The creeping threat to freedom of opinion
/By Rubashov
You have a choice. In many of the "Western democracies," you can voice an opinion outside the orthodoxy. But you will be punished. Prizes and honors will be withdrawn. Self-righteous hatred will flow your way. You will need "security" for your person, if you chose to go in public. And because of this, many self-censor.
But not Germaine Greer.
Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian-born writer, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. She lives in the United Kingdom, where she has held academic positions at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge.
Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), became an international best-seller, bringing her both adulation and opposition. She is the author of several books about women, feminism, literature, art and the environment, including Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), Shakespeare's Wife (2007) and White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013).
Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and settling to live the lives of "unfree men." "Women's liberation," she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues that women's liberation means embracing sex differences in a positive fashion – a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate." (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Ms. Greer is fashion's latest Emmanuel Goldstein. A former leader who will not conform to fashion's "values" -- who continues to be an honest free thinker. And so she has become the Enemy of Fashion and the object of its Two Minutes Hate.
See them, hear them... are you one of them?
Ah... listen to them, listen to the children of fashion... are you one of them?
A test for you then. Hear Germaine Greer's opinions in her own voice. Can you listen without feeling the very fashionable desire to hate?
Try, try to remember that these are only words. Ideas. Opinions. Try to contain your rage, the urge to stomp on this woman -- to gag her -- to take away her voice, her being and the means of its expression. And then ponder this: When did dissenting from fashion become so much like mocking the Prophet?
