Fifty Years a Feminist by Kedgley Sue

Author:Kedgley, Sue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

A photo promoting That’s Fairly Interesting, which screened in 1987. On my left are producer Neil Roberts and reporter Tim Shadbolt, to my right are Phil Gifford and Kevin Black.

She was by now thoroughly tired of men, she said, and had been celibate for years:

I haven’t been involved with men for ages. You grow out of these things, my dear — and just as well! Women have spent far too much of their lives thinking and worrying about men — I think it is time we just forgot about them. Not exclude them or hate them but just spend days without thinking about them — men hate that anyway — it’s a very good way of bringing them to heel.

She had discovered that most men are emotionally dead, she added, their instincts for tenderness having been battered out of them by the time they start playing rugby. And she never ceased to be amazed at men’s capacity to withhold emotions in the exercise of power.

Having preached her message of sexual liberation for years, she had now concluded it was all a massive ‘con’. A large part of Germaine’s media appeal had been that she was a woman who loved having sex with men, so this was another of her many astonishing turn-arounds. After various attempts at getting pregnant, she had given up on the idea of having children, but she said she didn’t regret having had an abortion earlier, as it was the right thing to do at the time: ‘I wasn’t ready for a relationship with the father and so I postponed having a child and then discovered, guess what, it’s too late.’ She added that in a way she was glad she hadn’t succeeded in having a child, as she thought she would have been a rather overwhelming mother. She lived instead in a communal situation with her ‘family of friends’, or assorted ‘non-paying guests’, as she would often refer to them, who helped her out on her property in return for free board.

Germaine Greer is one of only a handful of feminists who were able to use the media to reach a truly mass audience and popularise the women’s movement. She said she was heartily sick of the way the media trivialised the women’s movement and the way she had been constantly misquoted and sensationalised, but she had endured the media circus because it gave her access to the medium in a way that wasn’t normally open to women:

I knew I had to be first of all entertaining, and un-boring. There were a lot of women out there who were just lifting up their heads, looking out of the window over the sink and wondering if there wasn’t more to life than that, and I put up with all that rubbish to try to reach them.

Over the years, Germaine has been criticised for writing about a movement that she never joined, and for being more interested in men than in women. She agreed with me that when

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