Germaine Greer: Twitter trolls and online porn mean we've never had it so bad as women



Academic said that online sphere is a 'grab bag of loathing of women'

Greer, who wrote The Female Eunuch in the 1970s, says it is worse now

Says online abuse of women shows men are less tolerant than ever

Spoke in upcoming documentary, also featuring Professor Mary Beard



'Liberation didn't happen': Feminist academic Germaine Greer believes men are even less tolerant of women than in the 1970s

Germaine Greer has claimed that women are worse off than ever because of the proliferation of online pornography and the torrent of abuse they have to endure on social media such as Twitter.



The sites have become a forum for ‘the loathing of women’, says Greer, whose ground-breaking book The Female Eunuch revolutionised feminist thinking in the 1970s.



‘Liberation hasn’t happened, even sexual liberation didn’t happen,’ she argues. ‘What happened was that commercial pornography was liberated, fantasy was liberated, but people weren’t liberated.’



The Australian academic delivers her damning verdict in a BBC TV documentary - Blurred Lines: The New Battle Of The Sexes - which looks at the threats of rape and violence directed towards women online as well as the ‘objectification’ of women in violent computer games and sexually explicit pop videos.



Greer, 75, tells presenter Kirsty Wark: ‘Things have got a lot worse for women since I wrote The Female Eunuch.’



She claims the abuse directed at some women online is proof that men are more intolerant of women than ever before.



‘I never thought once you had social media there would become this terrible grab bag of loathing of women,’ she says.

‘Men are now more aware of women because women keep pushing themselves in.



‘Nowadays women expect to share men’s lives, they want to do the same work, they want to play the same games, they want to have the same social life, and I think it’s driving men nuts. And the result would seem to me to be that men are even less tolerant of women than they were before.



‘Now if men have always needed women to be in a subservient, filial, ancillary position, when they [women] stand up and call attention to themselves, it produces reactions which are difficult to manage.’



Several high-profile women have suffered abuse at the hands of online ‘trolls’. The author and feminist Caroline Criado-Perez was targeted after she launched a petition calling for female historical figures to be represented on banknotes.



Used to be better: Greer is pictured above in 1974 - before the online 'grab bag of loathing of women'

The campaign was a success and the Bank of England announced that from 2017, Jane Austen would be on a new £10 note.



But the campaigner found herself inundated with highly personal abuse and threats.



At one stage she was receiving 50 threats an hour, and she was so affected that she lost half a stone in two days.



Professor Mary Beard was targeted in a similar manner after she spoke out about immigration on BBC’s Question Time last year.



The historian had to contend with highly personal comments about her appearance as well as a picture of her face with female genitalia superimposed on it.



Prof Beard tells the documentary that such attacks will not deter her from speaking out.



She said: ‘You do have to steel yourself a little bit because it is quite affecting when you get this stuff. But most of all it is infuriating. My views on anything are irrelevant to the size and shape of my vagina, I’m sorry.’



Prof Beard is worried, though, that such campaigns may deter other women from entering ‘the public sphere’.



She said: ‘I have decided I am going to face the music. But there must be loads of women who think, that is not what I want.



‘I don’t want that kind of rubbish and it’s vile. It really is vile. Why would anyone bother to do this unless they were incredibly determined? It is very bad for women’s participation in the public sphere.’

