Pathetic old cow

Posted on March 24, 2004 by Ken Parish
Posted in Print media

Robert Corr sums up my attitude to Germaine Greer's latest repugnant attention-seeking effort in the Sydney Morning Herald, about footballers and gang rape. I just chose to ignore the pathetic old cow to avoid gratifying her increasingly pathological desire to be noticed. But Rob's spot-on demolition job is worth recording.

10 Comments

  1. Geoff Honnor
    March 24, 2004

    It's not online but Luke Slattery ran the ultimate
    Germo demolition job, in last weekend's Oz Review.
    It was a concise, workpersonlike shredding. Take this gem:

    "La Greer is beginning to look like something of a one-woman vaudeville act on some virtual London stage. There's a touch of cerebral fizz to the performance but so much of it (getting her kit off for the camera or disgorging the details of her private life) is an over-share. If she hadn't so successfully inhabited her own public persona, which combines elements of the Wife of Bath, Betsey trotwood and Miss Havisham, it would have been necessary for Barry Humphries to invent it. While Greer increasingly rivals Dame Edna for grotesquerie, she is more laughed at than laughed with."

  2. wendy
    March 25, 2004

    "over-share" - heh heh!

  3. Norman
    March 26, 2004

    Even when I despise the messenger's motives, and think most of the message is of little value, I try to analyse the claims and see whether there could be anything worthwhile in it. The problem goes far beyond Germaine's attention seeking, and Robert's simplistic knee jerk reaction. And until the media are willing to discuss the underlying problem ba\ehaviours in an open, non moralising manner, free also from the restraints of political correctness, we're not serving the best interests of any of the genuine victims.

  4. Tony.T
    March 26, 2004

    Here you go Geoff, Greer's last two articackles and Luke Slattery's slapdown all in one hermetically sealed post....

    http://aftergrog.drivelwarehouse.com/archives/007345.html

  5. Tony.T
    March 26, 2004

    BTW, I laughed at that too, Wen

  6. Manas
    March 28, 2004

    Good response, Ken - "pathetic old cow" was a nice touch.

    I too found the article appalling, though perhaps not to the same extent I find appalling that any self-respecting feminist could take such a view of other women, and so blatantly excuse the culture that permits such behaviour.

  7. Manas
    March 28, 2004

    I agree Ken. An appalling diatribe.

  8. Norman
    March 28, 2004

    I'm not averse to the messenger under attack being "shot". But isn't anyone concerned about the possibility there was a baby among that bathwater --- or does this touch upon an underlying problem society would prefer to overlook?

  9. Geoff Honnor
    March 28, 2004

    Actually Norman, yes. I don't share Ken's laudatory appraisal of Robert's critique. As far as I could see, Robert's concern was misplaced. His take seemed to me to be along the lines of Greer saying that women have only themselves to blame for rape. It's a woefully wrong-headed interpretation of Greer's critique.

    On the other hand, Greer's innate desire to shock - as an attention-seeking device - is too well established to need further elaboration. Shooting the messenger, in this case, is maybe more about self-preservation in the face of an overwhelming egocentricity than it is about an obdurate refusal to hear the message. Boys who continuously cry over-embroidered wolf shouldn't be surprised when the audience keeps envisaging an ancient nude academic...

  10. wen
    March 29, 2004

    You mean he was naked when he put his hand on her knee? Now that puts a completely different slant on the throwing-up episode....oh - or didn't you mean that Wolf....?