GERMAINE GREER
THEORIST ACADEMIC AND JOURNALIST
1967
PhD Literature at the University of Cambridge
1970
Following some TV acting, writing and university lecturing, the controversial The Female Eunuch was published
1989
Appointed special lecturer & Fellow Newnham College Cambridge
2003
Published The Boy, an examination of young men
2005
Appeared on reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother
I've never been an equality feminist. Equality Feminism means that you take the present condition of men as the aim that you strive for. Well men are not free. The corporate world is a nightmare and cruel, it has no place for older people, it's only for the big swinging dicks. It's corrupt to the core.
People who come to power need not simply to be women, they need to be feminists and they need to have an agenda, which is the defeat of masculinism, of chauvinism, of competition as a way of life. I don't think we've got a prayer, frankly, at this point.
I've always described myself as an escapee. But I had to work probably twice as hard as any man would work to make my escape first of all.
The really curious thing about Britain is that British men really don't like women. And that's very, very apparent. They love situations were there are no women, for that simple reason. The only reason that a man would sit on a muddy, cold riverbank with a rod in his hand is that there's no woman there.
Women just haven't learnt solidarity at all... If you ask a man for the dirt on another man, his first instinct is not to give it to you. He may know something fantastic, something truly newsworthy and utterly shameful, but he won't give it to you, because his first instinct is solidarity. He may then realise, that it's in his interest to leak this fact. But he won't just do it because he can't resist it.
The greatest danger to women today? It depends where you are, but I think it's probably Islam. The women who've been active in the Arab Spring are now discovering what the future holds and its pretty nasty. In Egypt, women were forcefully internally examined because they were out in public without a man. Can you imagine? Because Sharia says that a woman who is wandering the streets without a man is a prostitute. In Egypt, which is one of the more cosmopolitan of the Islamic nations. We're talking life and death here, not lifestyle choices. We're talking being whipped, being stoned, being imprisoned, being exiled.
