Professor Greer isn’t doing print interviews,” an assistant tells me when I call to ask about the latest Germaine Greer furore – this time, telling the Hay Festival that “most rape is just lazy, just careless, insensitive,” and arguing for reduced sentences for most rapists (she also argued for a reduced burden of evidence, and said that rapists should be tattooed with the letter “R”). Maybe the interview-aversion is because when things Professor Greer says end up in print, they have a habit of running away from her: becoming outrageous headlines, feeding Twitterstorms and inspiring op-ed columns.
Not that this has put a crimp on her willingness to say such things. Before the comments at Hay, she said that women – not men – are the main audience for scenes of rape and torture perpetrated on women in crime dramas and fiction. And before that, it was calling #MeToo “whinging”. Then there was “just because you lop off your penis, it doesn’t make you a woman”; walking out of the Big Brother house and calling it a “fascist prison”; being in the Big Brother house in the first place; saying attempts to outlaw FGM were “an attack on cultural identity”; and so on, a catalogue of shocks stretching over the decades.
Content from our partners
