By Rob Harris
London: Louis Theroux clearly knew he was in trouble before he started. You could hear it in his voice.
But the British-American broadcaster, who has long warned that too many of his peers play it safe and avoid difficult subjects for fear of causing offence, dived head first into peril.
Germaine Greer, the author of the seminal feminist text The Female Eunuch, on The Louis Theroux podcast.Credit: TikTok
With a coffee cup in hand from his London studio, he peered down the line at octogenarian Germaine Greer, with a red wine in hers, as the two navigated a series of taboo subjects including rape, transgenderism, #MeToo and sex.
It didn’t take long for Greer to stir the pot, starting with her theory that clever women should marry truck drivers if they want to outshine their husbands.
The 85-year-old Australian, one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century as a leading figure in second-wave feminism, also rejected claims she is transphobic in an at-times shocking hour-long interview for Theroux’s podcast.
The author of The Female Eunuch, a seminal 1970 text of women’s liberation, Greer told her host she still didn’t understand why women felt compelled to get married, said victims of assault often put themselves in vulnerable positions and that “all men hate all women some of the time”.
Asked why she thought ambitious women should marry truck drivers, Greer said: “I think it’s the notion that you should be in competition with your husband is a bad notion. 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.”
In her first interview for almost two years recorded at the end of 2023 but released last week, she said she was living in an aged-care home in Castlemaine, north-west of Melbourne, where she has “almost anything I need” except she “can’t just take off and disappear”.
She also opened up about being raped in Melbourne when she was 19, saying she never knew the man’s name and would have been “mortified” if he had been caught and gone to jail.
She said she did not feel comfortable talking about it at length, and never reported it to police.
“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,” she said. “And I wanted to help because he kept saying, ‘I want you to say help me, help me, help me’.”
Greer has previously dismissed rape as “bad sex” and called for lower penalties for perpetrators of sexual assault. Her views have drawn strong criticism from the likes of Rape Crisis England and Wales, which says her remarks could damage efforts to hold perpetrators to account and make victims more reluctant to come forward.
Greer, who married Welsh carpenter Paul du Feu in 1968 but separated only three weeks later, told Theroux she finds marriage “grim” and could never understand why same-sex couples had fought for it.
“I find it grim that young women grow up thinking they’ve got to find a husband ... that’s where the first mistake is made,” she said.
“You think you find someone who will treat you in a sensitive way or humane way, and you don’t. Because he starts feeling trapped. And why does he feel trapped? I mean, 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.”
She said it was possible for men to be feminists, but they rarely were, and “they tend to feel as if they could take it over ... and do it better”.
When asked what her definition of feminism was, Greer said: “Looking at every question that comes up from the point of view of what does this do for women.”
British broadcaster Louis Theroux, who interviewed Germaine Greer for his podcast.
“Does it do them ill or does it assist them in what is already a difficult life path to take?” she said.
Theroux asked Greer about a famous photo of her with Robert Plant, the lead singer of the rock band Led Zeppelin, of which she said: “The Spice Girls only had to pop into bed for five seconds, and it was all over the tabloids, but my boyfriends were better behaved.”
Although she denied a full fling with Manchester United legend George Best, widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of his time, Greer said she had “got all tangled up” with the late star.
But Theroux later had to push back on several controversial statements, including accusing her of “victim blaming” women who fuelled the #MeToo movement.
‘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.’
Germaine Greer
“You could argue when people are sexually molesting you, how much have you got to do and the fact that you’re in a situation in which you can be molested?” Greer said.
“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.”
Greer said she has realised that growing old means that she has had to become more outrageous to express her views, but acknowledges many people would think she was “as mad as a meat axe”.
Pressed on her previous public comments on transgender people, including “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock”, she said she was “perfectly happy to accept people who think they’re transgender”.
“There are some things about being a woman that do not transfer,” she says. “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 realised 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.”
In 2015 Greer was labelled transphobic and a petition was launched to try to stop the Australian from giving a public lecture at Cardiff University. Students’ Union women’s officer Rachael Melhuish said that Greer had demonstrated “time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether.”
In the podcast, Greer she said she welcomed attempts on university campuses to shut her up and understood where they came from.
“I expect students to rebel, I expect them to object, and I expect as a teacher to have to play my corner. It doesn’t worry me this notion that people will shout me down, shout away.”
Theroux told his listeners he had approached the conversation with apprehension, but was interested in speaking to Greer because “she’s a legend”.
“She’s in her mid-80s and has never really in her life been out of the headlines for long and never been afraid to cause controversy,” he said.
“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 … also obviously got her into hot water.”
Theroux said he had grown up with Greer being part of his household because his mother, BBC producer Anne Castle, was inspired by her feminism and “regarded the gospel of Germaine as something that was liberating and helpful” while not endorsing every aspect of her opinions.
The filmmaker, who has made a string of documentaries for the BBC on difficult topics including the sex crimes of British media personality Jimmy Savile, said he was aware that people “probably thought I shouldn’t be doing the chat” because of some of her past comments on transgender issues. But he said he felt it was important to challenge her views as well as to understand them.
Theroux said Greer had at times gone “a bit over the line” and understood people would be offended, but he did not believe in censoring tough conversations.
“I’d rather have this be more interesting and to have more moments of grit even at the risk of it feeling uncomfortable at times,” he said.
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