Germaine Greer is a dinosaur
Powerless against a new feminist movement :
by Kaite Welsh
A
university lecture isn't the first place you expect to find
headline-grabbing controversy, but Germaine Greer's invitation to at
Cardiff University on 'Women & Power: The Lessons of the 21st Century',
was met with an outcry from students.
Her history of bigoted comments about the transgender community
prompted the outcry.
Although the university did not cancel the lecture, Greer has since
announced that she won't be attending, seething on the BBC and in the
broadsheets about censorship, free speech and men in dresses, while much
of the feminist community cringe at her comments.
In a nutshell, Greer, the great feminist and smasher of social
hierarchies, doesn't think transgender women are proper women.
When 'The Whole Woman', Greer's follow up to her groundbreaking 1970
polemic, 'The Female Eunuch', was published in 1999 it, too, caused
something of a furore among the chattering classes. You see the
outspoken Aussie was backtracking on some of her earlier arguments.
In certain cases the world had moved on, in others she had
reconsidered her stance, as any academic worth her tenured salt should.
Her U-turns made newspaper headlines at the time, the mainstream
media having a little joke about a woman admitting she was wrong.
Suddenly, she was a celebrity - photographed biting the heads off Barbie
dolls and going on Newsnight without brushing her hair, the height of
cool. But now her views are immoveable, and these days many flip the
channel when they see her on TV. No matter how right on you once were,
when Tony Blair is apologising more than you are, it's time to
re-evaluate your position.
Out of touch
It's easier to shrug off remarks made by old, out of touch men than
it is of old, out of touch women, simply because there are more of them.
Outspoken women, who can command a public platform, are so rare that we
feel like we must protect them even if we're cringing with
embarrassment. Women have been silenced throughout history and we
understandably don't want to be party to that. But God, it's a shame
when a once vibrant, exciting voice starts to sound an awful lot like
the people she wanted to replace. From revolutionary to oppressor, it's
a well-trodden journey.
Isn't it often the way? You fight your way from the trenches to the
throne, overthrow the corrupt regime and set about remaking the world in
your own image, only to realise that you have become the thing you most
despised. But life rarely shows its narrative structure so clearly and
Greer isn't ready to look in the mirror and see the abyss staring back.
There's a growing feeling among us young feminists, to not to forget
the achievements of our foremothers. The people making this case have a
point - if we can't tackle ageism, who can?
Like all bullies, Greer is really a coward, increasingly powerless in
the face of a feminist movement that now recognises that class, race,
sexuality and being assigned the wrong gender at birth is just as
important as some nebulous ideal of womanhood. What do feminists like
Greer have to say to people who have periods and breasts and can give
birth but aren't women? To the women who now, or in the past, have a
penis? What does she have to say to thiscisgender lesbian feminist who
would rather share a podium with the entire T section of the LGBT
movement than with her? The only thing more dangerous than a dinosaur is
a dinosaur that feels threatened.
Whose 20th Century?
Greer's proposed lecture was entitled 'Women & Power: The Lessons of
the 20th Century'. But whose 20th Century? Whose power? When prominent
media feminists decry the number of women being murdered each year, how
often do they include transwomen in their statistics? Transwomen are not
there for you to believe in or doubt, like a patriarchal tooth fairy.
They are not the monster under the bed who will go away if you hide your
head under the covers of 1960s feminist theory. They are part of the
women's movement and always have been.
The idea that thinkers like Greer were radical once means they think
of themselves as forever right, absolved of having to take on board new
ideas. Their hypocrisy reminds me of my Lefty friends, friends who voted
for Jeremy Corbyn and Scottish independence, but see no problem saying
things like "tranny" and "but black people can be racist, too".
Maybe it's understandable. It's exhausting, this fight. When you
think you're reaching to top of the mountain only to realise that it's
just a foothill, who doesn't get demoralised? Being an activist or
campaigner today is to live in a constant state of knowing that you've
forgotten something, as though each individual strand of tolerance were
a piece of homework that needs to be handed in. We all fail in multiple
ways, every day.
The trick is to not get defensive when someone gets angry about it,
to apologise, to try to do better. If Germaine Greer wants to lecture us
on the lessons of the 20th Century, she might want to start learning the
lessons of the 21st. Or, you know, basic politeness.
Evolution isn't pretty. It's slow and messy and at some point you
turn around and see that your vestigial tail is just getting in the way.
From Angry Young (Wo)man to Establishment Fogey - it comes to us all
eventually. Maybe the best we can hope for is to nurture a younger
generation to tell us how wrong we are - but unlike Greer, be ready to
take it or face a slow and painful extinction.
-This article was originally published in The
Telegraph |