Women know the difference between rape and bad sex. Surely Germaine Greer does too
It was weird having to explain Germaine Greer, the Morrissey of feminism, to my teenager the other day. My older daughters know who she is – she once made fun of both of their names in a newspaper. One of them, 10 at the time, wrote a letter to the editor to explain that at primary school you were not allowed to bully other people because of their names.
So I’m conflicted about Greer. She was great once. In her pomp, in the 1970s, she was alpha. And the way in which an alpha woman turns into a bully interests me. It seems as if she has never liked other women very much. She attacks them regularly, especially when she wants to get noticed or has a book out.
Her quest is so often misunderstood. The quest is liberation, not equality. This is one way of grasping her lack of solidarity with other women.
She went for me, in another century, as I had answered a question incorrectly about whether she had a hysterectomy or not. Her old mate, the author Richard Neville, claimed she had. An evening newspaper phoned me while I had some fish fingers on the go and I simply didn’t know. Or care, to be frank. The whereabouts of her womb was not much on my mind. She said nasty stuff about me in this paper, including that I wore “fuckme shoes”. People have made stupid jokes to me about “fuck-me socks” ever since. It was a bit “you are not going out of the house dressed like that”. Not the first time I had heard those sentiments, but it was shocking to hear them from this big feminist; a woman who had posed nude and who wrote the feminist classic, The Female Eunuch, which famously showed a naked female torso hanging from a horizontal pole.
“So she is like Kanye,” said my daughter, as I was trying to put her latest remarks about rape into perspective. As we all know, Kanye West gets a little controversial when an album is about to fall from the sky.
This is the context, then, in which Greer’s latest comments must be taken. She has been in the public eye for ever, and knows that suggesting more lenient penalties for rape will create a fuss. This is what she did at the Hay festival last week. As ever, there is a kernel of truth in the midst
of the egotistical blather. She is right to say that the penis is not a weapon. It isn’t. That is why in war, gang rape, ethnic cleansing and domestic abuse, women are penetrated with bayonets, broken bottles and guns.
She is correct to say not all rape is violent, but all rape surely involves the threat of violence – that is why it is not helpful to think of it as “bad sex”.
It appears that Greer is refusing the one thing I would have thought she stands for: female agency. Women absolutely know the difference between being raped and having unsatisfying sex. We know the difference between disappointment and violation. Surely she does, too.
When Greer talks of having got over her own rape, it seems the experiences of other women do not live up to her standard of femaleness. Trans women. Younger women. All other women. We all fail. The only woman who can scale the heights and dine on the lofty buffet of ideals that Greer generates appears to be Greer herself.
It must be lonely up there.
Comedy or conspiracy? The Tracey Ullman fallout
Antisemitism is often spoken about as though it is a particularly hard concept to grasp, and this makes it somehow excusable – it can be done accidentally, or even to the wrong people! When I first had a byline, I used to receive a lot of letters that addressed me as a “Jewish whore”. One of these things was true. It is possible, too, that my mother was Jewish, but as she was adopted I am unsure. But denying my Jewishness is hardly the point: I was always amazed how people would reach for this as the biggest insult. I found myself in an undercurrent of antisemitism that many never encounter, and therefore find hard to believe.
Thanks to the transparency of social media, we can now see this in all its moribund glory. Before I write any more, let’s make the obligatory disclaimers: 1) this is not an article about Israel, and 2) the clever riposte that Judaism is a religion not a race isn’t so clever when atheists and babies were sent to the gas chambers. Antisemites don’t care what Jews believe, or how religious they are. This is about what others believe about them: that they secretly control the world in mysterious ways, even within the Labour party.
Jews apparently oppress everyone with their non-specific conspiracy. So when Tracey Ullman got dressed up as Jeremy Corbyn for a sketch about antisemitism, there were Corbyn supporters who tweeted a lot of racist rubbish. They said the sketch had been written by David Baddiel, a man who singlehandedly bats off abuse every day. It hadn’t.
Corbyn has not been in control of this situation for two years now and the idiots who tweet at Baddiel are as brazen as ever. Corbyn, I guess, is too nice to say these people are thick. I am not. But the many decent people who work towards a Labour victory must be appalled.
Melania must have moved in with the Obamas
Where is Melanie? Trump spelled his own wife’s name wrong in a recent tweet – perhaps not one of the worst things he’s done but, you know, it’s not great. Melania hasn’t been seen in public for more than three weeks. Apparently she has had surgery for a benign kidney condition and is fine. No one believes this, of course, because no one believes anything. Several rumours are emerging: that she has had plastic surgery; that a love-child has emerged and she is preparing to divorce Donald; that the release of the pee-tape is imminent. But my favourite is that she is secretly living with the Obamas, while Trump is preparing to marry Ivanka.
'So she is like Kanye,' said my daughter