At a time when India is tightening its laws against sexual offences, and lawmakers are pushing for death penalty in rape cases involving children, Germaine Greer’s argument that punishment for rape should be reduced has met with much anger and opposition. Greer’s ideas — particularly her thesis equating most rapes with non-consensual, bad sex — has been widely criticised, both in the international news media as well as on social media platforms.

So what is the argument that Greer outlines? How did her critics respond?

But first, who is Germaine Greer?

Germaine Greer, now 79, is a scholar of early modern English literature, who received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1968. You can read her thesis on Shakespeare’s early comedies here. She has held various academic positions in the UK and abroad, including that of Professor of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

Greer came to prominence as a feminist writer in 1970 with the publication of The Female Eunuch. Since then, she has authored several books on women (besides several others on literature, art, etc), including The Whole Woman (watch Greer’s lecture on the book) and On Rape (forthcoming).

Greer is regarded as a significant voice in the second-wave feminist movement. Consistently controversial, she has been a media figure since the publication of The Female Eunuch (one of the 100 best nonfiction books, according to the The Guardian) — not only has she been written about profusely, she has also contributed much as a columnist and presenter to multiple mainstream media outlets across the years. Greer describes herself as an “anarchist”. Here is a 2014 article in which six influential feminists assess Greer’s impact on themselves and women’s movements.

What did Greer say now?

On May 30, Greer delivered a talk at the 2018 Hay Literature Festival — an iconic event held in the market town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, which invites “participants to imagine the world as it is, and as it might be” — titled On Rape. Part of the Crime, Gender, Law and Politics theme, it was chaired by journalist and feminist Rosie Boycott.

Hay Literature Festival in Wales. Photo from 2009 by Peter, CC BY 2.0

Greer premised her argument by saying that we need to approach rape in a different way as the current approach is far from effective. She then built her thesis along the following points:

1. The criminal justice system treats women not as injured parties but as pieces of evidence, and this needs to change

“We’re not getting anywhere approaching it as it were down the tunnel of history because we go from rape being a crime of stealing a woman from her menfolk, which remains the way that the criminal justice system works. We have to escape from that because it means that we are treating women not as plaintiffs, not as injured parties, but as bits of evidence. They are the corpus delicti and their situation is getting worse. Once upon a time you’re expected to show up with your clothing torn, your hair disheveled and complain that you have been attacked by men, and people would judge from your injuries whether you were telling the truth.”

2. Most rape cases do not involve violence, so it is difficult to present evidence

“We are told that it is an essentially violent crime. An expert like Quentin Tarantino will tell us that when you use the word rape you’re talking about violence, a throwing them down… it is one of the most violent crimes in the world. Bullshit Tarantino. Most rape is just lazy, just careless, just insensitive. Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal right, he is raping her. It will never end up in a court of law. Bertrand Russell said that he thought there was more unwilling sex in marriage than there was in the whole of prostitution.”

3. Complicating the issue is the question of consent

“In a recent case in Ireland the woman in question was actually cross-examined for eight days. There were four defendants and she was examined by QCs [Queen’s Counsels] for eight days. Who is representing her? Nobody. Because she isn’t actually a party to the action. She is a piece of evidence. She can only utter unprompted replies. She can’t be protected by counsel. This is a mess. It’s a big mess, and it’s getting us worse than nowhere because it’s one thing to be raped, it’s another thing to try to get the person who outraged you brought to justice and then be totally discredited. That humiliation must be even worse than rape. “In the case of the young woman involved in Ireland, some of you may know that her identity was broadcast by social media. She didn’t even have the resource of being unknown to the public … Now what gets me about this is that because they couldn’t prove this woman did not consent — now those of you who have objections, think about this. Can you actually prove something that didn’t happen? You can’t. Logically, you can’t. She said she did not consent. She was not believed. But what is worse is that the men said that they believed that she did consent. As long as they can say that and they can’t be contradicted with any safety, they are not guilty of rape. Now how nuts is that?”

4. So what if the question of consent is removed from the equation?

“[I] am just trying to look at new ways of thinking about this. Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime… and some rapes are, think about it as non-consensual — that is, bad sex. Sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love; we used to talk about love-making. Once upon a time, we knew you had to make it, you had to actually put some effort into creating the language of passion, the language of desire, you had to manipulate, waiting, pleasurable delay. Think about the structure of music. That used to the structure of love-making … Instead, now we got sex as a version of athleticism. And too often does it involve athletes. Alas. “And the athletes … if you think of the Irish rugby players … they were cleared of the charges of rape, in my view, for no terribly good reason except that you can’t prove it. But they were not only cleared of that crime, they were cleared of all charges. How does that work? “Now, you go into a police station with a black eye. And you say, my next door neighbour punched me in the eye. They are not going to say, did you consent? Because obviously here you are, carrying a wound … Consent is not an issue in ordinary crimes. It is not an issue when we talk about assault. It is not an issue when we talk about other felonies. Why is it an issue with rape?”

5. Removing consent will mean it is not his word against hers

“Supposing you do it this way. Supposing you say, okay, this young woman claims she has been raped by this person here. She is saying she didn’t consent. And he’s saying that she did. And he is saying that he thought she did. What I am arguing is take the consent thing out. Just say this is moot. We can’t decide this. He is going to say she didn’t. So that’s moot, that’s over there. But then we have the other offences. We have the injuries, we have…whatever else happened. And we can certainly convict on that, and we can do it easily — and that will be itself a lighter tariff than if we hooked it on to the yes-no consent thing.”

6. Juries will find it easier to convict if the penalty is lighter

“Why do juries fail to convict? To me it is very interesting. We keep revising rape laws all the time. And one of the most famous judges involved said, oh, what we will do is we will increase the penalty, and then more women will come forward. Wrong. But not only that, juries won’t convict where it is his word against hers and the penalty is seven years or something, juries will go, no! And they must do that. That is their moral duty … Nonconsensual sex is rampant, universal, and they are all not going to prison … Here am I saying that the jury won’t convict if the penalty is seen to be so heavy, when the actual scintilla of proof is so tiny, and so speculative. So we can’t actually do it that way.”

Greer’s 27-minute talk ended with returning to the Harvey Weinstein case to argue that it was not just a problem of Hollywood, but indicative of a larger societal problem — a “situation in which women are losing”. Greer said:

“They are leaving their husbands, they are accepting being single parents, they are entering an endless life of work, and poverty, in order to be free, in order to be dignified, in order not to be living a lie. And my heart goes out to them. We have to think of something better. We have to be able to protect the love of our lives.”

How did the Hay Festival audience react?

Greer was greeted by lengthy applause when she walked on after Boycott welcomed her to the stage. She appeared to elicit interested attention from the audience all throughout her talk, including laughter for her flippant comments. Greer contextualised her flippancy in light of her own personal experience of being raped a few days before her 19th birthday, and stressed that she did understand the gravity of the crime of rape.

At the end of her 27-minute talk, there was lengthy applause from the audience. Boycott began with several questions about Greer’s suggestion that rape sentences should be lightened — Greer had not expanded on this in her talk (points 5 and 6 in the above section were unpacked as part of the questions segment) — before opening out to the audience.

The session saw five responses from the audience. In the context of her argument that rape was not extraordinary, these sought clarifications on her stance on the #MeToo movement, the need for universal love, her ‘women-vs-men rhetoric’, how the legal system can be recalibrated (a further enunciation of Boycott’s question), and if better sex education in schools might help.

What did the media report?

Media reports mostly cited Greer’s comment equating rape with bad sex and her call for lower punishment. Her questioning of the PTSD statistics for rape victims — which was part of her answer to one of the questions after the talk — was also a significant point of discussion for some news outlets.

The Hindustan Times ran with the headline Women’s activist Germaine Greer for reducing punishment for rape. In the UK, the Guardian ran a similar headline, with the standfirst Feminist academic tells Hay festival that ‘most rape is just lazy, careless and insensitive’. The Telegraph headlined the story Rape is rarely violent and doesn’t merit a jail term, claims Germaine Greer, while the BBC led with ‘Academic and writer Germaine Greer has been heavily criticised after she suggested the punishment for rape should be reduced’ in its story.

The US media, by and large, took a similar line: The Washington Post, with the headline Feminist Germaine Greer says most rape is just ‘bad sex’; The New York Times,with Germaine Greer Stirs Furor With Call For Lighter Rape Penalty; and the CNN, with Germaine Greer calls for punishment for rape to be reduced.

How did her critics respond?

Compared to her live audience, those who responded to Greer in the media were highly critical about her thesis. Their focus, possibly reflecting the emphasis in news media reports, was on the ‘bad sex’ and ‘lighter sentence’ parts of Greer’s argument.

Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, wrote that it is damaging and dangerous to suggest that rape is not a violent crime. Journalist Holly Thomas’s piece in CNN, in a similar vein, was titled Germaine Greer’s dangerous ideas about rape, while Observer columnist Barbara Ellen led her piece by saying that Greer was sprouting “embarrassing, offensive, outdated claptrap”.

Some others suggested that Greer was trying to sell her forthcoming book. In an article on Conversation titled Germaine Greer: from feminist firebrand to professional troll, academics Katie Edwards and Emma Nagouse argued that Greers comments are glib, ill-informed and potentially dangerous. “Let’s hope she has put more thought into the content of her forthcoming book,” they wrote.

How has Greer responded to her critics?

Since the Hay Festival, Greer has not responded directly to the points her critics raised. On June 9, BBC2 aired a feature-length documentary on Greer (Germaine Bloody Greer), and she was also in the news after the Hay Festival for criticising Beyonce. At the time of writing, her Twitter account (@TheFemaleGreer), though it has more than 11.4k followers, has been silent since March 20, 2012.

— With inputs from Anunaya Rajhans and Aakanksha Singh