Concrete Playground

Germaine Not Dead

We at Concrete Playground tend to believe young people should be in charge of big, important media organisations. But Ben Naparstek of the Monthly: you’re starting to give us a bad name. Commissioning Louis Nowra (not 'Louise', as could be innocently skim-read) to write a bitchy appraisal of Germaine Greer forty years after The Female Eunuch. Seriously?

We’ve all had our mixed feelings for Germaine over the years, but Nowra’s piece is full of half-baked assertions that Greer “misunderstands” women because “young women today love shopping more than ever”, embrace “fripperies”, accept botox as a “rite of passage”, and all while sometimes being even more educated than their husbands. Apparently devoid of irony, he proceeds to lambast Greer for her looks, age, and resemblance to his "demented grandmother".

The explosion of internet derision has been all-consuming; follow it here, here, and here. Particularly check Helen Razer’s funniest, most vitriolic and satisfying rant in years. Greer also kind of responds. Meanwhile, the Independent reprinted Germaine’s own words as a challenge to Nowra’s assertion that she “has no idea what makes women tick”:

"Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate." (from The Female Eunuch)

There was a time when the Monthly looked like Australia’s inspirationally impoverished answer to the New Yorker; those seem like heady days now.

By Rima Sabina Aouf