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In search of granny porn | page 1, 2
Oh, yes, modesty is a better aphrodisiac. But Shalit also argued that the old paternalistic system was actually more
protective of women's freedom and women's autonomy than the new system, which she attributes to the feminist movement where sex feels required and
every young woman should be extremely sexually active. Why does she blame feminism? Feminism is the world's most impotent political movement. Feminism exists to be blamed. It is like motherhood. But I think that ... she's right. There was no sexual
revolution. What there was was a change in the law that meant that commercial pornography could be published with impunity. That was all that
happened. So there was a tremendous outgrowth of sexual fantasy. But there wasn't real sexual freedom. People who are ugly or old or poor never had any
sexual revolution at all. Nothing happened for them. That is one interesting thing about a lot of San Francisco's sexual subcultures: They are filled with people who don't seem to care about the
culture of beauty. There will be a gorgeous diva having sex with an incredibly fat man. Or fat women being worshipped by a bunch of young
studs or young women. Sometimes in these fringe sexual subcultures all those rules about what is beautiful and what is not beautiful have been
turned on their heads. Without money changing hands? Without money changing hands, absolutely. Lead me to the granny porn. [Laughs.] Did you say old ladies and boys? Where does that happen? Old men and young women is the norm. Yes, I know, but this is different. Where can I get me a 20-year-old? Tell me now. I have very limited time. I have got to be out of here tomorrow morning. I am sure we could do ... find someone for you very easily. But ... But I am sure money has to change hands. Have you read the new Christine Wallace biography of you? No. Have you heard much about it? No. I didn't help her do it and she doesn't know what she is
talking about. I mean, practically everything I have had pointed out to me has been wrong. Her focus seems to be on your big ideological changes -- There are no such changes. She thought she had a commodity that she
could sell. But the commodity turned out to be alive and then she had to
put it together, but also she was stupefyingly lazy. I mean, speaking as a
journalist to another journalist -- her whole construction of my childhood,
which, thank God, I haven't read, is based on two telephone calls to my mother. I find that absolutely shocking. She didn't even go to see how my mother lives, which would have given her the clue that my mother is not entirely
in her right mind. My mother's address is in the phone book, and it was no big deal. She just looked in the book and dialed the number. My mother, being a lot smarter than Christine Wallace, told her all this stuff which Wallace believed. I mean if we were doing a story like that, we would take the mother's story as one version. Try and stand it up by talking to the siblings and -- she didn't do any of that. And my mother just told her
complete bollocks as far as I can make out. For instance, that she breast-fed me for two years. She was too busy fucking American soldiers! Give me a break. What is your mother like? She is too like me. She's what? Too like me. She is not as tall as I am, but we are roughly the same shape. She doesn't look very like me either. But she is very ... I think she
is extremely narcissistic. She doesn't really believe that other people
exist. She thinks she can just make them up and make up their actions and
she can manipulate them endlessly. [Her] perception of how she stands in relation to other people is either to assume that she is
enormously superior and needn't trouble herself about this, or that she is
low as the dust between their chariot wheels. What you can't get my mother to understand is that she is a person like everybody else. It is completely unimaginable to her. And she doesn't
believe in truth. She doesn't believe in communication. She uses language as a weapon. Do you think that is like you? To a certain extent? Maybe. Except that I do believe in truth. And so when I used to try and argue with my mother and she changed her position all the time, I
would get really agitated and she would look at me as if to say, who is going to stop me, da, di, da da. And she still does this to me. She is
relentless. Aggravating. Maddening. But she maddens everybody, not just me. She is really weird. For someone who is a feminist and thought so much about motherhood and the meaning of the womb, and the larger implications of valuing our
mothers, was this difficult to reconcile your philosophy with your own
feelings about your real mother? Very much so. My mother had difficulty with me because I was the child that threatened her nubility. She was barely 20 when I was born.
And so I thought when I left home, she might be reconciled to the role of the mother with regard to her younger children. And I only just found out from my sister two years ago that that didn't happen. And that when I left home, my sister lost the only mother she had ever had. In what way? She lost me. And I had concealed this from myself. When she reminded me [of] the things I used to do for her, I felt really terrible. I am looking
into those eyes and seeing this anger: "When I really needed you, you ran out on me." And me having to say, Look, I was afraid I was going to murder our mother, that I was going to kill her. Because I sleepwalked and I woke up one night at the foot of the stairs and I didn't know if I had done it or not. I had been dreaming that I had beaten her with a stick in her bed
and she was dead. So I went and looked in her room and there she was. Alive. I hadn't killed her, but I think I left the house the next day. In the first part of "The Whole Woman" you deal with a lot of the unspoken rules about
beauty and submission to medical authorities and eating obsessions, etc., that govern women's and girls' lives. The body, yes. The body as a battlefield. Do you feel constrained by these issues yourself or do you feel more like you're an outsider looking into a culture that seems very distant? No, no. I have, still, at 60 years old, the pressure to be attractive or good-looking or not to be fat, or to limp or whatever. And also I am
under pressure to use estrogen, replacement estrogen, and not using it is seen as bad behavior. It is storing up trouble to come. And I have had to
explain for years that I am not likely to have osteoporosis. I still have 146 percent of normal bone density for a woman of my age. And then they say, what about heart disease; so I have to say, OK, chief medical officer of blah blah: Don't you want to die of a massive infarct?
Don't you want to be walking down the street one bright day full of
optimistic thoughts and bang, it is all over?
Find books by Germaine Greer at BARNES & NOBLE Also Today Brilliant Careers: Germaine Greer In my family, like my mother, we die of dementia. We die of softening of the brain. And because we are physically so strong, it takes years and years and years to kill us, so that we sit around in nursing homes sucking up money. We don't know where we are or who we are. We use up all the substance that might pay for the education of our grandchildren. And if I am likely to have an infarct -- and in my family history I am probably not likely to, but supposing I was -- I would walk toward it with open arms. Strike me down. You have to die of something. I choose not to die of dementia. Not to die a vegetable or a puddle. I'd rather be struck down, just like you, in the middle of a productive life. Please may I have my heart attack? Can I please not take estrogen? And they sort of say, OK, as long as you know what you're doing. I don't want to buy a longer life. Friends of mine die every year, and every year I am amazed. Why am I outliving this person? Died at 58, died at 45. I am beginning to feel, even now at 60, like a survivor from an already extinct generation. I don't want that to go on for too long. I don't want to outlive all my friends and the culture that I grew up in and all of that. Death doesn't frighten me. In your book you sound like you are defending female genital mutilation. I am so sick of this argument. I mean, most of the people I have this argument with have no idea what they are talking about. If I ask them to tell me what they think goes on in FGM, they really don't have the vaguest idea. Well, I studied it. I know a lot about it. OK. Well how many forms are there? I would say there are four. At least four, and it can be subdivided by four again. And even some of the ones we thought we understood, like Somali infibulation. I headed a panel on FGM at one of the London teaching hospitals where this really interesting surgeon who has been reversing infibulations found that in 43 out of 45 cases, which is a large sample, the clitoris was intact. And so where was it then? It was sewn together -- under the abraded scar tissue. And it seems [the ritual] was about actual penetration of the vagina and not about lack of pleasure at all. Until we find out from them what they think they are doing, I don't think we have any right to run around criminalizing it or ... I can't understand why Americans are hypnotized by it. They just want to keep on talking about African women's genitals. I think it is part of their own anxiety. We do an awful lot of genital mutilation right here. We do normalization surgery on newborns. We do construction of fake vaginas for intersexual children. And we do episiotomies ... [then] we say to the women, We'll make you nice and tight for your husband and all this stuff because you are afraid of any malpractice suit because you have got a relaxed vagina, blah, blah, blah. They say there are 120 million FGMs, but they are not all the same, and we have got women in America who are having things inserted in the hood of the vagina. Why? I don't know why. Well, don't ask me. But a grown woman choosing a procedure for herself is different from a 7- or 8-year-old girl being forcibly held down against her will or a newborn having something done to them which removes -- We don't know what it removes. You and I both have lots of friends who get a huge amount of pleasure of taking a cock up the ass. I don't get a huge amount of pleasure out of that, but I am not going to tell them that they don't. When I talk to women in the Sudan, they were the horniest women I think I have ever met. They were really funny. They were very hot for their husbands. They were all circumcised. And they said to me for the sex it is no problem. For the childbearing, yes, but for the sex, no problem. I am not about to tell them they don't know what sexual pleasure is. That is the height of arrogance and it actually ... Well there are a lot of women that who don't want it to be done ... And we support them in their struggle. But what we don't do is criminalize FGM so that if we have African women giving birth in our
hospitals we refuse to close them up again. And that means they go to a
traditional practitioner. The Somali women in England have a very tough
time. They go in to give birth as closed women, we cut them open as the
midwife would do in Somalia and then afterwards we refuse to close them.
If I can have cosmetic surgery on my genitals. Why can't I have that cosmetic surgery?
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