Youth, I do adore thee

At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up and down like a bride’s nightie. Whereas most of us, thanks to our helpful male classmates, learn whether we are ‘frigid’ or ‘nympho’ back in Big School, and more or less manage to stick to these guidelines for the rest of our natural lives, the good professor’s libido has historically been all over the shop. Starting out as a young blood who was happy to pose not just in the altogether for underground magazines, but with legs so far apart that one could, if one saw fit, see all the way to Alaska, Dr Greer was some time later to be found saying that she was starting to think that sex was horrid, and that women should have nothing to do with it. She, along with all the other You’re-Not-Going-Out-Dressed-Like-That-Young-Lady older recanting feminists so beloved of the Daily Mail, such as Mary Kenny and Fay Weldon, has always been a great practitioner of Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Doism, a position which I find renders a person faintly ridiculous, to say the least. Approaching the menopause in the manner of a bulimic approaching a cream-cake, Dr Greer was for some time torn between wanting to hold on to her undeniable physical attractiveness (as she appeared in the famous City Hall film opposite Mad Norman Mailer, she seemed to be the most beautiful woman since Nefertiti) and wanting to cast it once and for all into the void, the better to concentrate on things intellectual. Eventually plumping for the latter, she wrote a lot about a woman’s right to become a cackling old crone and reject HRT; then after a bit she started to appear weekly on television looking very sexy and showy and gussied up — not a bit of a crone, cackling or otherwise.