Germaine Greer has followed up her critical comments on the “whingeing” #MeToo movement by blaming women for the prevalence of sexual violence and rape on television for which they are the largest audience. She says women are drawn to dramas about the victimisation of women in murder and rape.
There’s always a nugget of truth in what Greer says but she always manages to sound bulldozingly dogmatic and as if she enjoys stirring up controversy without worrying about whose sensitivities she’s tramping on. Nuance isn’t her thing.
In 2010 Illinois University researchers did find that women were disproportionately likely to review true crime books on Amazon and watch police procedural series.
Born 29 January 1939 6 am Melbourne, AU, Greer has a Sun Aquarius conjunct her Ascendant in a controlling opposition to Pluto and square Moon Uranus in Taurus – so a curious and cool mix of Air and Earth. She’s very Fixed and Aquarius does like to outrage and shock. Her Saturn in Aries in her communication 3rd house is hard edged and her Mercury opposes intense and unyielding Pluto. Plus she has an ambitious and vengeful 10th house Mars in Scorpio. So what she says comes across with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
She does have a strong leaving-a-legacy-for-history 17th harmonic and undoubtedly made a difference in leading the feminist movement nearly fifty years ago with The Female Eunuch. But her contrarian impulses make her sound very one-sided. #metoo was long overdue and trashing it out of hand is hardly helpful.
I think there is a distinct difference in crime genres between the ‘find corpse, find killer’ variety – Agatha Christie and most police and forensic science procedurals. And the on-screen rape, torture, abduction dramas which I can’t watch. Game of Thrones I saw a smidgeon of since I know someone in it was horrifying. Rather glad when my friend was killed off and I could stop. Ditto Da Vinci’s Demons – death by rack and wheel, urgh.
Greer did, I think, mention Fifty Shades of Grey which I never read, apart from the first paragraph on the net but the prose looked so atrocious I couldn’t cope. I imagine it was a dumbed-down version of 1950s French ‘The Story of O’ about total female submission. Greer presumably would rather see herself as a dominatrix.
Sex is a complicated subject about which we know surprisingly little.
Oh lordy, Aquarians. My partner has sun and mercury there opposite a Pluto-Saturn in Leo and just has to take the contrarian view on almost everything.
Not me, the older I get, the more of a squeamish wimp I’m becoming.
I can’t watch anything as relentlessly gratuitous as Game of Thrones, but surely with crime dramas you watch the gory bit through your fingers and it’s over with quite quickly? What appeals more to women is the ‘whodunnit’ aspect; the characters and all the motives and possibilities (I wonder if Illinois University asked the women?)
In my limited experience, Mercury in Capricorn or in aspect to Saturn can sometimes seem stuck on one part of the picture. With Saturn in the 3rd as well, she may be driven to crystallise rather than keep ideas fluid and nuanced, though she isn’t short of imagination. If the birth time is accurate, the highest planet in the chart is that very strong Mars in the last degree of Scorpio, so this is what she is known for.
Sent too quickly, I was going to add that she also has a very strong Jupiter and Moon, below the horizon in the more personal 1st and 4th houses. I expect she’s quite different away from that very public, Marsy persona. Saturn in the 3rd will also compartmentalise her communication; they’ll be a separate gear, with a clear boundary, for the public stuff.
There were far more influential feminist in the sixties and seventies than Germaine. Studying real crime as women do, does not mean we endorse it.
How bizarre. Blaming women for the prevalence of sexual violence and rape on TV because they are the largest audience? Yet she appears to say nothing about the perpetrators of the sexual violence and rapes; the men. The rape stats prior to #metoo (even years before) as well as the sexual abuse stats in childhood, clearly show we have a problem in society in regards to sexual violence towards women/girls but strangely nobody has even brought this up once during the movement. I get it, Germaine. Women are to blame for everything. All we have to do is stand up and just tell the men off and they will leave us alone. We must be dumb not to realize the simplicity of it. If we are watching sexual violence on TV (personally, not my thing) then that must mean we want it to happen to us in reality. Oh, the joys of being raped and sexually violated is every woman’s fantasy! Woman is away with the bloody pixies.