GERMAINE GREER

The Australian academic Germaine Greer has interesting views on sex.

On 10 June 2011, on the BBC TV programme 'Question Time', the Australian academic Germaine Greer claimed that British troops might carry out rapes in Libya.

Germaine Greer said she did not believe the claims that Colonel Gaddafi had given his soldiers Viagra and ordered mass rapes.

According to Germaine Greer:

"Rape is always present where you have slaughter and you don’t have to have a government fiat (decision) to do it...

"If we send in ground troops ... how will we be sure they won’t do a bit of raping in their turn?

"...All soldiers in certain circumstances will rape regardless of whether they are ours or theirs or whoevers."

During the TV programme, Germaine Greer answered a question about the sexualisation of children.

She said: "There’s always been this sinister culture...

"The Barbie doll herself is a fetish, she’s descended from a sex toy....

In 1995, Germaine Greer said that, aged 19, she had been raped.


Professor Germaine Greer has some interesting ideas about art.

Greer's last academic appointment was Professor of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

In 2003,Germaine Greer's The Beautiful Boy was published, an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, which is illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty."

Germaine Greer's book The Boy was reviewed by Natasha Walter in the Guardian 11 October 2003 - http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1059174,00.html

Walter refers to 'page after page of sheeny illustrations of fine, languid boys as seen by artists from Praxiteles to Annie Leibovitz.... Greer is asking us to celebrate the evanescent loveliness of boys.'

According to Greer: 'Correggio is the only artist ever to have depicted the anus and scrotum of an airborne angel.'


Greer claims that saying boys are beautiful amounts to 'demolishing one of the last great western taboos.'

Greer looks at how boys in fifth-century Athens 'allowed themselves to revel in their own peacock beauty.'

Greer compares this with the lack of grace and feeling in some modern boys.

Greers aim is stated on the back cover: 'to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys'.

Peter Conrad reviewed Greer's book in the Observer, 26 October 2003. - http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1071096,00.html

According to Conrad, Germaine Greer warns women that "they are ill-equipped to act as 'sex objects' and are 'programmed for failure in their duty of attraction'."

According to Conrad, 'Greer believes that the job of arousing desire is done better, and with an ecumenical appeal to both men and women, by the boys who teasingly lounge and cockily strut through the pages of her book.'

Conrad tells us of Greer's belief that 'If nature didn't intend boys to be seduced by older men and women, why did it make them so damnably fetching, so downy-cheeked, rangy-limbed and pert-buttocked?'

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