Forum Topic

Germaine Greer

How f’ing annoying. She’s so full of herself that she can’t see beyond her own insecurities. Embarrassing!

Georgina Flint ● 2136d26 Comments

Ah. I'm guessing you've just been watching the Bridget Jones programme.  I think the problem was she just didn't get the joke.

David Halliday ● 2136d

Yes. She was an absolute bore! Bridget Jones was hilarious and very accurate in my day. Nothing wrong with it.

Georgina Flint ● 2136d

I was reading this morning about the concern over the depiction of  the character Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon film from 1980. According to some bod from the BBFC the fact the charcater is 'is coded as an east Asian character due to his hair and make-up, but he's played by the Swedish acton Max von Sydow, which I don't think is something that would happen if this were a modern production  and is something that we're also aware that viewers may find dubious, if not outright offensive.'Talking to my sons who adored this film when they were growing up and practically knew the script, they thought we are coming close to losing the plot not to mention a complete sense of proportion failure. The character is supposed to be an alien species from another planet for God's sake, neither of my two have a prejudicial bone in their body (leaving Tories aside!) and really there are times when some people need to get a grip, it's a fantasy for crying out loud.

Vanessa Smith ● 2135d

It's just attend seeking much like the so called conspiracy theorists.

Adrian Irving ● 2135d

I've been enjoying a couple of old sitcom episodes these past few days and notice that both Blackadder and Father Ted are now preceded by 'trigger warnings'.

Susan Kelly ● 2135d

I watched a re-run of an episode of the peerless Porridge a few months ago, it was the one where Fletcher had arranged a clandestine game of snakes and ladders, for money of course, in the boiler room of the nick.McKay pf course gets wind of this, and arranges a delivery of coal and when the miscreants escape the deluge,they are of course covered from base to apex in coal dust.The line that McKay came out with in the original showing,'It's the Black and White Minstrel Show', was completely cut from the new'improved'version.Completely ridiculous.

Keith Iddon ● 2135d

We're a country that currently cannot live comfortably within our own history..For me this stinks and I cannot wait for the end of this era of paranoid revisionism with tinges of the puritans..bawdy is best...

Stuart Kerr ● 2135d

Yes, hopefully we will be able to learn how fortunate we all are to live somewhere that whilst not afraid to question itself,is also not so daft as to ignore its past and accept the good and bad from it, and learn how to move on together.Anyone who is ignorant of history is destined to repeat it eventually,or words to that affect.

Keith Iddon ● 2135d

Georgina, what exactly did Germaine Greer say or do that produced this strong reaction in you?

Alastair Banton ● 2134d

She didn't like Bridget Jones

Micki Hawkes ● 2134d

One TV review I saw was quite scathing about Ms. Greer, although I didn't watch the programme.

Vanessa Smith ● 2134d

It's not that she didn't like her, exactly, but thought her a poor role model for young women, a view with which it's hard to disagree.

Susan Kelly ● 2134d

Quite, but my understanding is that the original Bridget Jones’ Diary was a warts and all picture of the author’s own life in which many women saw a painfully accurate picture of their own lives and insecurities, so she became a sort of fictional everywoman - the direct opposite of a role model.  So if Greer is worried about her not being a good role model she’s completely missed the point.  I need to watch the programme.  Meanwhile I would like to hear Georgina’s own take on this.

Alastair Banton ● 2134d

Mention of Germaine Greer brought back happy teenage memories of reading her seminal 'Female Eunuch' book. OMG are we still allowed to use words like seminal? Anyway, when I had finished the book I lent it to my younger sister. Years later I asked if she had read it and if she still had the book. Rather sheepishly she admitted that our (otherwise broad minded mother) had seen the cover and confiscated it before she could read it.I guess the question should be is Germaine a suitable role model for modern women?

Cllr Sam Hearn ● 2134d

Good question, Sam.  Apart from the Female Eunuch my other memory of Germaine Greer from that era is a nude photo shoot she did for Oz magazine which left nothing to the imagination.  Think Courbet’s Origin of the World.  I’m sure that over the years for many she has been seen as a role model.  Today, of course, she is still controversial.  Role model?  Pass.

Alastair Banton ● 2134d

I'm the same generation as Fielding and didn't identify at all with Bridget Jones's life. I thought she was pathetic.

Susan Kelly ● 2134d

Haha, I’m sure there are a lot more like you.  Maybe another aspect of the book’s appeal was that it gave the satisfaction to some readers of thinking ‘Thank God I’m not like that!’  But the bottom line is that it was a huge international best seller so it clearly reached a lot of women, and men, in one way or another.

Alastair Banton ● 2134d

'The Female Eunuch' made a lot of women of that era see themselves and the world very differently and it was a very important book in its time - as was Jong's 'Fear of Flying,' the works of Simone de Beauvoir and many others.  Recently Greer has made some very dubious comments including rape being just bad sex. I think she has maybe flipped in her old age.  The programme on her life - earlier this year I think or it could have been last year - was very interesting.  She was so beautiful, famous and sought-after when she was younger and her attitudes also seem to have changed a lot, not sure if the two are connected, maybe she craves the attention she used to have which is why she comes out with such controversial statements. I didn't see the programme but I doubt if Helen Fielding ever intended Bridget Jones to be a role model - don't know if Greer was claiming that she was intended to be such.

Claire Moran ● 2134d

See Germaine Greer talking good old fashioned common sense on 'Loose Women' in 2019https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBfhRj3qHYkShe was one of the very first women admitted as a member of the Cambridge Footlights (on the same day a Clive James and Russell Davies). Others who were members at the same time included David Frost, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Tim Brooke-Taylor.

Cllr Sam Hearn ● 2132d

According to Clive James, her response to being admitted was "This place is jumping with freckle-punchers. You can have it on your own." Miriam Margolies, who was in The Footlights a couple of years before Greer, but never admitted to membership, said she was ignored outside the gigs and bullied, and that John Cleese was "a shit".

Robert Fish ● 2132d

I read that too. Any idea what a 'freckle-puncher' is?

Cllr Sam Hearn ● 2132d

Sam, I'm not going to answer that on a public forum!

Robert Fish ● 2132d

Bumboy..

bobby osborne ● 2132d

A freckle puncher is someone who receives anal sex. Not exclusive to Gay men but as it is Australian it is usually applied as a term of abuse.  Greer wrote a book it was famous and controversial she tried to repeat the experience and it was a very sad flop indeed.  Now she is a rather miserable and pathetic person going around abusing women and saying the most ridiculous things about Transpeople. She has never said anything I found funny but a lot in the last ten years I have found insulting, obnoxious and the opposite of everything she said in the book that made her famous

Caroline Carney ● 2131d

I agree Caroline. I avoid her since a TV appearance some years ago in which she said that women didn't care about being raped and that the people who minded were their fathers/brothers/husbands because their property had been damaged.The intake of breath from the audience was deafening.

Susan Kelly ● 2131d

She used to have a bedsit next to mine in Earls Court in the late 60s, and she went off the rails with licentious behaviour soon after we joined the Common Market. Now Boris hhas got us a deal, I'm sure she'll mend her ways.

Roger Talbot ● 2131d