick for approximately 7,000 (in the UK) people most of whom have just vanished into the woodwork.

The real irony is the people who think that I and others like me don't know who we are and should be locked up or in therapy via ECT and receiving a talking cure as we can't possibly be who we claim to be and would get better if we only tried. This misses the small fact that I have been who I am since the age of fifteen and that's over forty years since.

These are the very same people who would scream blue murder if 'the experts' tried to return gay and lesbian people to this manner of treatment.