Tuesday 11 September 2018

Reading Germaine: 3 generations respond to On Rape

For nearly 50 years feminist icon and firebrand Germaine Greer has been inspiring and infuriating in equal measure – and her latest book, On Rape, has sparked fresh outrage. We asked three generations of women to read and respond to it

Yvonne Roberts, writer and journalist
The iconic cover of the The Female Eunuch, an international bestseller first published in 1970 and still in print, shows the stylised trunk of a naked woman, a handle on each hip, fresh off the conveyor belt. In the book, Dr Germaine Greer, then aged 30, explained in dazzling prose and with raw anger why men oppress women and hate them even more for their capitulation. “Women have been cut off from their capacity for action,” she told the New York Times a year later. “That has got to be changed.”

Almost 50 years later, in On Rape, she returns to women’s inertia, their lack of agency, particularly in the marital bed. As feminism’s human electrical charge, she does what she has always done: she stirs and enrages. “I put ideas forward to give them a life, to let them go and see what people do with them,” she has explained.

 As feminism's electrical charge, she does what she's always done: she stirs and enrages
I was a student at Warwick University when Greer was an English lecturer. She was 6ft tall with a halo of hair, thrillingly living out the sexual revolution with brio, a believer in the Reichian view that sexual freedom was the gateway to all other freedoms. Meanwhile, in the real world, we knew that a girl who “put it about” found herself labelled the campus bike. Magisterially, Greer has always assumed that her experience at any given time is universal to all women.

For me, The Female Eunuch, Greer’s flamboyant defiance of men who fell at her feet and her vigorous attack on femininity, opened the door to a different way of behaving and thinking. I’m indebted. “The old process must be broken,” she demanded. “What will you do?” What Germaine, a libertarian, has since done, gloriously, eloquently and often, is change her mind on any number of major feminist issues. Motherhood, damned in 1970 as a prison, transformed decades later into a sacred calling. The contributor to Oz magazine, and porn lover – self-styled as Dr G, “the only groupie in captivity with a PhD” – in The Change in the 1990s, eulogised the joys of celibacy and railed against porn and promiscuity.

Dr Greer is a polymath and then some. Broadcaster, critic, academic, environmentalist, gardener, publisher, exhibitionist (perhaps explaining a misguided entry into Channel 4’s Big Brother house in 2005) – she is also a “bolter”, married for only three weeks, who has said she would have liked a husband “intermittently”. Yet On Rape is strongly shaped by what she believes is a pattern in long-term relationships in which the man demands and the woman passively gives in. She rails against the “deadening spread” of “non-consensual sex”, “bad sex”, “banal rape”, that unjustly goes unpunished. “Most rape,” she writes, without possibly knowing, “is just lazy, careless and insensitive”.

According to Rape Crisis England and Wales, 85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped each year. Only 15% of rapes are reported to the police. Only 5.7% of rapes result in a successful prosecution. Myths still abound; consent is tricky to define; women’s sexual history is still an issue in court. Greer is right: “The system [is] not working.” As a victim of rape as a teenager, she rightly argues that rape is often not violent and it doesn’t destroy the victim. But it can.

Part of her solution is to effectively decriminalise rape so that, she writes, women don’t have to go through the ordeal of court (overlooking the due processes of law); perpetrators should be given 200 hours of community service or branded with the letter “R”. It’s an argument, not an edict.

What Greer ignores is that rape is always a violation, a breach of a woman’s bodily autonomy, even when there are no physical wounds. Rape feeds a culture of fear (one in eight Hollywood films features a rape). Better books have been written on rape, for instance by the late Professor Sue Lees and, more recently, Professor Joanna Bourke, but they didn’t act as catalysts. On Rape will. However, I hope that in the ensuing debate the focus will be less on personally taking apart Greer, the contrarian queen, who deserves a place on any plinth dedicated to female empowerment, and more on some of the truths she articulates, and linked issues not raised in the book.

Issues such as the notion of consent, which itself situates women as subordinate: a male acts, a female reacts. And why, still, the whole of the law – not just the treatment of rape – is male interests masquerading as human interests, as professors Kate Galloway and Mary Heath have argued. And how, in spite of pornography and the sexualisation of society, couples can and do have equal, consensual partnerships.

Sex is complicated. What Greer calls “good sex” can vary hugely, and at different times can encompass the rough as well as the gentle and intimate. However, what’s needed is a stronger interrogation by men about the kind of masculinity that still regards the appropriation and possession of a woman – banally or brutally – as what real men are supposed to do; robbing a woman of her self-worth and sexuality in the process. As Greer once said in a different context, that has got to be changed.

Afua Hirsch: writer, broadcaster and former barrister
Germaine Greer is a tricky feminist and one of a handful of feminist scholars who are household names, at least for my generation and that of my parents.

 She is right about some things, but her assumptions create so many problems
In the years since I grew up regarding The Female Eunuch as a foundational text, her pronouncements have often been problematic. As a black woman, I found her reluctance to embrace or even acknowledge the lack of intersectionality in her perspective worrying. Her intervention into the complex terrain of feminist perspectives on transgender were beyond unhelpful (“just because you lop off your dick… doesn’t make you a fucking woman”). And as someone who found the #MeToo movement a giant relief, I was appalled by her response that women are contributorily negligent by agreeing to “spread their legs”, she even went so far as to warn that Harvey Weinstein’s victims could risk being seen as “career rapees”.

As a former criminal lawyer, I feel pretty confident that the problem we have is not women “whingeing” – as Greer has accused us of doing – but that on the contrary the vast majority who experience rape and sexual abuse keep quiet about the atrocities that have become inexplicably normalised in our society.

Anyone who has dealt with a child rape case, as I have, would be manifestly horrified by the central premise of On Rape, which is that there is nothing especially violent about this crime. No two rapes are the same, but the very definition of rape Greer employs – the “penetration of the vagina of an unwilling human female by the penis of a human male” – conveys an inherent violence that seems obvious to me.

At the book’s core is the thesis that the most prevalent form of rape is ordinary, everyday, intimate-relationship rape. Most rapes, Greer argues, involve a woman regularly submitting to her husband’s late-night advances because she is too tired or apathetic to actively refuse, or worried about waking the children with the noise of confronting him. Greer assumes the inevitability of these experiences because “you wouldn’t want [your husband] put away for seven years, would you?”

It’s logic I fail to follow. I can’t relate to a world in which a partner is supposedly loving in all respects except the unfortunate fact of forcing himself upon a woman every night. I don’t recognise the supposed dilemma of consent which Greer imagines. A new generation of anti-rape activists have nailed this, in my opinion, by constructing consent in sex as something that should be ongoing, enthusiastic and active. If men understood this, and sought it, then they wouldn’t rape their wives by accident every night, would they?

Greer is right about some things. Is it relevant that some women fantasise about being raped? The answer is no, because in such fantasies, unlike in real-life rape, a woman is in control. Why is the criminal justice process of reporting a rape so traumatic for victims? Greer articulates the reality that a victim becomes not a party to the proceedings but a piece of evidence – submitting their integrity for interrogation. This is often just as – or more – traumatic than the rape itself.

But the assumptions underlying Greer’s approach create so many problems. Because she sees an inevitability in the prevalence of “banal rape”, she draws some depressing and extraordinarily sweeping conclusions about modern culture. “Heterosex is in serious trouble”, she says. “At all points in the life career, males and females make a bad fit… women in search of romance are coming to grief at the hands of men who are after conquest. When they meet with casual brutality they are deeply humiliated and traumatised.”

Yes, there is no shortage of examples of this depressing state of affairs. The Belfast rape trial, in which a court heard that Ulster and Ireland rugby players boasted of having “pumped a girl”, and “roasted her”, even bragging about the fact that the woman was “in hysterics”, triggered protests on both sides of the Irish border as the men were acquitted. There are so many examples of this ilk, that only the most extreme, or those where the accused is a celebrity, trigger any wider interest.

But this does not amount to the conclusion that men and women are incapable of having consensual and enjoyable sexual encounters. The problems Greer identifies are fostered and nurtured by culture – a culture that currently pornifies us all more, and invites us to explore substance and intimacy less. These are ideas that we as a society have created, with little attempt to re-educate ourselves as to just how wrong, and consequential, they are. There is nothing inevitable about that. Just as we have perpetrated this culture, so we are capable of changing it, too.

Germaine Greer shot by the Observer’s Jane Bown in 1982. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
Hannah Jane Parkinson: Guardian columnist and writer on politics and mental health
Ask someone at random to name a feminist, and the likely answer will be Germaine Greer. Maybe Betty Friedan. Possibly bell hooks. But probably Greer. At college, for the hot two seconds I attended, I read The Female Eunuch as part of the course. Many others will have done so. Greer pushed feminist ideas into the mainstream. She is owed.

 It contradicts itself from each one page to the next, and there’s a startling lack of evidence
Recently, Greer has courted controversy: first for her comments on transgender women (she said on Newsnight that transgender women were not real women), which she later semi-walked back on an Australian TV show, but then walked forward again. She caused anger again, this time for her comments about rape, at the Hay Festival, when discussing this new book.

Here’s my main issue with On Rape, a book so slight it can be read in 45 minutes: it contradicts itself from one page to the next, and there’s a startling lack of evidence, research, coherence or insight. Greer uses incredibly tactless language. A woman “complained of having been raped” – as though she was served the wrong starter at a restaurant. Though Greer is correct about most rapes being committed by men known to victims, often their partners, to refer to these rapes as “less spectacular” than those committed by unknown men is disgusting.

Some of the things Greer says are so nonsensical that I found myself writing “duh” in the margins of my review copy. “Why are women so afraid of rape?” one chapter begins (chapter title: Joystick or Weapon?) Well, duh.

For much of the book Greer discusses her belief that rape sentences should be shorter, because that would raise conviction rates. She even says that the prospect of a long sentence for rape might encourage men to murder women after attacking them. That is obviously absurd. Shortly after, she offers a case study of a man sentenced to 10 months for an attack that dominated the victim’s life for 12 years.

She is right, of course, that different jurisdictions have different legislation in respect of rape and sexual assault, often “no clearer than mud”. The problem is that her own thoughts on this are also as clear as mud. Could it be that the way to increase the conviction rate for rape is to provide better support for victims, so that more come forward in the first place, and better training for police and those within the criminal justice system – not shorter sentences so that rapists don’t just think, what the hell, and murder people instead?

The first sentence of On Rape excludes anything but penile penetration of an “unwilling female” from the definition of rape, which makes one wonder what Greer thinks about the case of Jyoti Singh, an Indian woman who died after a gang-rape, her injuries so severe that doctors suspected she’d been penetrated by an iron bar. Or the rape of men. Or anal rape. Or oral rape.

Rape, for Greer, is “a jagged outcrop in the vast monotonous landscape of bad sex” – but even teenagers know these days that rape is not “bad sex”. This also contradicts her assertion that rape is about power, not sex or lust. “Rape is not a sex crime, but a hate crime,” she says, before going on to describe how rape is a sex crime.

Greer writes acutely and wittily on bad sex: “Because their penis gives them so much pleasure, it is difficult for them to imagine that it is not doing anything for the recipient of their attentions.” True, a study found that 26% of women fake their orgasms, but that’s irrelevant here, because rape and bad sex are not the same thing.

She also says that raping a sleeping woman is not violent (“rape need involve no violence at all”) – as if invading a person’s body while she is unconscious were not a violent act.

What especially riled me was Greer’s description of fear of rape as “irrational”; she says women should not fear rape because men sometimes refer to their dicks as “willies”, signifying “weakness and foolishness”. This is one of the most bizarre opinions I have ever heard, on any topic. Fears are irrational when they are not based in reality; Greer can’t go from the assertion that rape is “part of the tissue of everyday life” to the view that fearing it is absurd.

Rape cannot kill a woman, she says. I’d point her towards the multiple cases of women and girls so brutally raped they bled to death from internal injuries. One study, by Porter and Alison, of gang rape victims in the US and UK found over 20% had died from their injuries.

Greer, meanwhile, says that “most rape is not accompanied by physical injury”. But she also states as fact that rape victims are told they are in “denial” if they profess to be not psychologically scarred. I have never heard this said. Ever. Nobody should be policing how a rape victim responds or deals with their rape.

There are points Greer makes that I agree with. To ask, as some have suggested, “Can I kiss you?” before doing so, would be the death of romance, in my opinion. And yes, some women do have rape fantasies; as Greer correctly asserts, this does not mean they want to be raped; with a fantasy, they are in control.

Again correctly, she says that victims of rape and sexual assault often experience paralysis during the act itself (and this time backs it up with a peer-reviewed study).

I know from an experience involving someone close to me that certain rapes are particularly heinous. But to suggest that non-consensual sex is merely “bad sex”, to exclude it from the definition of rape, is heinous too.

(Source: The Guardian)

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