OK, this is my last post on this issue (for a while at least). I am glad that at least two writers have seen what I have seen in these vitriolic outbursts, and I hope that this episode is not cementing a new way of dealing with women with unpopular opinions. I could be in for a very hard time 🙂
Very little of the anti-intellectual hot air blown about this week has been about what Germaine Greer may or may not have thought about Steve Irwin. It had everything to do with a dominant male power-base telling women to be seen and not heard. Of marginalising a particular kind of woman and reducing us to condition and circumstance. Of reminding those of us who like to speak our mind to watch our step, to remember our place and to shut up and agree with the menfolk. We are all a lot poorer for the unsightly fallout.
Excerpt from an opinion piece in the Age by Tracyee Hitchison
Disco Knitter 
It’s not a *new* way. It’s been used by the media since at least the 1960s in Aus, NZ the US, Canada and the UK and possibly other places too. It just surfaces in this particularly ugly way from time to time. Germain, for instance, was charged and convicted of using obscene language in NZ in the early 1970s – what she said was “Bullshit”. I don’t think you never get used to it, and I think it explains why a lot of older feminists are so cranky and suspicious.
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Sorry – I meant “new” in the sense that that sort of behaviour hasn’t been acceptible for most of my lifetime. Young women are taught to believe that the necessity for fighting for equal rights is over, that it was won years ago. This incident throws that bull into sharp relief.
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The attacks on Dr Greer have gone from bad to worse. The front page of last Friday’s Daily Telegraph (which I saw on Monday) turned my stomach.
If you are a woman, and have an opinion which is unpopular, be prepared to have your email address printed on the front page of Tele, with instructions to readers to “give her a gobful”.
I will be boycotting.
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Thank goodness I have found an article that reflects my opinion on the GG debate. Shut up women and breed that is the voice I am hearing all to often. I am over my breeding years and I will not shut up. Go GG and keep it coming.
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