Icon or false idol?
This week a 19-year-old student succeeded in doing what people have been trying to do for the last 30 years; she allegedly bound and gagged Germaine Greer. National newspapers have gone crazy, fascinated by the passionate reactions this 61-year-old academic can evoke. Greer occupies a unique position in the public conscience. A household name since her first book The Female Eunuch became an international bestseller in 1970, she has changed the way men and women think and talk about sex. Yet look beyond the hype and the outrageous witticisms, and you will see a surprisingly vulnerable woman who is a seething mass of contradictions.
At the front of her latest book The Whole Woman, sequel to The Female Eunuch, Greer hits back at the current trend for wishy-washy "lifestyle feminism" and declares that "it is time for women to get angry again." The High Priestess of Feminism has delivered an inspiring call to arms, injecting her traditional themes of sex, money, work and genitalia with a Nineties-style 'girl power' message. It is a book for women who want to take control of their lives, and shows clearly why Greer has such iconic status; she makes feminism fun.
Throughout her career Greer has always gone that one step further than anyone else. Take her legendary debate with Norman Mailer in the 1970s, which was broadcast live to the masses under the title "Town, Bloody Hall". Germaine excelled herself, and Mailer crumbled under the force of her famed acerbic wit. Greer has inhabited many different guises over the last 30 years, leading to claims by her detractors that she is a chameleon, changing her image and opinions more often than Madonna. An expert in courting press attention she has been a vamp, an eccentric spinster and now lives the life of a scholarly farmer who believes that "no sex is better than bad sex" and spends her days baking bread and gardening.
It is undeniable that she has performed a series of academic U-turns over the past three decades. Despite editing and posing for the magazine Suck in 1971, where she invited her female readers to send in labelled pictures of their cunts as part of her campaign for genital equality, she now berates the likes of Courtney Love for flaunting their bodies. Also having denounced motherhood as a "burden" in The Female Eunuch she now praises its importance. Some see these inconsistencies as a natural evolution of her views, as both she and the cause she champions develop and mature over the years. Others use them to undermine the power of her words and status. But Greer, as she has proved, is a true fighter. Over the years she has dealt with abortions, divorce (after three weeks of marriage), and rape, all of which she has shared with her readers. Never one to be easily intimidated she loathes the modern 'victim culture'. She has tackled her critics head on, often winning their grudging respect - if failing to change their opinions. Despite the extremity of some of her views, her hostility towards transsexuals and her traditional anger with mankind epitomised by utterings like the famed "all men hate all women", you find yourself drawn to her, fascinated by this enigmatic woman who is an icon and an iconoclast at the same time.
So who and what is Germaine Greer ? A national treasure or an angry, frustrated, lonely old woman? A raging feminist or a contented farmer? The answer, I think, as with everything lies somewhere in between. The public will only ever see as much of the real Germaine as she allows us to. In the past biographers who have tried to expose her have felt the full scale of her fury. Above all else, as the recent attack has shown, she is a survivor. As she herself says: "If we are revolutionary at all, our first duty is to survive."
27th Apr 2000