Writer and philosopher Germaine Greer has never shied away from controversy.
Greer is one of the godmothers of second-wave feminism. In her book “The Female Eunuch,” she argued that motherhood represses women sexually and that they need to ditch monogamy and celibacy, embracing their full sensual selves.
At the Hay literary festival this week, Greer again stirred the pot in an address about sexual violence.
“I want to turn the discourse about rape upside down,” she said, according to the Guardian. “We are not getting anywhere approaching it down the tunnel of history.”
In the speech, she argued that a lot of heterosexual sex is nonconsensual. Most of what we describe as rape is much more mundane, she said, more like “bad sex . . . where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love.”
“Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal rights, he is raping her,” she said. “It will never end up in a court of law.”
Rape, she said, should be understood not as a “spectacularly violent crime” but rather as something that is simply “lazy, careless and insensitive.”
Greer also argued that the depictions of rape on television and in the movies do not accurately reflect the reality for many women.
“Most rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever,” Greer said, according to the Guardian. “We are told that it is a sexually violent crime, an expert like Quentin Tarantino will tell us that when you use the word rape you’re talking about violence, a throwing them down . . . it is one of the most violent crimes in the world. Bulls--t Tarantino.”
Greer said the culture’s ideas about rape make the experience more traumatic for women than it needs to be. Society wants women to believe that rape will destroy them, she said. “We haven’t been destroyed, we’ve been bloody annoyed is what we’ve been,” she told the newspaper.
She cited a study that found that 70 percent of rape victims suffer post-traumatic stress disorder compared with 20 percent of conflict veterans. “What the hell are you saying? Something that leaves no sign, no injury, no nothing is more damaging to a woman than seeing your best friend blown up by an IED is to a veteran?” she asked.
Greer allowed that some rapes are violent. In those cases, she said, the perpetrators should be punished.
But in most cases, she said, it’s hard for lawyers to prove that the perpetrators truly did not have consent. Instead of humiliating trials that devolve into long debates about what happened behind closed doors, Greer said, we should punish rape less harshly but make it easier for women to push claims through.
Rather than prison, Greer recommended that rapists be punished with 200 hours of community service and perhaps an “r” tattoo on the hand, arm or cheek.
The comments drew swift backlash from activists, who called Greer a “rape apologist.” Historian Tanja Bueltmann said on Twitter that Greer should “stop calling herself a feminist because she very clearly isn’t.”
In her talk, it was clear that Greer had anticipated that reaction. “It is moments like these, I can hear the feminists screaming at me, ‘You’re trivializing rape!’ ” she said. Greer is set to publish a book on this subject in September.
