Germaine Greer, renegade feminist

On April 30, 1971, a firebrand writer (Germaine Greer), activist (Jacqueline Ceballos), literary critic (Diana Trilling), leader of the lesbian separation movement (Jill Johnston) and one of the most gifted – but relentlessly sexist – journalists ever (Norman Mailer) assembled for debate.

The result: Town Bloody Hall.

Decades had passed since suffragists fought for women's voting rights. The '60s, which spawned the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam war and a counterculture that took the world by storm, also birthed one of modern history's greatest revolutions: women's liberation ('Women's Lib').

It was in this context that a 'Dialogue on Women's Liberation' was organised in Town Hall, New York City. Greer, Ceballos, Trilling and Johnston, some of the most visible feminists then, were moderated by Mailer. The irony – and outcome – of a feminist panel being anchored by a chauvinist was so delicious, one only need watch Town Bloody Hall, which documents this landmark spectacle, to understand how staid our primetime debates are.
A bloodbath ensued amidst articulate arguments: people stormed in and out, and Mailer got harpooned by everyone from Greer and celebrated writer Susan Sontag to those proclaiming his work as trash. But the show was stolen by Johnston, who followed her delightful takes on the Bible by making out with two girls as Mailer looked on, mortified.

Germaine Greer's takedown of an audience member's question on 'what sex for women would be like after liberation' perfectly sums up the importance of this debate:

Greer: Why do you ask this question?
(Male) audience member (AM): Because I don't find it anywhere in the literature.
Greer: Why would you expect to find it anywhere in the literature? ...You ask me to describe a state of affairs that doesn't exist. It's a perfectly unreasonable demand. What makes you suppose women's liberation has happened?
AM: …I really don't know what women are asking for, and I suppose I want to give it to them.
Greer: You may as well relax. Because whatever it is they're asking for, honey, it's not for you.

***
It's been 45 years since Germaine Greer penned one of the most seminal feminist works in the The Female Eunuch. Before that, she was a figurehead in UK's counterculture movement for her columns in Oz, The Private Eye and Suck magazines. Post her first book, she wrote many others spanning art, memoirs, poetry and the environment, became a columnist with The Guardian, and was an academic at Newnham College and the University of Warwick.
And much like during The Female Eunuch, the 76-year-old has been in the eye of storms over time.

The latest controversy erupted on October 22, when more than 100 students of Cardiff University signed a petition for Greer's scheduled November lecture to be cancelled for her 'transphobic views'. The backdrop: her opinions on transgender women, who, she indicated, in The Whole Woman and subsequent articles and lectures, weren't 'real women'. Debates were ignited on whether the 'bar' on Greer was justified or not.

Greer, currently in Mumbai for the ongoing Tata Literature Live!, sighs when asked about trans* issues, and understandably so – op-eds on her are dropping like loose change.

"I've never said transgender people don't have a right to exist. I just ask: who decides what gender one belongs to? None of us really know, because gender is a notion. If someone who was born male says he's been a woman the whole time, you wonder, 'How do you know what you've been is a woman?' So he'll tell you what he thinks a woman is... that's not an insult. It's questioning."

Greer doesn't just get flak from contemporary feminists for the above. Her views on hormone replacement therapy, in-vitro fertilisation and abortion are confounding. Abortion rights in particular – a foremost demand of Women's Lib – isn't hailed by her as the huge feminist victory we think it to be because, she feels, the medical establishment uses women's reproductive rights to create a profit-industrial complex.

Ask her whether the brickbats she gets points to an intolerance of contrarian views within feminism, and she replies matter-of-factly: "Feminism demanded orthodoxy from day one, but my demand has always been liberation, not equality. I regard equality as conservative and don't envy the life of a man. When I talk about liberation, I'm referring to a state no one knows about. What would it be like if women were completely self-regulated?"

Greer's renegade views also extend to female genital mutilation (FGM), a ritual practiced mostly in North Africa, where young girls' genitalia are mutilated in keeping with the sexist concept of 'female purity'. While Greer supports the elimination of FGM by feminists in their 'home countries', she also warns against 'reinforcing the western notion of cultural superiority'. It's a contradictory stance for someone who fought for a woman's right to express her sexuality and claim ownership of her body.

"Do you know what the commonest operation on newborn girls in the US is?" she counter-questions, when asked about the line between cultural relativism and abuse. "It's the reduction of the clitoris size if it's considered too big. This is common, but you don't get figures on it. It's all so soft."

***

English journalist Helen Lewis once called Germaine Greer 'feminism's arsonist'. It's not hard to see why. Throughout her life, Greer flipped the proverbial bird to those who wanted her to behave a certain way or say what they wanted to hear. Not everything she says resonates, but then, she never cared. Much like the most famous book she penned, she threw restraint under the bus and instead blasted thought-provoking cannonballs at us.

Like now, when she bemoans the collective failure to fight for the rights of elderly women:

"Elderly care is never on the agenda. The UK government wants to cut back welfare in care homes – 80 per cent of this population is female. These women, who've been underpaid their whole lives, are being given crappy care. People want things like equal representation on the boards of companies. I couldn't give a f**k. You won't get on the board of a multinational company unless you're an 'organisation woman'. And the EU passed a law mandating one-third women's representation on the board of international companies....

...Two men to every woman. How's that good?"