Who is germaine

The result is helplessness, resentment, a lack of sexual pleasure, an absence of joy. Greer was critical both of the idea that emancipation can be achieved by women adopting male roles or merely by economic change. Nor did she believe in the possibility of women's self-determination within the nuclear family. Two themes here point toward Greer's later book Sex and Destiny: her belief that the suburban, isolated, and consumer-oriented nuclear family is both constraining for women and an undesirable environment in which to bring up children, and her dislike of the way Western industrialized society "manufactured" and therefore confined sexuality.

In developing these ideas and in writing about sexuality in a way that was both intellectual and explicit Greer took advantage of and helped to create a new permissiveness in publishing and in public discussion about sex. While increasingly involved in mainstream journalism as a freelance writer and in television, Greer also had a background in underground magazines and in struggles against censorship. She was an original contributor to the Australian magazine OZ and later as "Rose Blight" wrote a regular gardening column for Private Eye.

While promoting The Female Eunuch in Australia and New Zealand in she was a witness for the defense in two obscenity trials in which the offending publications included counter-culture magazines and the novel Portnoy's Complaint.

In New Zealand she was charged with using indecent language at a public meeting in the Auckland Town Hall. Censorship was one of the reasons she gave at that time for her decision not to live and work in Australia. Greer's intellectual background was molded by the libertarian and anarchist ideas of the group in Sydney known as The Push, who drank, at that time, at the Royal George Hotel and who were influenced by the ideas of Sydney University professor of philosophy John Anderson.

Greer described it this way: "When I first came to Sydney what I fell in love with was not the harbour or the gardens or anything else but a pub called The Royal George, or, more particularly with a group of people who used to go there every night … and sit there and talk…. The regular diet of reasoned anarchy, sexual precosity and Toohey's Bitter helped mould her unique shock style. Germaine Greer's three-month visit to Australia in was the first since her departure to study at Cambridge.

She continued to live for the most part in Britain, becoming a well-known Australian expatriate, whose comments on her place of birth its men, its "stupifying dullness" were anxiously awaited by the local press on each of her intermittent visits.

In in London she married Australian journalist Paul du Feu, a union which ended in divorce in Between and she lectured in English literature at the University of Warwick. After the publication of The Female Eunuch she lectured on the American circuit, wrote a column in the London Sunday Times, and between and worked as a free-lance journalist, reviewer, and broadcaster.

Part of her time she spent at her house in Italy. In Greer became a professor in the Graduate Faculty of Modern Letters at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and she later became director of that university's Center for the Study of Women's Literature, positions she relinquished to return to full-time writing and broadcasting.

In she described herself as having given up teaching except for lecture tours and visiting fellowships. Greer wanted to be certain about this female difference, and for her, this certainty started with the body. She claimed it kept women docile, repressed, and weak. Only by liberating women sexually could they remove this imposed submissiveness and embrace the freedom to live the way they wanted.

Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. More than anything else, she should be viewed as a utopian. For Greer, the greatest danger of the widespread female eunuch is not an unfulfilling sex life. It is in her being so concerned with femininity that she is incapable of political action. Greer believed this social conditioning was dire and its enforcers so embedded that revolution rather than reform was required. Greer called for this revolution to start in the home.

She spoke openly about topics that at the time were taboo: menstruation, hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause, sexual arousal and orgasm.

She decried the agents of femininity that she felt kept women trapped: makeup, constricting clothing, feminine hygiene products, stifling marriages, misogynistic literature and female sexual competitiveness. She reserved her greatest fury for widespread consumerism, which she believed kept women dependent on the systems that forged their own oppression.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft before her, Greer argued neither men nor women benefited from this. But the solution she presents is exploratory instead of pragmatic. Perhaps women could live and raise their children together, making their own goods and growing their own food. It would be somewhere pleasant like the rolling landscapes of Italy, with local people to tend house and garden.

Her determination to inhibit others from writing about her own life sat uncomfortably with her longstanding opposition to censorship. Besides, Greer had spoken so freely about herself that there was little about her personal life that was not already in the public domain. Greer, whose first book The Female Eunuch made her a household name at the age of 31, is now almost 80 and arguably the most famous feminist alive.

Her private life — her relationships with her family, with her many lovers among them Federico Fellini , Warren Beatty , Martin Amis , friends and enemies — has been as eventful and tumultuous as her public one. She has written a page-turner, though not by means of cheap sensationalism. A book can perform a valuable function at a given moment without necessarily being good or original, or even clear.