IF you can stomach it, and have £10 to spare, you can subscribe to the Hay Festival online player and watch the whole of the Germaine Greer event that caused all the fracas last week.
For, as with anything the controversial second-wave feminist says or does, it was headline-making and littered with comments that would serve to alienate almost any listening demographic – from rape victims to jocks to #MeToo advocates to libertarians. Which particularly got to you? The one, perhaps, where Greer said: “Most rape is just lazy, just careless, insensitive.” Or maybe when she questioned the high statistics around PTSD in rape victims, saying: “Something that leaves no sign, no injury… is more damaging to a woman than seeing your best friend blown up by an IED is to a veteran?”
I did watch the talk, partly because it seems to me, with Greer, you’ve got to go to the original source to get even the remotest grasp of what she’s banging on about. After all Greer is someone prone to denying things she is quoted in the media as having said – leading to the impression that either she forgot or bungled them herself, or they had been quoted in some misleading way.
What comes across when you watch the talk is a few things. The first is that right at the centre of it is an angered description of much of what’s wrong with our current system of rape prosecution, and a cry for change of the type that many a feminist would relate to. The second is that unfortunately all of this is bundled up in what seems like little more than an attack on the #MeToo movement.
Often it seemed as if Greer was taking the same issues with which the #MeToo movement has grappled and attempting to repossess them. It’s as if she was saying, "You think you know the answer, well I know a better one". Hers, essentially, is to reduce the penalty around rape, the theory being that what scares most juries off a guilty verdict is the gravity of the penalty given the paucity of firm evidence. The problem here is that we have no idea if this would work – and, at the same time, it looks very much like Greer is trivialising rape.
At times, too, the talk seemed like just a rerun of all the debates we’ve had over the last year. She talks about the ubiquity of “bad sex” – what she calls “lazy” and “insensitive” sex – and it seems a little like she has jumped on a Twitter bandwagon that has already thundered off into the distance. We feminists have already done a lot of fretting, in the last year, over what happens in that territory of sex when consent is vague or not enthusiastic, and will continue to do so.
But the problem is that when Germaine Greer mentions “bad sex”, she seems to almost entirely conflate it with rape. She may be doing this to emphasise that a lot of rape does not conform to the stereotype of physically violent assault, but it’s not hard to see why what she says is offensive to many who have experienced highly coercive rape.
Why, you can’t help but wonder, does she want to trivialise it like this?
I believe there’s a simple answer here. What Greer shows is a disdain for every other answer to the problem of rape than the one she has come up with. No one else, it seems, can possibly be right. Particularly not anyone involved in #MeToo. This is sad, because if she could just ditch her egotism, she might still have something to offer to this debate. But as it is, she seems to want to trash her own ideas, even as she creates them, by making them offensive to all who might otherwise have listened.
There's simply no excuse, gentlemen
THERE are things I like to think that pompous, entitled male CEOs and business leaders probably don’t say any more; comments that one imagines probably are now consigned to the dustbin of history and 1970s television dramas. In truth, we probably all know that they’re still out there, but it is nevertheless a shock when you see the words there in black and white. Such was the case when last week a UK government report into gender representation in FTSE firms was published, complete with excuses from business leaders for why they had failed to hire female directors.
“I don’t think women fit comfortably into the board environment,” said one, as if discussing the fit of some badly-tailored suit.
“Most women don’t want the hassle or pressure of sitting on a board,” said another.
“There aren’t that many women with the right credentials and depth of experience to sit on the board – the issues covered are extremely complex,” said a third.
“All the good women have already been snapped up.”
There you have it. It’s really not that extremely complex. No need to worry your pretty heads, gentlemen, when it comes to the taxing gender gap question. It’s not that hard to work out why ten of the biggest companies in this country, according to the report, have no women on their boards. Certain men are quite happy to make sure that women never feel there’s a place for them at the table. For them, women and suit can never fit.
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