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Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
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culture · Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939) · essayist · journalist · professor · screenwriter · actor · women's rights activist · critic · broadcaster · university teacher · anarchist · also Germaine Greer, Rose Blight, Dr. G Terf, Greer
Born 29 January 1939 · Q103591
90 published statements · 0 followers
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14 photos · 1 audio
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Germaine Greer BBC Radio4 Bookclub 5 Aug 2007 b007rdly
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They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.
85%
“It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about. What they are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.”
“They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.”
“Try doing that if you were a 76-year-old woman. They would throw a blanket over you. They would throw you in a waste disposal unit. People are intolerant.”
“They said: ‘I’m so glad that someone is saying what we think. We don’t think that post-operative male transexuals are women but we are not allowed to say so’. I will say so because I don’t believe they are women. That’s not tantamount to calling them names. I also happen to believe that the surgery is unethical.”
“I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,”
“at a certain point, you have to reckon with the fact that no matter how much money you spend, you look your age.”
“are looked at and therefore become self-conscious.”
“There can be no suggestion that feeling tired and disillusioned at 50 might be the appropriate response and that convincing yourself that you are happy and fulfilled might be self-deluding to the point of insanity,”
“an incoherent entity with bits of ceremonial mumbo jumbo.”
“t shave their legs. What it did do was say that if you want to shave, you should be aware that political pressures are behind that desire; just as political pressures force women to diet, and have breast implants, and use anti-ageing creams made from placenta, and generally feel hateful towards their physical selves. Greer”
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“A woman of taste is a pederast—boys rather than men”
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The Guardian: Ugly Sisters review – deft duo riff on Germaine Greer’s encounter with a trans woman
Published “Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis” in The Lancet — cited 14,025 times.
Greer returned to Australia to sell her home and put herself into aged care in Castlemaine, Victoria
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The Guardian: Germaine Greer’s attack on Meghan Markle – so predictable, so old hat, so wrong | Barbara Ellen
The Guardian: ‘Short of imagination’: Germaine Greer scorns Leonardo da Vinci’s art
Published “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole” in The Astrophysical Journal Letters — cited 3,667 times.
The Guardian: Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer by Elizabeth Kleinhenz review – a career of controversy
The Guardian: The Life of Germaine Greer review – an elusive firebrand
The Guardian: Germaine Greer predicted the suffering of women like Ashleigh Raper | Van Badham
The Guardian: Germaine Greer on Q&A: 'Women are encouraged to be frightened' – video
The Guardian: Germaine Greer likens rape victims' trauma to her fear of spiders
As "Do what you want and want what you do
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Said she had changed her mind about calling rape "sexual assault", because most rape (in particular, sex without consent within marriage) is not accompanied by physical violence
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Awarded Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2016).
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The coat, now in the National Museum of Australia, got its own scholarly article, and the photograph by Lord Snowdon is in the National Portrait Gallery in London
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Was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
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Objecting to the use of no-platform policies against Greer and feminists with similar views; signatories included Beatrix Campbell, Mary Beard, Deborah Cameron, Catherine Hall, Liz Kelly, Ruth Lister, and the Southall Bl
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When students at Cardiff University tried unsuccessfully to "no platform" her to stop her from speaking on "Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century"
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Published White Beech: The Rainforest Years about her Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme, her effort to restore the land to its pre-European-settler state
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Said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth"
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Advised Australia's first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, to change the cut of her jackets because she had "a big arse"
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Published “Histone methylation: a dynamic mark in health, disease and inheritance” in Nature Reviews Genetics — cited 1,967 times.
Published “Incorporation of Bevacizumab in the Primary Treatment of Ovarian Cancer” in New England Journal of Medicine — cited 2,113 times.
Published “2011 Compendium of Physical Activities” in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise — cited 5,507 times.
Published “Poisson's ratio and modern materials” in Nature Materials — cited 2,225 times.
Was one of four feminist "Australian legends" (along with Eva Cox, Elizabeth Evatt and Anne Summers) represented on Australian postage stamps
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Published “Early Palliative Care for Patients with Metastatic Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer” in New England Journal of Medicine — cited 6,348 times.
When, in a column about the death of Australian Steve Irwin, star of The Crocodile Hunter, she concluded that the animal world had "finally taken its revenge"
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Supported activists trying to halt the filming in London's Brick Lane of the film Brick Lane (based on Monica Ali's novel of the same name) because, she wrote, "a proto-Bengali writer with a Muslim name" had portraye
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Because, she wrote, it was a squalid "fascist prison camp"
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Published “Stress-Dependent Regulation of FOXO Transcription Factors by the SIRT1 Deacetylase” in Science — cited 2,766 times.
Was a "cultural wasteland"; the Australian prime minister, John Howard, called her remarks patronising and condescending
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Viewed Greer's "entire oeuvre" as autobiographical, a struggle for female agency in the face of the powerlessness of the feminine (her mother) against the backdrop of the missing male hero (her father)
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Awarded Victorian Honour Roll of Women (2001).
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Greer bought 60 hectares (150 acres) of land in Australia for $500,000 at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley, near the Natural Bridge section of Springbrook National Park in South East Queensland
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By Farrar, Straus & Giroux at the instigation of Jennifer Baumgardner, a leading third-wave feminist and editor of the publisher's Feminist Classics series
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In a chapter in The Whole Woman entitled "Pantomime Dames", she wrote: "Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women, men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated
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“driven a coach and horses through our statutes”
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A Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne in 2003, a Doctor of Letters at Anglia Ruskin University in 2003, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Sydney in 2005
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When the script was re-worked and produced by Phil Willmott as Germaine Greer's Lysistrata: The Sex Strike
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By Doubleday, one of seven publishers who bid for the book; Greer was paid an advance of £500,000
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Wrote an episode, "Make Love not War", for the television documentary series Cold War, and the following year sat for a nude photograph by the Australian photographer Polly Borland
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Said it was "disgraceful" that Newnham College had recently granted a fellowship to physicist Rachael Padman, a trans woman who had transitioned in the early 1980s during her PhD
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And in 2001 was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women
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That the crime of rape be replaced by one of sexual assault with varying degrees of seriousness and swifter outcomes
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That she had wanted to become a mother, but was forced to abandon this due to constant miscarriages
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Wrote Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom Greer portrayed as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to the criticism that in her writing she was projecting her relationship w
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"and memory reproaches me for having performed miserably, made any impression or any dent in the argument
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Published “Adaptive histogram equalization and its variations” in Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing — cited 3,430 times.
By Oxford University Press as part of its Past Masters series
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Oxford University Press published her book Shakespeare as part of its Past Masters series, and in 2007 Bloomsbury published her study of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife
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Published “A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures” in Econometrica — cited 2,885 times.
Greer bought The Mills, a Georgian farmhouse on three acres of land in Great Chesterford, Essex, England, where she planted a one-acre wood, which she said made her prouder than anything else she had done, and tried to k
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Travelled to Ethiopia to report on the 1983–1985 famine for the Daily Mail and again in April 1985 for The Observer
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Founded the Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, an academic journal that highlights unknown or little-known women writers
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“Przeciętny Anglik nawet wciśnięty w swego ziomka w metrze nadal rozpaczliwie utrzymuje pozory, że jest sam.”
“Stereotyp to Wieczna Kobiecość. To Obiekt Seksualny, upragniony i poszukiwany przez każdego mężczyznę i wszystkie kobiety. Nie ma płci. Jego wartość mierzy się wyłącznie pożądaniem, które wyzwala w innych. Jedynym, co musi wnosić, jest samo istnienie.”
“Wolność jest krucha i należy ją chronić. Poświęcać wolność, choćby doraźnie, oznacza zdradzić jej ideały.”
“Walka, która nie przynosi radości, nie jest właściwą walką.”
“Jeśli uważasz, że jesteś wyemancypowana, rozważ pomysł spróbowania smaku swojej krwi miesięcznej – jeżeli przy tej myśli robi ci się niedobrze, to wierz mi, kochana, długa droga przed tobą.”
“Tkwi w nas silny lęk przed wolnością. Nazywamy ją chaosem lub anarchią i same te słowa budzą strach.”
With the novelist Martin Amis, then 26, which was discussed publicly in 2015 after she sold her archives to the University of Melbourne
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Feminist scholar Arlyn Diamond wrote that, while flawed, it was also "intuitively and brilliantly right", but she criticised Greer for her attitude toward women:
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When it published a naked photograph of her lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face peering between her thighs
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That she had been raped while in her second year at university, an experience she described in detail in The Guardian in March 1995
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And in 2016 BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour placed her fourth on its annual "Power List" of seven women who had the biggest impact on women's lives over the previous 70 years, alongside (in order) Margaret Thatcher, Helen Bro
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And in the US the following year, she was "Playboy Journalist of the Year"
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And again during an interview with Clyde Packer in the 1980s, Greer discussed how she had been raped as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne
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“expression of uncontrollable desire”
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Greer was co-founder of an Amsterdam-based pornography magazine, Suck: The First European Sex Paper (1969–1974), along with Bill Daley, Jim Haynes, William Levy, Heathcote Williams and Jean Shrimpton, the stated purpose
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Was married for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973
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Appeared in the BBC shows Good Old Nocker and Twice a Fortnight and had a starring role in a short film, Darling, Do You Love Me (1968), by Martin Sharp (the Australian artist and co-editor of Oz magazine) and Bob Wh
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Studied at University of Cambridge, Doctor of Philosophy (1967).
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From Christ's College that allowed "Wives in for sherry only"
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And from the 1990s until her later years, divided her time between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England
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After three months and the editors convicted of obscenity, later overturned
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With an upper second, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians
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Greer won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
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Born 1939-01-29.
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