Was Louis Nowra being fair to Germaine Greer or not?

Andrew Bolt: Nowra is probably right about The Female Eunuch, but this cheap shot at Germaine Greer is not just cruel, but, worse, irrelevant: ...she looks like a befuddled and exhausted old woman. She reminded me of my demented grandmother... Just a few words, but all it takes to make me doubt the judgement of the man who wrote the other 4100. UPDATE Rick Feneley: All that said, Nowra’s essay is a great read, a brutal but thoughtful and sometimes fair critique of The Female Eunuch and of Greer: the daughter embittered by her narcissistic mother’s emotional abuse; the powerful polemicist who inspired women to leave their husbands but who wrote off gays as ‘’faggots’’; the fantasist who reckoned mothers could live in farmhouses in Italy where a revolving door of friends, relatives and local peasants would care for their children; the acid-tongued mauler of other prominent women; the woman who imagined herself as the wife of the Bard (’’I’d f--- Shakespeare except that he especially asked that his bones not be disturbed’’); the author of ‘’dull and graceless’’ and ‘’increasingly daft’’ prose; the attention seeker on Celebrity Big Brother; and, ultimately, the ‘’irrelevant noise of a shock jock few people listen to any more’’.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous