The Louis Theroux Podcast - S2 EP7: Germaine Greer on her three-week long marriage, flirting with George Best, and her controversial views on gender and the MeToo movement.

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Louis rises at the crack of dawn to talk to Germaine Greer, the infamous writer, intellectual, and major voice of second-wave feminism. Beaming in from a studio in Castlemaine, Australia, they discuss her extraordinary life and career, including her three-week long marriage, flirting with George Best, and her controversial views on gender and the MeToo movement. Warnings: Strong language, adult subject matter, including descriptions of sexual violence, and is intended for adult consumption only. Listener discretion is advised. Visit spotify.com/resources for information and resources. Links/Attachments:  ‘Revisiting Suck magazine’s experiment in radical feminist pornography’ – Journal Time  https://www.documentjournal.com/2018/11/revisiting-suck-magazines-experiment-in-radical-feminist-pornography/ Robert Plant & Germaine Greer picture  https://i.pinimg.com/736x/05/f2/88/05f288fb945d5aac7af471ef88db7a08.jpg  ‘Nice Time’ – BBC TV show featuring Kenny Everett and Germaine Greer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywl0QrK3C68&t Credits: Producer: Millie Chu  Assistant Producer: Maan Al-Yasiri  Production Manager: Francesca Bassett  Music: Miguel D’Oliveira  Photo: Neil Spence Photography Executive Producer: Arron Fellows     A Mindhouse Production for Spotify  www.mindhouse.co.uk  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, let's do this. Hello again, Louis Theroux here. Welcome to my Spotify podcast called The Louis Theroux Podcast. No jokes, that's what it's called. In this episode, we are speaking to Germaine Greer, writer, professor, intellectual, and one of the major voices, definitely the most famous exponent of second wave feminism, which, if you didn't know, is the one that was in the 70s. Yeah, I know about this stuff. She wrote The Female Eunuch in 1970 or thereabouts, the year I was born. So that's two great things that

happened that year. But the Beatles broke up. It was a seminal text, a bestseller around the world. It made Germaine a household name and having dipped into it, it's maybe not what you would think. I guess it's a polemic, but it's very much about not just the idea of women's power, but also sort of the idea that women have been castrated from being their full selves and especially in their sexual self-expression. She spoke openly about topics that at the time were taboo, menstruation, hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause, sexual arousal and orgasm, which nowadays, I wouldn't say that's routine, there's probably further to go on that stuff, but that time it was even more the case that people didn't speak

about those subjects. Since the beginning of her career, she's been known for being outspoken and often controversial, calling for reduced sentences for rape, dismissing the Me Too movement as quote, whinging, and most recently criticized for comments around the trans community. She's a hero to some, and to her critics, she's outdated and out of touch and I felt for me that in this chat that kind of the fact that she's made her life's mission to be unflappable unshockable I felt uh we could sail close to the wind Jermaine spent much of her life living between homes in Essex and Italy but for the last few years she's moved back to Australia

where she resides in an aged care facility. I was interested in her because, well, she's a legend. She's in her mid-80s and has never really in her life stopped, well, been out of the headlines for long and never been afraid to court controversy. In fact, you could say part of her brand has been sort of shooting from the hip on subjects where others might hold back. And that's one who a lot of appreciation, but also obviously got her into hot water.

And for me, like also growing up as a son to a feminist mom, in the early 70s, well, 70s and 80s, Germaine was a figure in our house. I don't mean literally, it was just someone I was aware of. And I think it's fair to say my mom was a fan and regarded the gospel of Germaine as something that was liberating and helpful at times, while definitely not endorsing every aspect of her opinions. I approached the conversation with a degree of apprehension. Actually, or did I? Like, I always want to, you know, I always feel a degree of apprehension.

I want to bring my A game, especially when talking to someone with the years behind her that Germaine has, you know, that level of kind of output and kind of consistent production. But I was also aware there were people probably thought I shouldn't be doing the chat because of some of the comments that Germaine's made. Rather than just do a deep dive into her life and work, I was also keen to get her insights and thoughts on the present culture more generally. So yeah, look out for that and me trying to explain basically the internet and whatnot to her. Maybe that's a bit unfair, but

you can be the judge. The conversation took place remotely. It was 8am in London and 6pm in Castle, Maine, a small town a couple of hours drive from Melbourne in Australia. As you can imagine, there are warnings around language and adult content. We talk about sex in some detail. We discuss subjects like rape, sexual assault, and domestic abuse. Some of Germaine's views can, of course, cause offense, especially those that bear upon the trans community. All of that and much, much more coming up. 1-2-1-2 That's Louis Hello

Here I am Hi Louis Hi, can you hear me? I certainly can How are you doing? Fine, thank you Thank you for doing this i've wanted to speak to you for a while and so i appreciate you making the time um oh look i'm jealous now you've

got a wine bottle in in shot in vision it's a little later i'm going to start by asking where are you um where's my wine bottle i don't know there's one behind you i'm getting it cold for you there you go and what um there's a glass over there. Obviously, I've got a coffee, it being 10 past 8 in the morning where I am. Where are you and what time is it where you are? I'm in Castlemaine, which is an old mining town from way back. And I live in aged care, which means I'm taken care of And I live in aged care, which means I'm taken care of and I can have almost anything I need, except I can't just take off and disappear, although it's quite

a tempting idea, I realise. I don't know how I feel about aged care. It all happened in a sort of accidental way. But whether I'll stay in aged care is another matter. You're looking at me thoughtfully. Do you realise that I once used to work for your mother? Did you know that? Funnily enough, I was talking to her about this night before last. I said, I'm speaking to Germaine Greer.

And I knew that she'd had some professional association. My mum, for those who don't know, is a, or I should say was a producer for the BBC World Service, working mainly on arts programmes. So do you recall what it was that you worked with her on? I don't recall, but I think there was more than one. I think there would have been. I think I might have done several. She said that I think she might have got you in

to do something about Shakespeare. And then the last minute, it was no longer Shakespeare. It was a film. I can't remember what film it was. And then my mum says that she said, well, we'll keep Germaine anyway because she'll be brilliant on that as well. And that you were, you discoursed, you know,

wittily and thoughtfully about whatever the different project was, the different film. But it's funny you mentioning my mum because my mum and you are of a similar generation. My mum's a couple of years younger. She was born in 1942. My dad born in 1941. I think you were born in 39. But reading The Female Eunuch and thinking about some of the ideas in it, and specifically the suspicion of the institution of marriage and the idea that perhaps it doesn't serve everyone's needs best, sort of made me understand a little more about my own parents' ambivalence about marriage. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn by saying that because it's an intimate thing. I just wonder whether for you, is it still your

view that marriage is basically a flawed, highly suspect kind of a thing? Well, that really is my position, I think. I mean, when people used to come around asking what I thought about gay marriage, I'd say things like, why do they want to get married? It's a bad system and people suffer in that system. And the more they try to make it work, the more they suffer. Damn it, we can't keep doing this. But every time you turn around, marriage is being eulogised again as if it was the proper destiny of male

and female or female and female or male and male. And I even wonder about heterosex. Is that a totally false position that we're pretending to be better mates than we really are? I don't know, because women work so hard to make marriages work. And it just seems to make the state of bondage even more apparent and more unbearable. When I look around at marriages in my peer group, one thing I notice is I think divorce is slightly less common than it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago. But that a lot of that may be to do with marriage being increasingly

kind of a business proposition and that it makes sense for tax reasons. Divorce is very expensive. You own a house together. There's all these economic factors that militate in favor of keeping a marriage on track. And, you know, that may be all very well, but the side effect is that sex is quite far down the list and, in fact, may not be a feature of or not a significant feature of a lot of marriages now. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is that something you... Does that chime with you in any way?

Well, but a lot of it's got to do with age. Do we get married now younger than we did before? Well, we certainly live longer, right? I think it's actually older. We get married slightly older, but we now live to be 80, 90, 100 years old. So you stay married for maybe 70 years in theory, or you can do. Yes. Which is slightly unrealistic in terms of keeping, you know, mating in captivity, as they say.

keeping, you know, mating in captivity, as they say. Something I think about is to what extent it's realistic or reasonable to expect joyous sex to be taking place within a 70-year-long relationship and to what extent that's important. But that connects with the worst problem, which is how much of the sex that is being had in our current system is actually wanted by both parties, in particular the female. We don't talk about that, really. We don't talk about a woman's right to refuse.

If you're not forthcoming, if you're mean mean if you're fed up with him bored by him sick of his way of making love whatever uh it's yours your fault you're the one who didn't keep the flame burning but you got married when you were children virtually. What did you know about keeping flames burning? Nothing. I find it hard, really, really hard. And you're given advice, but it's somehow assuming that the person giving you the advice knows more about it than you do. Whereas the only person who knows about your marriage is you and your partner,

who we now have to call a partner as if you're both in business together. It's hard. It's really hard. And with both partners, you see, this is the real killer. With both partners working out of the house, how do you make it work? You're both tired. And so that means a moment of not understanding how much structure there had to be to support marriages and people living in monogamous splendor. So what's the answer? Polyamory? Apart from being a silly word. It's silly because it's a mixture of latin and greek right is the prefix poly greek or no poly is greek yeah and amor is latin yeah but it's not even proper latin no but nevertheless polyamory the idea of consensual non-monogamy uh which is

quite a trendy thing now although how workable it is in the long term i think in my own mind at least slightly up for grabs but in a sense it's been around for ages and certainly sexually it avails you of more opportunities but whether it's there's any stability there i think is the question but what are your thoughts, if you have an open marriage, as we used to call them, you are supposed to give each other certain liberties. But I think there were easy ways to betray it. I don't think you were supposed to use the love word except as the Latin, amore.

I think you were supposed to not put too much strain upon the basic relationship. But everything depends on whether there are children, apart from the fact of whether there are debts held in common, whether you're both working off the mortgage and the insurance. The case that's made sometimes is the idea that without marriage, and this is something that's talked about actually by jordan peterson and it's part sort of informed aspects of the kind of the manosphere and incel culture is the idea that if you have a kind of free market of sexual opportunity it becomes very hierarchical very quickly and you have these sort of alpha good-looking high-achieving guys who accrue tons of women who have this sort of virtual um

kind of harems and then these beta guys end up with no one i know that's kind of weird i don't know i'm not advocating that position but do you see that as a possibility so in other words that monogamy kind of gives a chance to us losers, I suppose. Well, confusing some things, I think, because marriage is not the same as monogamy. I find the whole thing grim. I find it grim that young women grow up thinking they've got to find a husband. And that's where the first mistake is made.

You think you find someone who will treat you in a sensitive way or a humane way and you don't because he starts feeling trapped. And why does he feel trapped? I mean, he wants a wife, but he wants a wife who doesn't take up too much time. And these days, it's a wife who has to go to work and earn less than he does. And the thing that used to get me was women are the people you see running at lunchtime. Why are they running? Because they've got all the bills to pay, the food to buy, the choice to make of things to eat or whatever. And it's exhausting. And then they're supposed to be engaging and entertaining and sweet and funny when all they used to want to do was give him his dinner and send him off to the pub.

That was what the pub was for. But now pubs are closing. The one escape hatch has been battened down or is getting battened down. I don't have a smart answer here. I lasted three weeks in my marriage. My husband made me sleep on the floor the very first night. Why? I have no idea. He then went and married Maya Angelou and they lived happily ever after.

So I should actually study it and find out what I did wrong. I know that it comes up a lot in the interviews that you do, the fact that notwithstanding your opposition to marriage, that you got married yourself in May 1968 to a man called Paul Dufour. For three weeks, you say, although I think it was functional for three weeks, but you didn't immediately divorce him, right? In other words, you remained married for a bit longer than three weeks. Is that right?

Well, no, I don't think it is right. I mean, as far as I was concerned, I was gone. I ran away and he followed me. And I said to him, I ran away because I was frightened and I can't live with a man I'm afraid of. But lots of women are living with men they're afraid of. This is a bit of a sidetrack, but let's stay on it for a minute. Why did you marry him? Because he asked me. I think it's like when you had your 16th birthday party and you had to get a kiss before the dreaded night so they couldn't say sweet 16 and never been kissed it was a bit

like that and actually i quite did i quite fancy him probably you said i think you did i mean i'm not not i don't think i should be telling you that but i think you did and i think uh i think he when you saw him he had sort of cement or paint paint on his boots and maybe he looked like a kind of like a hunky bit of rough or something, whatever the term would be. And you shagged each other's brains out, I think, if I can put it that way. I'm trying to remember. You've said that clever women should marry truck drivers. Oh, yes, I think.

I think it's the notion that you should be in competition with your husband is a bad notion. But, of course, if you're a poet, you marry a poet and you end up being Sylvia Platt. But we always think that we need that status in our husband. He doesn't think he needs that status in us. So there's an imbalance at the very beginning. And I mean, Ted Hughes now, what do we think? Ted Hughes is a great poet, and Sylvia is a woman poet, a female poet, and a martyr.

I mean, looking back over the things you've written and the things that have been written about you, I think what struck me more than anything, which may say more about me and my prurient interests, was the amount of lust in there. Are you okay talking about sexual matters? I'm only asking it to be polite, really, but I'm going to assume that you are. I'm only asking it to be polite, really, but I'm going to assume that you are. And then, so going back, would you say, but you were co-founder of a pornographic magazine called Suck, based in Amsterdam, which I think you said at the time was intended as a sort of, I suppose, a more thoughtful or less exploitative alternative to magazines like Screw and Hustler. Tell me a bit about that, if you would.

Well, it was pretty straightforward. I hated the idea of Screw for obvious reasons. And we know that most of the language for sex is destructive. It is about screwing rather than whatever the other thing is that you do. But making love these days, what does it mean? It means whatever you want it to mean, I suppose. And so I wanted to do suck because it's gentle, because you don't kill people, but you can certainly kill them with penetrative sex, easy peasy.

And I really wanted it to be different in that we didn't use models for the sexual pictures. We used ourselves, which was pretty daring, I suppose, because we were middle-aged, all of us. And, of course, what actually happened was that they used a picture of me on page three, which in those days was a significant number because it was the page three girls in the tabloid press that were causing the fuss with feminists, for example. And I really wanted us to make nudity not a situation

in which the nude people were being oppressed or rejected or dehumanised or whatever. It would be us in all of our middle-aged unglory. So I'm going to throw a quote at you here we go from an article in oz that i think either you wrote or maybe it was an interview you were quoted as saying star fuck is a name i dig because all the men who get inside me are stars even if they're plumbers they're star plumbers. What do you think I meant? I don't know what I meant.

I've no idea. A star fucker was someone who looked for a star to add to her list. And so people like the Beatles or people like Jimi Hendrix were very desirable because they were stars. It was from a piece called The Universal Tongue Bath, a groupie's vision. Another quote was, the group fuck is the highest ritual expression of our faith, but it has to happen as a special sort of grace. Well, yes, that was probably after the wet dream film festival where we all trooped across to holland and watched tedious porno movies and somebody said we need to get it on we're being

hypocritical we're watching other people and it's synthetic and da-di-da. And we did all end up on the stage behind a screen that projected our image and we ended up apparently having group sex, which is the highest expression of the porno religion. But porn isn't a religion, it's an industry, as you and I well know. But that was part of it. It was meant to be playing, that what you're doing in sex when you're not trying to procreate or cement a relationship is you're playing. You seem to have a moment where you got into rock music in the late 60s,

having been more maybe classically orientated. And then part of that was throwing yourself into the rock scene and announcing yourself as a groupie. What was that all about? And how much was that theoretical and how much of that was actually practical? What I was trying to do here was to elevate women's sexuality, however promiscuous and playful, to the same level that men's sexuality was raised. Now, the person who actually redeemed the groupies from Approbrium was another friend of mine. I've forgotten his name. You know who I mean. Is it a musician?

It is a musician, and it's a famous musician who died of prostate cancer. Frank? Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa. Sorry, Zappa means plow of course so i'm skirting away from the thought of hard work but i made up a personality for myself as dr grier the day tripper which was meant to say look this is how we play and people know us And so for quite a few musicians, they were lonely on tour. There was misery on tour.

To know that there was a groupie who knew the ropes, who knew what you needed and had a room where you could get some sleep or where you could even bring someone else, we were like hostesses, really. I didn't do as much of that as anybody else did as a matter of fact but I wrote about it in order to elevate the uh the type really did you have a thing with Robert Plant or not look one thing is the men in my life have never written about me, which I've always found extraordinary because the Spice Girls only had to hop into bed for five seconds and it was all over the tabloids.

But my boyfriends were better behaved, so there's that. What was the other part of that question? I've forgotten it already. I think I was inviting you to be indiscreet about some of your past relationships and you were very politely declined. No, no, I wouldn't do that. The really important thing to me is that they've never written about me. And for some of them, it would have been a blessing because they needed the money, but they didn't do it. And I will always be grateful for that. And so I'm not going to do the same thing to them.

You're basing that on a famous photograph which appears online, which is of Robert Plant and me sitting together talking. There was more to it than that, but not much. We were both travelling. One went one way, one went the other way. I respected him as a musician and I liked him as a person. Looking back, do you feel satisfied with sort of how your romantic life has gone, if that's not a weird question? Do you feel like you've sucked, you know, you've drunk life to the

dregs in that sense? Well, it sounds a bit precious, but I don't think I ever thought of my life as requiring that sort of satisfaction. I always loved what I did. I had fun doing it. I did it as well as I could, and sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was very, very good. Sometimes it wasn't good at all. But we all have that. You do that.

I do that. But we all have that. You do that. I do that. Well, I'm conscious. I'm 53 and I'm conscious of the years going by. And suddenly I'm on the other side of the hill with a slight feeling of, oh, wow, did I get everything out of that passage of life that I was supposed to? When you look back, do you find yourself thinking about the past much or do you stay very much sort of in the here and now? It's usually things that trigger it, like a death in the paper. Someone I know, the one where you think, I meant to do this, this and this and I didn't do it and now you're gone and now I'll never be able to do it.

I hate that. And I am distracted. I'm not a good, I'm a terrible friend. It's the one thing I should regret is that I ignore people. I leave them out. I forget them. I get all involved in working out which fern grows on which aspect of my garden than I do in finding out if someone's lonely and miserable

and ill. Well, I mean, that's very human, I think. I think I'm a bit guilty of that. So, you know, as we speak, it's 2023, I believe. And, you know, going back over your work, reading The Female Eunuch and dipping into other books of yours and, you know, going back over your work, reading The Female Eunuch and dipping into other books of yours. And, you know, so much has changed in the culture. The Female Eunuch came out in 1970, which is 53 years ago, unless my maths has gone wrong. And with all the changes that have taken place in the last five decades, whether you see any sense of progress having been made? Progress is an odd idea, isn't it? Do I think things are better? I wish. I wish. I mean, one of the lead stories in today's paper is about how they've discovered that endometriosis is genetically connected to some other hideous problem that women have.

Women are now sicker than they were when I wrote The Female Eunuch. And they're also, in this country, they're paying the fortune, a fortune, to get ordinary medical treatment, which I find amazing. $100 for a visit to the doctor. I mean, England gets a bit grim from time to time. I don't think it's that grim. Extraordinary. Endometriosis. That disease didn't even exist when I wrote The Female Eunuch. So if you're asking me about progress, finding new diseases that you can't treat cannot really be called progress. What about we have a situation now where there are more women in the workplace.

I mean, I'm just positing this to sort of gauge your thoughts on it. More women in the workplace, more women at the highest echelons of power, female know, female prime ministers and presidents and whatnot. Do you see that as a kind of improvement? It would depend, wouldn't it, on what you thought these people in power were actually doing and who was pulling the strings for them. I mean, women come and go from centres of power, but then they end up being monsters, like Imelda Marcos, for example. There's a woman everybody knows. And I watched with some disappointment. I mean, New Zealand had three major heads of government,

New Zealand had three major heads of government and they've all gone and they're all doing chores now for the UN and this, that and the other. And you think, but what difference did they make? Where are we now? Have we got a new way of organising people, a more humane way, a gentler way, a more respectful way. And I don't think we do. And I'm adverting on the culture generally. What about, I'm going to throw a couple of other things at you, which you may or may not be aware of. Does the term WAP mean anything to you, W-A-P? No, not really. But it's a bit like woke. I can't make much sense out of that either.

Well, let's come on to woke. But let's do WAP first. WAP was a song by Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, I believe. And it's an acronym for wet ass pussy. And I think it's a celebration of womanhood and specifically the joy of being a well-lubricated lady. And it became controversial in the culture because it was celebrated by some as a sort of expression of kind of liberated sense of sexuality

and the idea that a vagina that might have been seen as almost over-aroused and therefore suspect was now being seen as something a positive although personally i don't remember any celebrations of dry vaginas like i don't think that was ever a thing and then some people said oh well this is just actually the patriarchy in a different form but does the idea of a song that celebrates um a wet sorry i can't believe i'm saying this i feel a bit embarrassed now does the idea of celebrating a well-lubricated vagina in song, does that seem like a positive? It was a big moment in the culture.

I wonder why you think an ass is a vagina. This is a conversation we may need to have somewhere else. No, no, ass is just like a suffix. It's an ass. Yeah, it is. But in that sense, in the idiom that i'm using ass is just a suffix that means uh kind of very like if i said to you you're a stupid ass i wouldn't ever say this germaine but if i said to someone are you a stupid ass piece of shit

it just means um i think it just means a metonym for human. Well, I would choose to disagree with that, actually. Most of our casual epithets are loaded with meaning, and I would think that was similar. A wet ass, to me, is a significant thing, and it's not necessarily that easy to have a wedlock. You cannot always produce one when you want one. And you can't always want one when you've accidentally produced one. Sex is difficult.

It's tricky. And I think that people are embarrassed now more and more. You're meant to know all kinds of things that you don't know. Okay, no, I think that's fair. How are you doing, by the way? You've got your wine there, and I'm just conscious you haven't touched it. I think I'd like another coffee, if that's allowed. Does the name Andrew Tate mean anything to you?

No. Okay. I don't think it does. What about the term manosphere? Meaning the world of men. So basically, in the increasingly sort of virtual culture of the internet and social media, there's various influencers, i.e. kind of online gurus and content creators, who've projected a sort of man-focused vision of the world. And I think if I can summarize it, the idea is that feminism either went too far or was fundamentally misconceived, that the traditional gender norms of the man as provider,

the man as alpha warrior, that those reflect an essential idea of how the genders should interrelate. And the most prominent and controversial of these various gurus of the manosphere, the manosphere is the online world of men's rights, is Andrew Tate. So he's a very controversial person in the culture. And it seems to reflect something about maybe if I put a generous gloss on it, the idea of men being slightly directionless and young men in a climate that's more influenced by feminism, at least now than it was maybe 30 or 40 years ago. The idea is that young men are confused and young men don't know how they fit into the world. And the idea of toxic masculinity, which obviously is deplored appropriately, but that it leaves them with no positive idea of what it means to be a

man. And so people like Andrew Tate step into the gap and fill their heads with these kind of very outdated notions of what manhood is. So I suppose I'm just, since you haven't heard of him, it's maybe a moot point but do you recognize that as an issue in the culture at all have you noticed that there's this sort of resurgent almost revanchist sort of men's rights activism yes i think i do recognize that but i watch men a lot because i i wish women could learn some of the things they know how to do and one of the things they know how to do is to be clubbable to be together as an undemanding group who give each other support by meaningless activities like obscene jokes or playing bar billiards or whatever.

And I wish women could learn that a bit more because they tend to be demanding of friendships. Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. Whereas sometimes the real secret is to tell me less, tell me less, tell me less. Take care of me. Make me laugh. Tell me a joke.

Let's run a sweepstake all those things men do okay my coffee's coming in it's a good time for a sip of wine if you're thinking of having one goody i'm not instructing you to i've already had several but you didn't see it must be piped in in a way that i can't see um in contemporary academic discourse genders seem very much as a construct, I think. There's a view that, I don't know if it's still fashionable, it definitely used to be, that there's no essential differences between men and women. Everything is a result of kind of acculturation and conditioning.

Is that your view or do you think men and women are fundamentally different? Is that your view or do you think men and women are fundamentally different? It's a bit hard, this question, I think, because there are some things about being a woman that do not transfer. You might think that you've got the wrong body, but you can't really have the wrong body. I mean, I've tried very hard not to talk on this issue because I realise that there's a whole body of thought now which wants to erect gender into something which is given to the person, whereas in my mind, you're born with a sex, you can't opt out of it. And

when you come into maturity, sexual maturity, it'll be brought home to you. I mean, menstruation's no fun. You don't really terribly want to do it, but you do it because you don't have very much choice. And if you don't do it, you get nervous because something's gone wrong and I think there you are inventing manhood as a gender an imaginary thing a construct and on the other hand you've got this sex thing that is going to grab you it'll grab you at certain stages in your life it will grab you when you get diseases that are connected to your genes and your construction, and you realise that sex is going to be there. And to me it's really important that our earth is populated because of sexual reproduction.

So my feeling about I don't say anything in the discourse because I'm listening to what the people who are inventing it now and building it now are saying about it, but I don't want to intervene. I think being 80, how old am I, 84? The time I shut up is my feeling. I mean, there's a lot of different things to think about in what you just said. I I mean I do think it's worth reflecting that your views on the trans issue have been extremely controversial and I

guess I could say divisive and that for some people me even speaking to you would be a dereliction but I didn't even I didn't utter them though I. I didn't utter them. I'm told I'm transphobic. I didn't say I was transphobic. I'm perfectly happy to accept people who think they're transgender. I can't see why you wouldn't say you were transgender if you felt it, but it's a matter of feeling it rather than it being a condition of human reproduction. It isn't. I think the quote that gets recycled a lot is in 2015 you said, just because you lop off your penis and wear a dress doesn't make you

a fucking woman. That got you into hot water. Who says I said that? I don't recall saying that. It was in 2015 to Rebecca Rootbecca root a trans comedian it wasn't perhaps a considered opinion i've never met rebecca root i don't think i ever said that you won't find it in my papers anywhere they're all at melbourne university if you want to look but i don't think i said that there must have been a context supposing i did say it, but I don't recall the context either.

I think, I mean, there was a time when I used to say to my workers in the rainforest that we needed to be more Aboriginal, and they would say to me, they thought they were quite Aboriginal enough, thank you very much. they thought they were quite Aboriginal enough, thank you very much. And then so we had to discover could we be Aboriginal? Could we put up our hands? Self-identifying is supposed to be the name of the game. So we are self-identifying. I'm Aboriginal.

Oh, no, you're not. Because one of the things you think you have is the right to your appellation, the right to the thing you are. And if somebody tells you that you're not English or not human or not, you're going to say, yes, I am, if you do identify that way. But it's too complicated. This self-identifying thing, half of us are misled about our identity. It's a really evanescent thing, your identity. When you get old, believe me, your identity changes big time. When you turn into the person nobody listens to and you have to learn it and it's hard. And then you have to find ways of getting people to let you get your view out, your statement finished.

And if they've already decided you're as mad as a meat axe, it won't do, it won't happen. I mean, I suppose there's a division in the culture now that it's seen that the left is maybe more censorious and less tolerant of dissenting opinions and more opposed to free speech. I mean, you yourself were, well, you weren't, I don't know if the term would be no platform,

but you were invited to speak at Cardiff University. That's right, isn't it? And then there was a small protest or some people decided that you shouldn't come, that't come because of your views. But the university didn't let it happen. There was a small group of people who had posters, I think, and when it came to the point of not allowing me to speak, the university cleared the protesters away and I spoke.

But I'm on their side. If they want me to be shut up, then fine, go for it. I don't think anyone's got a God-given right to speak. That sort of thing doesn't worry me terribly. I mean, you can always speak somewhere else. You've always got another place to make a noise. It doesn't frighten me terribly. I expect students to rebel.

I expect them to object. And I expect as a teacher to have to play my corner, to actually have to deal with them and not dismiss them. Probably an unsatisfactory answer, but it doesn't worry me, this notion that people will shout me down. Shout away. Well, that sounds like a healthy attitude. You know, so basically you mentioned your age, 84, so I can say it

and hopefully that's not rude. What preoccupies you? you yeah but why would you think it was uh I don't know that's convention isn't it I interviewed Joan Collins a few weeks ago and she didn't want me to say how old she was but either way I know that some older women and people perhaps I think men are all right with it don't like you to say their age you must be aware of that surely yeah we're not worried about it at all. I was wondering if you asked Joan whether her husband was gay. What makes you say that?

Just curiosity, really. Right. Best reason for asking a question. But why? I mean, perhaps I'm being a little bit puckish, but why would you think he might be gay? Well, anybody might be gay. Okay. You're not going to be pinned down on this. I think I know how your mind works and you're

thinking because she's 90 and he's 50 something that why would a straight man be interested in a woman who is so much older? Is that what you're thinking? Not quite. No, I know lots of men who have been interested in women a lot older. I could include myself. Okay. What's the biggest age gap in any relationship that you've been in? I can't remember. You opened the door to that question and I went through it. Yes, I realised that.

I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't have. Let me see. I have to be careful now because they're all bloody dead. Hi, I'm Louis Theroux and you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now, back to my conversation with Germaine Greer. Back to my conversation with Germaine Greer. I should probably mention Me Too, having been such a big cultural moment,

and I think you were a bit of a Me Too sceptic. Is that fair? I wasn't really a sceptic. I just kind of, I thought, oh, for Christ's sake, here we are, we've got victims of sexual assault. And then we've got a whole bunch of people saying me too, as if it was something to be proud of. Well, bugger that for luck. It isn't. And we should be better at fighting it off when it happens. I just don't like the idea of us saying I too am a victim and you could argue when people are sexually molesting you,

how much have you got to do with the fact that you're in a situation in which you can be molested? You know, if you're in a hotel room in Hollywood, where's the surprise when the man who's pouring the drinks tries to get it on? None. That sounds a bit like victim blaming. Oh, well, please don't think that because I know what it is to be a victim and I don't blame the victim especially when the victim is young especially when the victim is inexperienced and or on job experience or whatever it's just the whole idea of I'm one it happened to me I'm going to invite you on to another controversial area because you wrote a

book as well a pamphlet really called on. And one of the things you've said is, I think you've sort of suggested that, forgive me if I'm misquoting, but the idea that rape isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman and that maybe it's been sort of freighted with too much kind of meaning, like it's made out to be worse than it is.

Is that sort of what you've said more or less? And is there anything you want to expand on about that? I wouldn't say it like that but what I would say is if you believe because you've had a pretty unsatisfactory episode of failed intimacy, if you believe that you're ruined, you are devalued, you are rubbish, you are to be jettisoned, then that's your problem, not the rape itself. Half the time when people have sex, one person thinks it's one thing and the other person thinks it's another. And I don't think you've got the right then to go racing down the street after them and shoot them because they were wrong and when you tell me that the man who raped me when I was 19 should have gone to jail for 10 years which is what the tariff was I can't accept that at all. I mean, when it happened to me, I didn't even ask the man his name

and I realise to this day I don't know what his name was. I don't want to go there if it's in any way painful. I don't really want to talk about it at length. It was rather funny. When I'd written a piece on rape for The Guardian, length. It was rather funny when I'd written a piece on rape for The Guardian, I got some snotty letters saying that I didn't know what rape was, that I was clearly ignorant, that I had said that it was this devastating blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And so then I wrote the article and said, well, you may not realize this, but I do know what rape is. And it was unpleasant.

It was horrible. But I didn't want to kill him. In fact, I was really worried that he was mad. I thought any man who thinks he can have intimacy with a woman like this is mad. And I wanted to help him because he kept saying, what did he say? Help me. Help me. Help me. He said, help me.

And as we're sending him to jail for 10 years, I would have been mortified if that had happened, utterly mortified. They never caught the man who did it. What, to me? Yes. I never complained. I was working as a housekeeper for some young men who had a flat in St Kilda Road, and I was staggering in the street in shock,

and a car came. And in the car was a man and a woman, and I knew that I could ask them to help me. I kind of knew that if I asked a car full of rugby players to help me, it would have been a mistake. So I asked them and they took me back home. And then the guys who took me to the party came home. And then there was a whole other story because they decided what to do

about this bloke because they knew about him. They'd had problems to do with him for a long time. So they just told him that if he went to Torquay or to Hotham, they would kill him. And he believed them. I never saw him again. I would like to talk just for a minute, if we can, about your upbringing.

You've written about it extensively, and in particular in your book, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. Tell me a little bit about the household growing up. I know you had a couple of siblings. You've said that your mum could be quite brutal, that she hit you with a stick. Your dad was a sort of distant, enigmatic figure. He'd come back from war kept to himself I think he perhaps had relationships outside the home maybe with a secretary but what would you like to say about that that might shed light on people's understanding of you well remember that this

is not just my story it's my sisters and my brothers and they're both around. I had a different time because my father was away at the war. My little sister was conceived when he came back, but it was a terrible time. I don't know what my mother had been up to. I was a child. I just didn't know. Other people would have told me, but I didn't ask them. She'd had a relationship with, was it with a soldier or what was it?

She had some sort of a relationship with someone, we think, right? I don't know that she had a relationship with anybody. I certainly didn't see any such thing. I do remember that one night she made lobster Thermidor for someone and she gave me some before I was put to bed early and I vomited all night long. She nearly lost me, which probably would have been a stroke of luck. But I mean, she was different with my sister and different again with my brother,

what's to say? And I ran away. Started a lifetime career of being a bolter. Why did you run away? I was just sick of being victimized and kicked around. And there was a really terrible moment when I asked if I could have a banana. And she said, they're for my children. So I went.

I wasn't a child. It wasn't her child. I could go. And I went. And I went and went and went and went and kept on going. She was young when she married my father, and then there was a war. I mean, it was a big disappointment. Then he came back and I remember we went to Spencer Street to meet him and we couldn't recognise him.

We went up and down the station looking in every face. Then we realised that an old man standing against a stanchion on the station was my mother's husband. And she put him under her arm and took him home. And do you suppose they were happy people? you were growing up did they seem as though they loved one another to what extent were they kind of imprisoned within gender norms that prevailed at the time and how all of that trickled down to you so my dad went to the office every day he never worked an afternoon in his life he would would go to the CTA, the Commercial Travellers Association, and he was the principal referee for all the card games and he was the referee for,

what's his name, the billiards player, Lindrum, Walter Lindrum. So that was pretty full at life, though he had no complaints there. He went off every morning in his car, leaving mum at home without a car, of course, which was par for the course. I think she made his life pretty difficult. But I didn't make a judgment of that sort. I was a child. I don't think I could have done. He sold advertising space in a newspaper, is that right?

Advertising manager, I think, was his title. And he mostly sold advertising space to the schmutter merchants on Flinders Lane. Tailors, do you mean? Schmutter is Yiddish for rags. The rag trade, that's what it's called. And I believed that I was Jewish. Why did you believe you were Jewish? Because my father's mother was called Emma Rachel Wise and I thought Rachel Wise, Jewish name, Jewish matriarch,

here we go, I'm Jewish. And my ambition when I was little was not to be part of the Holocaust. I didn't want to be guilty. So I learnt Yiddish. I can still sing the Hatikvah. I joined the Habibah players. What is the Hatikvah? The Hatikvah.

I can still sing it. I just can't remember what it is. That's life for you. Who were your heroes? I mean, it was a suburban existence, and then you became obviously an eminent best-selling author and intellectual, but what was the launchpad for that? And what were you reading? What did you claim as your own?

What pieces of culture spoke to you clearly and distinctly? Well, when I was 12, I read all of Dickens. I would sit on the train and read it and carry it with me everywhere until it was read and then get another one and another one and read them all. I mainly read whatever books I could get my hands on. We didn't have very many. In fact, we had all

the free books given away by the Herald and Weekly Times. And Daddy would bring those all and stack them in the little walnut bookshelf about this high. That was our library. But then I had membership of the Brighton Public Library. I used to ride my bike there and get a book. And I used to always pick the book according to its mass. It had to be a big, fat book because it had to last. Then you went off to university. You fell in with a Bohemian set. Is that fair? And correct me if I'm wrong, Clive James is there in the mix somewhere.

Various glamorous, artistic and interesting people. And this would have been what, the late 50s, early 60s? Did it feel as though you were part of a kind of an emerging cultural movement? First of all, I went to Melbourne University on a teacher's college scholarship. And then I had to go and teach and then I realised I had to teach something called civics and I said, I can't teach that, it's nonsense. And I ran away. I did what I used to do.

I ran away. But I didn't meet Clive James until I was in Sydney. And so then we were part of what would have been an anarchist cell, which I loved. What did it mean, being an anarchist? Well, it meant, I'm finding it interesting at the moment because people are talking about authoritarian government. I was listening to a discussion of politics in Gaza, I think,

about how the tendency now is towards authoritarianism. We existed to oppose authoritarianism, but however we were to be governed and marshaled and pushed about. It had to be rational rather than religious or even political in that sense. And we did read Bakunin and other anarchists from Russia. Did you? Mm-hmm. Do you still think of yourself as an anarchist? Well, I'm not in favour of people having power over other people for no good reason. But do I think of myself as an anarchist? Well, I'm not in favour of people having power over other people for no good reason.

But do I think of myself as an anarchist? Yeah, probably still a bit, still a bit. So how did you wind up at Cambridge and what was that like? I had a job at Sydney University and I made the application for a Commonwealth scholarship and got one. And so off I went to Cambridge. And when you were at Cambridge, one of the striking things was that you got involved in the comedy set and you were part of the Footlights. I was the first female member of the Footlights.

I actually got into the Footlights by doing a skit based on a Barry Humphreys joke, which I never acknowledged. Wicked of me. What was the joke? It was about how you get an Australian accent, and it involved an egg timer. I mean, an egg slicer, I should say. And it was quite funny.

And was it Eric Idle that was part? I mean, a lot of the Monty Python people were there at that time. Is that right? I wasn't the same time. They were a year before me. I was the next year. It's more of the goodies. Was it? I noticed Australia watches the goodies. That makes me laugh. That's amazing. We haven't watched it in England for 40 years. Well, they still watch the goodies in Australia to this day? Yeah, they're on every day, I think, yeah. I used to love The Goodies. And that makes me laugh.

For our younger audience, we should explain who they were. It was Bill Oddie, Graham Gardner and Timbrook Taylor. They sort of played these sort of, well, it was almost like they were boys in men's bodies living together and getting into adventures. Was that more or less what it was? Very Cambridge, very public school. And then you actually worked in TV comedy on a show called Nice Time,

which you co-hosted with Kenny Everett, which is still up on YouTube for those who are curious. And it's quite funny, still holds up. It's never. It's pretty funny in parts i mean it like a lot of old television the grammar is a bit weird and skits that might be funny at 20 or 30 seconds length seem to last forever but i mean people may may not even remember kenny everett now but he was very famous throughout the 70s and 80s and he was gay and um he was again

someone i used to love watching growing up were you aware that ken he was gay and um he was again someone i used to love watching growing up were you aware that kenny was gay and were you conscious that that was might be difficult for him in that cultural setting in that society in that time not as long as it was show business really just about everybody in show business was gay he was pretty pretty safe, I think. I knew him pretty well and I knew all about that and I knew who the boyfriend was and I was glad for him. Before he met the boyfriend, he married a woman who was a jazz singer. I didn't know that. But he had a few boyfriends who had an eye on the main chance. But I think we all did. I mean, I got all tangled up with George Best. That was pretty funny.

In what way? What do you want me to say? Romantically. In a pretty obvious way. He was a good-looking man. I was very, I was down on him. He was a fucking good footballer as well. But, I mean, what happened there is that I used to ignore George.

We all drank in the Brown Ball, which is a hotel near Granada, and the footballers would come after the game. And so one night I was there, socking back the suds, and he said to me, you don't fancy me, do you? I said, George, for Christ's sake, there's not a woman in this room who doesn't fancy you. What do you think I am? A monster, abnormal.

Not that it made a difference. I did not immediately leap upon him or vice versa. So I thought you'd revealed that you had a fling with George Best and now it sounds like you're announcing that you did not have a fling with him. Is that what we're going with? No, I've never announced that I had a fling with George Best. No, I thought you said you got tangled up with him and I think I got two and two and made 16 out of it.

Yep. hi me again louis through just to remind you you're listening to the louis through podcast and now back to my conversation with jermaine greer i'm conscious of not taking up too much of your time, so maybe we should talk a little bit about just how you feel about feminism, I'm assuming that you still view yourself as a feminist, that going forward, do you sort of survey the picture and see other people who you think are carrying the torch in any way, or you're not that interested? How do you see the scene at the moment?

Well, let's see. It's really interesting to see in a place like our care, in aged care, what these older women are like. They have their own style, their own fashion, their own way of reacting. They're generally fairly fit, which I'm happy to see. It's still there, but what's going on at the moment, and I'm not sure if it's really going to take off, is that feminism is beginning to reappear in the schedules of talks and so forth. And it looks as if feminism is going to resist the attempt to turn it into single-sex marriage and sexual identity and so on,

that these are women who've lived their lives as well as they could, have been independent, have been through the marriage mill, come out the other side, watching their daughters go through the same thing. And I'm really touched to see how many of the women in aged care here are visited all the time by their daughters. It is wonderful to see. all the time by their daughters. It is wonderful to see.

So the last thing I do is think, you know, oh, I'm 84 and so now it's all over. It's not. But it is changing. There's a change coming and there's going to be a resistance to this peculiar sexless or sexological or whatever it is that's going on. I mean, the women are kind of taken aback by the noisiness of the transgender movement, by the staginess of it. And I mean, I think the one thing I said that got me a bit of immediate reaction,

I said something about how seeing their version of womanhood, it strikes me as hostile and caricaturish. I'm going to push back on that, because I think that actually, you know, part of how female gender is expressed is caricaturish and hostile to women. I mean, you could make the argument that false eyelashes, Botox in the lips, plastic surgery all over the place, that that's not only is it not unique to people who are trans, but that actually that's kind of epidemic across the culture. You know, it's part of Instagram culture.

And that you take the point that it's been sort of been over, whether it's because of capitalism or some other reason, to a great extent we still live in that sort of slightly Stepford Wives-esque culture? Well, it is very Stepford Wives-esque. I don't think that's spontaneous expression of womanhood. I think that's pretty peculiar stuff, really. I think that's pretty peculiar stuff, really.

I think it is actually a parody, a grotesque parody, and mainly driven by hostility. And part of the background of what we've been talking about all night is an enduring hostility to women. is an enduring hostility to women so that even men who are very susceptible to this kind of gross parody will go for it, will react to it. Don't ask yourself what happens next. I'm going to throw a quote at you. Women have very little idea how much men hate them. Do you think that's still true?

Yes, I do think it's still true. It's not so much that men hate them a lot. It's that all men hate all women some of the time. And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can cost you your life. You don't really know what the suppressed rage with women is, but it's there. Well, I think we've arrived at a good point,

suitably dark and troubling and uncompromising. I thought it might be funny if I tried to explain, if I mansplained feminism to you, that would have been a kind of a meta-joke. Go on. No, I can't do it do it do it uh you it's not funny anymore um it's just uh it's just human rights for women isn't it it's it's is it equal rights for women what how would you define it we should have started here well feminism uh in my notion means identifying women. Can a man be a feminist?

Yes, but they're not often. They tend to think they are, and they tend to feel as if they could take it over and get it and do it better. That's the next thing. But feminism, as far as I'm concerned, is looking at every question that comes up from the point of view of what does this do for women does it do them ill or does it assist them in what is already a difficult life path to take and what about this idea that feminism is obsolete you know that you hear this quite a bit now that oh well women are at the commanding heights of all the industries and whatnot, and actually we don't really need it anymore. And, in fact, by some metrics, men are killing themselves more,

dying younger, more depressed, more anxious, and actually we need to be thinking about the men a bit more. Well, I could agree with all of of that except in my experience men think about themselves a lot i could keep going for another three hours that sounded almost like a double entendre but i feel as though we kind of reached a good conclusion which was to do with um you know there's still work to do really and um how how are you doing, Germaine? I hope that was okay for you. I'm conscious it's not ideal in the sense that you're 5, 10,000, 10,000 miles away. But I really enjoyed the chat. And I feel, you know, very privileged that I got to

talk to you. And maybe one day, we can meet in the flesh. But until then, this will have to do. Well, I've enjoyed it. Thank thank you now i've got to go away and think about stuff that i haven't thought about for ages oh have i dredged up a lot of stuff about kenny everett and george best those were the fun bits those are the fun not objecting to them so there we are jermaine greer and um i think you'll agree it was interesting and times maybe uh well I was going to say close to the line I probably a bit over the line in the sense that um I imagine there will be people who are offended there was content that was controversial and what was striking was that at one moment she said I'm going to stop talking about subjects to do with, you know, the trans community. And that felt, well, I was thinking like, yeah, I think that's probably a

good shout. And then couldn't seem to help herself. And at times clearly that served her, her willingness to be unafraid and to go straight to the subject that people don't want to speak about or don't want her to speak about and i understand that some people will be offended some listeners will be those aren't the positions of the podcast i think we have a podcast where we're open to having guests with whom we don't align in every respect a clarification about um jermaine's comment when she characterized the trans community. I said that she put it to Rebecca Root, a trans comedian. In fact, and Germaine said, I never said that. In fact, it seems Germaine never said it to Root. Sources do show it was put to Root as a statement from Germaine by Victoria Derbyshire

on her show. I mean, there's more that I could unpack. When I talk about WAP and the epithets wet ass applied to pussy, I think I've listened to it a couple of times. I think we're at loggerheads. I think I've listened to it a couple of times. I think we're at loggerheads. I think she takes ass to mean the female genitalia. And the thing she says after that about, well, it's quite hard to get a wet ass sometimes. And sometimes you don't want a wet ass. I think she's talking about female arousal. That's the best sense I could make of it because I can't think of many contexts in which people go around thinking like, oh, I wish I had a wet ass and I can't get one right now. Right? Is that making sense to you at home? Either way, maybe that's what I need. That was part of my journey. Fate had for me was that I needed to explain in cringe-making detail Megan Thee Stallion lyrics

to an icon of second wave feminism. I deserved that. It was even more awkward than it sounded. A documentary exists, we can put this in the show notes, called Town Bloody Hall, where you can see Germaine very much in her pomp as a sort of statuesque and deeply impressive figure at this town hall event where feminism is being discussed with norman mailer the american literary lion and it all slightly kicks off and there's various leading feminist figures all slightly talking at cross purposes and i think it's made by um d.a pennebaker and her appearance appearances on some of these amazing old comedy shows, including the one with Kenny Everett, you can still find on YouTube,

in which she acquits herself as a comedy professional. What else can we say? She's an older woman. She won't be with us forever. It's been a kind of a cozy space, the sort of the Louis Th theroux podcast space like you know there's moments of grit and there's certainly we like to get into subjects that have some heft some seriousness some conflict i feel like this is a new bar for us i'd rather have this be more interesting and have more moments of grit even at the risk of it feeling uncomfortable at times, rather than have everything kind of blanded out. Former podcast guest Nick Cave talks on this subject as well. I refer you to that episode. He didn't want everything put through a sieve of,

what did he say? Ideological rectitude. It wasn't that, but everything blended out. He doesn't sound like that, but I only have one Australian accent and it's the one I have. You know, if we've got Australian fans, I probably shouldn't be doing a bad Australian accent. If you've been affected by sexual violence or any of the issues raised in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com slash resources. Credits. Produced by Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Maan Al-Yaziri.

The production manager was Francesca Bassett. And the executive producer was Aaron Fellows. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira. This is a Mindhouse production for Spotify.