My close friend and fellow Harvey Weinstein survivor, Lysette Anthony, wrote a response to the widely reported speech by Germaine Greer at the Hay Festival during which she claimed most rape doesn’t involve "any injury whatsoever" and that it should be viewed as merely a “lazy, careless and insensitive” act. If you read the reports more closely, you'll notice that Ms. Greer's use of the words ‘outrage’ and ‘humiliation’ and the suggestion that rapists should have an R tattooed on their cheeks do not match her statement that women, who like her, have experienced violent rape are not traumatized but are “bloody annoyed.”
Bloody annoyed but “still not angry enough.”
Minimizing, dismissing, emotional numbness – these are all characteristics of dissociation. It appears that Ms. Greer has not yet been able to integrate her own experience of rape which left her ‘beaten half conscious.’ Failure to be angry about her rapist, who then went on to rape another woman and in both cases was never brought to justice, does not sound like someone who is really in touch with her feelings, nor the reality of the harm done. She refuses to accept that women’s lives are destroyed, refuses to acknowledge injury when there are no visible signs, but to make statements that are so seemingly callous suggests that Ms. Greer has indeed suffered terrible injury, which is now manifesting in her inability to have empathy for others and, most likely, for herself.
We know that feelings can only be suppressed so long before they erupt into anger, and if the person who caused that anger is beyond reach you will carry around ‘an empty frame of aggression.’ Ms. Greer’s frame seems to include men in general, women who get raped, lazy husbands, the #MeToo generation... but sadly not the person who is really responsible for the damage that is evident to everyone except her.
Ms. Greer also states that a man rolling over on his exhausted wife, claiming his conjugal rights without love or tenderness, is tantamount to rape. In Sweden, a law has just been passed to support that view. In one speech, she flip-flops from minimizing violent rape to decrying what some women would reconcile to themselves as an obligation of marriage. She is correct in calling all sexual intercourse without consent rape, but would she really characterize her own rapist as a lazy man and herself as a victim, passively complicit?
It seems as if somewhere in this shocking speech there was once some logic that has become confused and conflated with her own experiences and her general distrust of male/female relationships. We are left with the impression of Germaine Greer as a victim, an angry woman whose reason for anger is so far buried that she spits out nonsense that to her feels true because, as with many trauma survivors, the past continues to intrude upon the present. The clue is in her own history. Whatever Germaine Greer once did for feminism, it has done nothing for her. She is as unhealed now as after her rape at the age of 18. Despite her dangerous and damaging words, for that you have to feel sorry.
Comments (2)