Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer (born January 29, 1939) is an Australian academic, writer, and broadcaster, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the 20th century.

Other publications

Her second book, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, was published in 1979. In the same year, she accepted a post at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma as the director for the Center of the Study of Women's Literature.

Related Topics:
1979 - University of Tulsa - Oklahoma

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Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, published in 1984, continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Greer's target again is the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behavior, and the commercialization of sexuality and women's bodies. Greer's apparent approval of life styles and family values in the developing world — the world is over-populated, she argued, only by Western standards of comfortable living — and of poverty in preference to consumerism, led her to endorse practices frequently at odds with the beliefs of most Western feminists. Female genital mutilation had to be considered in context, she wrote, and might be compared with breast augmentation in the West. The book consequently attracted a great deal of criticism.

Related Topics:
1984 - Fertility - Female genital mutilation - Breast augmentation

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In 1986, she published Shakespeare, a work of literary criticism, and The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, a collection of newspaper and magazine articles written between 1968 and 1985. In 1989 came Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a diary and travelogue about her father, whom she described as distant and unaffectionate, weak, craven, and feeble, which led to claims — as she knew it would, according to The Guardian — that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men.

Related Topics:
1986 - 1968 - 1985 - 1989

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In 1991, The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause, which the New York Times called a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book" became another influential book in the women's movement. In it, Greer tries to dispel myths about the menopause and ill health, advising against the use of hormone replacement therapy. "Frightening females is fun," she wrote in The Age. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable." It is fear, she wrote, that "makes women comply with schemes and policies that work against their interest," (The Age, July 13, 2002).

Related Topics:
1991 - Menopause - Hormone replacement therapy - Libido - Depression - Death

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Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet followed in 1995 and, in 1999, two books: The Female Misogynist in 1999, in which she attacked both men and women for what she saw as the lack of progress in the feminist movement, and The Whole Woman. The chapter titles reveal the theme: "Food," "Breast," "Pantomime Dames," "Shopping," "Estrogen," "Testosterone," "Wives," "Loathing," "Girlpower." Greer wrote in the introduction: "The contradictions women face have never been more bruising than they are now. The career woman does not know if she is to do her job like a man or like herself ... Is motherhood a privilege or a punishment? ... ake equality is leading women into double jeopardy ... It's time to get angry again."

Related Topics:
1995 - 1999 - Pantomime - Estrogen - Testosterone

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In 2003, The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, richly illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty", alleging that Greer had reinvented herself as a "middle-aged pederast." http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1057077,00.html Greer described the book as an attempt to address women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure," (Greer 2003).

Related Topics:
2003 - Pederast

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