Germaine Greer’s new essay is guaranteed to provoke outrage

Germaine Greer’s essay on rape is flawed, muddled and designed to attract maximum attention, argues Brooke Magnanti
Brooke Magnanti6 September 2018

Last year, Germaine Greer shared a shocking story about rape. This is what she does now. Instead of castigating the husband — a friend of hers — for attacking his wife, she suggested it would have been out of order for the wife to do anything about it. The internet was suitably scandalised. As an attempt at nuance now we have On Rape, an extended essay on the topic. Perhaps, with more room to explain, Greer can clear the air.

At the Hay literary festival in the summer, Greer said her intention was to “turn the discourse about rape upside down”. Many would welcome this, given the low conviction rates for the underreported crime. We desperately need a framework for consent that does not result in so many people being hurt. Has she succeeded?

On Rape opens with assertions about the nature of sex before moving on to examples and discussion. These are deeply heteronormative, conservative in their adherence to “married heterosex”, and haphazard in their sourcing. Is Bertrand Russell on prostitution not doing it for you? Well, here’s a statistical meta-analysis which is neither explained nor digested.

Greer gives an overview of wildly varying legal frameworks with no context of how they came to be. She writes that in current investigations “the previous sexual history of the complainant [can] not be produced in evidence”. One only has to read her later chapter describing police searching a victim’s phone and social media, or her description of the rape trial of Ireland and Ulster rugby player Paddy Jackson, to know this is untrue.

In a month where revelations about systematic abuse of children by priests in the Catholic Church are dominating headlines, it’s an unpleasant jolt to see Greer use the same euphemism for rape — “unwanted sex” — that defenders of the church are using.

Of course, what these abusers perpetrated was not “married heterosex”, so she has expended little thought on child sexual exploitation. Or — given the subject matter of her 2003 book, The Beautiful Boy — perhaps she has.

This is not to say her book is all wrong all the time. Greer is correct when she writes that rape is carried out not only by monsters, that it is part of the fabric of life — what the Tumblr generation would call rape culture. She comes very close to agreeing with sex-worker activists when she writes that the vagina is just another body part, not sacred. While that idea alone might have made a cracking essay, that is not the book I was asked to review.

Greer declares consent a “conundrum”, which means that it is situational, requires discussion, and can be misinterpreted. Much like any human interaction, then. That witness testimony can be unreliable is not a revelation. The rest of that chapter is a cut-and-paste job of the salacious details of famous rape cases. In fact, so are most of the chapters. We have Wikipedia and true-crime television already, thank you.

She frequently, bafflingly, conflates consent with orgasm. This opens the door to her later sneering at victims who experienced unwanted orgasms during their attacks.

Deftly building straw (wo)men, Greer accuses the #MeToo movement of doing insufficient work to check accusations are true. She may be surprised to learn of the complex discussions happening around doxxing — searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent — and social media in the aftermath of the Gamergate affair. It was led by tech-savvy victims, who are all too aware how reporting systems can be co-opted as tools of abuse.

She calls rape an act of power and not sex, yet minimises rape where there was no lasting physical trauma but plenty of career and reputational damage — as was true for actresses Rose McGowan and Paz de la Huerta.

Greer has written for this series before, On Rage, but from where does she think feminine rage stems from, if not from sexual injustice? Does quoting George Galloway on the accusations against Julian Assange serve any purpose but to alienate her from her feminist base and ally her to reactionaries?

The anecdotes have little in common other than causing reader outrage. Perhaps that is the point. This is the late career that is offered to accomplished women: attract the press at any cost or be forgotten. It is very dull and predictable. Ignore your critics and, if they speak up at all, claim that you’re being silenced, preferably via an exclusive column in the broadsheets. It’s political correctness gone mad! (Repeat as needed.)

It’s a sad state of affairs that some second-wave feminists have embraced to survive. As a former call girl, I understand survival. Prostitutes and public intellectuals have more in common than either of us would prefer to admit. But rape is too complex a topic to treat so flippantly. So, here is the reaction you crave Germaine — On Rape is a terrible book full of terrible ideas, terribly written. I hope the attention it will bring is both satisfying and profitable for you.

On Rape by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury, £12.99).

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