Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1988 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and an academic. Nearly 20 years ago she published a book in which she argued that women were repressed and reduced to stereotypes of male fantasy. She wrote another book in which some detected a mellowing of her views, but she denies that her opinions have changed, and whichever side you take.

She remains unarguably feminism's most assured apostle. She is of course Germaine Greer. Germaine, feminism scares most men to death. Do you find men are... No, not at all. I find mostly they ignore me without very much difficulty. And they also patronise me, which amazes me still. I still can't get used to it. In what way? Well, this thing of assuming that you're asking them for something. Or for example you can't change a tire. I change a tire because I have a house in the country in Italy where we do a tire a week. You're tired about four minutes flat. But men are always elbowing you out of the way and then taking 20 minutes, which is so irritating. What about women? When you introduced a sort of a strange woman at a party, how does she accept you or not? whether she's younger than me, older than me, whether she feels that she is more--

There are many, many women in England who would consider themselves to be a lot more feminist than I am, even though they're married, which I regard as a fairly non-feminist posture. I don't think there's a stereotype. Reaction to me. Sometimes I'm aware when I go to dinner parties that people have made up a speech just for me and they've been rehearsing it for years. And that generally I... Heard it many many times before. An attacking speech? Oh well, yes, well reductive speech or things like, I consider myself to be a perfect feminist, this from men. Oh, and of course I've had 20 years to rehearse my answer. And what do you think? Well, when they say things like, Do you know how much alimony I have to pay my ex-wife and how hard I have to work to run two families and so on? I generally say something like, Well, you know, it wasn't meant to be that way and the money doesn't make her suffering any better and you've got a chance to stay. Again and she hasn't, all that kind of thing. But it doesn't matter really. I've searched for the perfect squelch for these arguments.

Men and I've never found it I must say because I think I've delivered it and they won't lie down. but are they not then surprised to find that you're a perfectly warm human being who laughs and bleeds and cries like the rest of us? well they don't always discover that of course. they can be shown a fairly thorny exterior. they can also be shown the door it has been known. I'm not always a pussycat. well you're gonna get rid of them all because we're gonna cast you What are you going to do with yourself all day on the island? I imagine I'll be working terribly hard. I mean, first of all, it's quite hard to survive in those conditions. And you have to study what's edible, what's not edible, what grows beneath the tide line, what grows above it, and so on. I had a very good training for it, because I was a very bored small child who was forced because my mother...

Very intent on getting a tan. I was forced to spend long hours, I mean eight or nine hours at a stretch on the beach. Let's have your first record. Well, I've chosen a record which I think is typical of the sort of music I sang as a child because we were very lucky at my convent school. We sang some of the most wonderful music ever written and we had no idea of course, we just thought it was a chore. But it was a chore that I particularly liked and so I've chosen Popole Me's... 'Fecce Tibi' by Thomas Louis de Victoria because it's my kind of anthem. It's actually about the sufferings of human beings rather than the sufferings of God, about whom I've never been able to care very much.

♪ Press forward in me ♪ ♪ Away in me ♪ ♪ In me ♪ ♪ In me ♪ Popule Meos Quid Fecitibi by Thomas Luista Vittoria sung by the choir of the Priory Church of St. Bartholomew's the Great Smithfield directed by Andrew Morris. Now Germaine, gardening is one of your great loves isn't it? What sort of gardener are you? Are you a serried ranks lady or a wild weed woman? Well I do in fact use bedding plants which is something one's often expected to be ashamed of. But I discovered that some things, for example...

If you plant out a packet of lobelias, you can then produce this extraordinary backdrop for things, which is just like a pale blue curtain and all the other plants grow above it. And I've just planted out several hundred forget-me-nots, because I just love the idea of that early spring blue appearing. Are you creative indoors as well? Do you make beautiful flower arrangements or do you hang great bunches of lavender flowers? in the kitchen ceiling? - Well, I do arrange the flowers. We have, we grow a lot of flowers in the vegetable garden because I wouldn't have. In the garden, but I will have them in the house. And then I have to think of ways of using them So I've become a flower arranger by default. And are you a cook? Are you a good cook? I'm getting better all the time. I used to be a coarse cook of lavish dishes of game and jug tears and things of that sort. But with the onset of menopause I've become vegetarian. It's nothing to do with animals.

Being hurt by my administration's, it's to do with me being hurt by eating animals. And so we now have extraordinary vegetarian food at home. It sounds as if you have all the housewifely, if I can use that word to you, credentials, but... Not the husband. But no, I quite like a husband, but I only want one sort of intermittently. I'd like someone who is rather good with the books and who could tell me how to spend my money. You had one once, did you? Yes. Three weeks. Yes, but it wasn't really even three weeks. It was three weekends and they were spent mostly fighting. He then went on and married Maya Angelou and stayed put for seven years. She's obviously much more stronger and more worthwhile. No, I just ran away I'm afraid. We shall pause and have your second record. Well, now my second record will be a blast from the past for me because it's Russell singing the prologue to the play of Noah in which I played the bass recorder and the triad.

In 1962 I think in a performance in the crypt of St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney. In those days I sang five nights a week, generally in churches and churches. Choirs and magical choirs and things like that. And that was one of the happiest times of my life. And the thing I love about this voice. We later sang with Alfred Deller and I believe that most countertenors are in fact singing falsetto. The Loblin is the real losers naturae. He's a real countertenor.

Singing the prologue to the play of Daniel with the New York Pro Musica directed by Noah Greenberg. You were born then, Germaine, in Melbourne, Australia, nearly half a century ago. What did your parents do? Mother got a tan, mostly full time. My father sold advertising space, which has always struck me as quite the most-- me Happy home? Was there lots of music going on? Nothing, nothing. It was terminal sensory deprivation. We had no records, no pictures, no good food, no parties, no books, nothing. We had the beach, the dread beach. I agree with Larkin, you know, my childhood is a long remembered boredom. So where did you find it all at school? From the nuns, the dippy old nuns, who talked to me.

Me to be immensely enthusiastic about painting, although they'd never seen any in the best tradition of convents. They taught us. Without ever having seen a picture. But the music was different because we did have that and we made that, we made that all the time. You were determined to go to university and you were determined to leave Australia? Yep, and I did both, but leaving Australia took a very long time. Struggle because I had absolutely no money and no prospects. So I had to wait until I won a scholarship, which I finally did. I won a Commonwealth In 1964. But why did you determine at such an early age to leave the place? Because it was so boring. Couldn't bear it. I just longed for beauty actually. The Australian ugliness is pretty pervasive and now that it's become kind of...

See American ugliness, it's superficially more acceptable, but deeply more ugly. Let's have another record. Well now, this record is a piece of pure self-indulgence for me. I happen to go soft inside whenever I hear the voice of Plácido Domingo, who is not just a great musician, he has one of the amazing caressing... Sensuous voices, totally Latin, and to hear him singing with the voices of boys, to me the combination is just...

Everything I've ever dreamt of in the way of lusciousness.

Poery Consinité by Johann Ritter von Herbeck, sung by Placido Domingo with the Vienna Boys' Choir. So Germaine, you went off to Melbourne University and then you ran away on to Sydney. What were you running away from? I was running away to something in that case. I discovered this gang of people in Sydney who called themselves the liberationists, Liberation of the seventh, the Sydney libertarian push they're sometimes called, and I wanted learn more about them and more from them really because they took a very dim view of what they called ideology in other words lying and received ideas and failure to get to the bottom

Things. They refused to be careerists, which was a bit unfortunate for me, because my career went through a big old cheque while I tried to learn to live the way they did, which was entirely by the proceeds of gambling. And I wasn't a good enough gambler, I'm afraid. I backed a horse in every race from the... Major racetracks for one whole year and broke even. And I thought that was the worst paid several thousand hours of work I'd ever done. So you left all that behind and as you were saying earlier, you came to England, I think, 19... You won a scholarship to Cambridge. I resumed my career, yes. I left the man I was living with, whom I was, you know, wildly in love with. Deliberately sort of took my love for him with both hands and broke it over my knee because I wasn't ever going to get anywhere. I'd still be trying to win a fortune on the horses. And went back to school and won my scholarship and left the country. And you came to Cambridge and you were in the footclimber.

Weren't you? Yes I was. What sort of thing did you do? You had to do anything that came along, you know, sing, dance, jump up and down, dress up, undress and so forth. You in fact ended up doing some television in the late 60s, didn't you, with Kenny Everett? Yes, I know it was really strange because I didn't want to do that. I thought I was completely miscast and wrong and shouldn't have done it because I thought it should be somebody with a common touch and a much less complicated head than I've got with a much more immediate, popular appeal. What part was it? What sort of program? It was the first of the silly programs as distinct from satirical or smart... Or anything like that. We were just a lot of silly people doing silly things. And what was good about Nice Time when we did it is that things just happened and we didn't have to make them happen according to the rules.

To a shooting schedule or script or anything. But then as more money got put into it and more people got involved and we had more writers and researchers, the life went out of it and then we all got very bored. Let's have your fourth record. Now my fourth record. ...relates to a period in my life when I wanted desperately to be Jewish and looked in the mirror a lot and made Jewish faces, sort of pulled down the sides of my nose and so on because I think like lots of children who... Were reaching the age of reason in the late 40s when we were discovering what had been done to the Jews. There was such a tremendous burden of guilt. That the only way to escape it was to become a Jew, and then you'd join the victims rather than the perpetrators. So I became a Zionist for a while. I'm not a Zionist anymore. And one of the things that made a difference to me was a song called Habaita, which means home, which was sung apparently by the displaced people in the holding camp.

In Israel and I remember hearing Shoshana Damari who's an Israeli singer sing it when I was 16 or so and it's a song that I've sung ever since Shoshana. A good one. That story goes back to my relationship at Cambridge, my friendship at Cambridge with Sunny Mehta, the publisher, who asked...

Me to have lunch with him one day after a nice time had come to an end. And I told him in some, with some miffedness actually, that my agent then had suggested... That I write a book on the failure of women's emancipation and I said to him I do think that's a bit over the top really because I don't think women's emancipation has happened so how can you talk about it being failed? And he said, What do you mean? I went on and on and beefed and whinged and carried on. And he said, That's the book I want. I'll draw up the contract today. Can I try and sum it up for the purposes of those who... You'll argue, of course, with the summary, but here we are. You said that woman had become a stereotype sex object. She was a eunuch, she was weak. And she was passive and she was debased, she was dependent on the male and you were really calling on women to throw off the chains of marriage and trust in her true self.

Because I said, Do what thou wilt, i.e. want to do what you do and don't always let things happen to you, which was the role that women were supposed to play, it was taken as meaning that you should go out and be sexually active. I.e. another duty was imposed upon women, which was not my idea at all. It was your own personal quest, wasn't it, that you wanted to experience the total female experience and everything it had to offer? Oh well, if I'd wanted to do that I should have made sure that I could do it. I had a child, I didn't do that, so that's one whole angle. Also, I've never worked in a service, well, I have, I've been a waitress, but I mean, I don't know. Dreary slog that most women have. You know, get up, get the house organised, run to work, be terrific at work, run out at lunchtime and do the shopping. Finish the day's work, run back home, get the kids organized, get the meal on and so on and then be the perfect sexual partner with the candles lit at eight o'clock when he comes in.

But this was when you were about 28 or 30, you wrote this. I mean, you might have been going to do all of those things. No, I knew I never would. Did you? I knew I just couldn't do it. Absolutely. I disqualified myself already. I mean, the streaked hairdo and the stockbroker were light years away already. What about the other bit of female experience? What about lesbianism? I think any sensible woman would be a lesbian. Women are so easy to love. They're so lovable. The only people who find them difficult to love are men. Who never seem to know what's required of them. It's as if we spoke different emotional languages. And I really envy lesbians, but I'm afraid I can't get it together. I mean, I've done some of the bits you're supposed to do, I think, I'm not entirely sure what one is supposed to do, but of course it's not a question of gymnastics either. But where women have wanted to make love to me and I've submitted to them, I've let it happen and even tried to be resourceful and imaginative and considerate and all of that and been bored.

To conniptions the whole time, so it's not for moi. It's not your thing. No, neither is the other now. I'm very happy to be free of both of it. It took such a lot of time, I seem to remember. I was always so concerned about it and him. How it was working and whether we were doing it the right way and often enough and it's such bliss to suddenly think, Oh goodness, I don't have to do it anymore. It hasn't left a gap in my life at all. Has the non-happening of motherhood left a gap in your life? Undoubtedly. But the thing is that I believe that if you can't reconcile yourself to childlessness, then there's something wrong and you really ought not to be able to hold the whole society to ransom, to give you the child that you imagined that you want. Because the fact is you don't know what a child is, and a child has a right to invent itself. So if you haven't had a child and if it hasn't been vouchsafe, then you accept it. Your fifth record, please.

Now my fifth record is as abstract as my last record was Concrete. I really love the harpsichord music of Francois Couperin.

Because it is so extremely cerebral and perfect. And especially when it's played by someone like Gustav Leonhard, who doesn't try to make it expressive, who just lets the music build its structure in time.

Prens, pièce de Clavison played by Gustave Leonhart. That was the one from the 15th book called Les Vaporets, the evaporated one. We have not evaporated, we are here. Germaine, some 14 years later it was said there was a radical shift in your position after writing The Female Eunuch. You put your hair in a bun and you started saying you were bored with sex and you were Advocated chastity, but that was not quite accurate, was it? I've never advocated chastity, actually. I don't see the point of chastity. However... I do watch young women trying to find their way through the minefield at the moment and I still wish, as I always wished, I go on my knees and pray to heaven that women would stop being so vulnerable and so obviously up for grabs, you know. Because women still depend more upon a relationship, to having a relationship than men do. Perhaps that is simply the feeling.

Male role. Perhaps you can't change it. Perhaps it's entirely natural. But there are other roles. I mean, I think Carmen is a great role model to take. Carmen has men when she wants and only when she wants. There's that side to it as well, you see. Most of the sex that women are getting is not sex that they've actually wanted. It's a condition of another situation which they want to maintain. But Carmen gets bored and says no, you know. But you'd have to be quite tough to be like that. You don't want women to be tough, do you? I'm strong, I want them to be. Strong and dignified and dangerous. Difficult. Be difficult, exciting, dangerous. Juris is what I say to my goddaughters. But those who analyse these things say that new woman, if you like, who's come through the revolution that you helped to put in train, new woman has achieved everything that people like you were advocating. But in fact, she's still not happy because now she

As the added tyranny of independence and strength and career, as well as vulnerability and motherhood and marriage. Well, I think we have to get one thing quite clear. There's been no revolution. What actually happened in historical terms was that most women who went out to work went out to work to service the family debt. And most of them are not doing anything that's worth doing. Most of them are not facing any likelihood of promotion. Most of them are still working. In the service industries, I think that it has now become harder. Really harder because women are now expected to be active in all these spheres. They're supposed to be super women. And they never get any rest and they're perfectionist the whole time. Women didn't necessarily take in what I was talking about.

Because I was talking about undoing all that, undoing the tyranny of the house, opening the house out into the community, sharing parenting with other people and so on. I mean, we still talk, we render lip service to these ideas. So if there's been no revolution, what is the solution? What have you achieved? What's it all been about? Well, I've never said I've achieved anything, because if women have changed their life... They changed them. I didn't change them. And when women write to me saying, You changed my life, I write back immediately saying, I did not. And don't force that responsibility on me. If your life was changed, you changed it, not I. And I've never... Wanted to do anything except what writers always want to do, which is to raise consciousness, to put ideas forward, to give them a life and let them go and see what people do with them. Let us have your sixth record. Now my sixth record is for me one of the valid images of female power. I'm very interested in female power. And Jessie Norman...

Apart from looking like a wonderful bronze lion, has a voice of the most astonishing power. And I've chosen Bein Schlafengehen by Richard Strauss because it's a song about dying. And I'm very interested in the art of dying well. Anyone who's been to Ethiopia knows that there is something very important about the way you approach your death. And that's what this song is actually about.

Jessye Norman singing one of Richard Strauss's four last songs by Schlafengen. Germaine, you will undoubtedly be extremely adept at living the simple, chaste life on this desert island. Will you be able to build something to live in or under? Well, it depends what the island's made of. If it's made of coral, it shouldn't be too difficult. I just have to find something to cut the coral with. Will you be desperate to escape? I don't think I would. My notion of... To luxury is to be quite alone. And when you lie there on the island in your lonely state, dreaming, what will you dream of, do you think? What everybody dreams of, one's childhood. I know I dream a lot about Australia because I do. I think I probably dream about my animals and

and always dreams about one's mother. - And would you dream about any of your lovers? Would you dream of romantic love? Have you ever been in love in that sense? - I don't know the answer to the question because I've always, I've thought I was, and I've certainly been fairly infatuated, demented. Obsessed and you know hanging by a thread and waiting for the phone to ring and finding every hour a month when the loved one is away But I've been told by so many people that I don't know what love is about that I'm beginning to think perhaps I don't. Would you like to fall in love again in the way you just described? Yes, it's the only thing I would like to do before the curtain falls. I would just like to go completely positive.

About somebody again. And not even have it requited, because it's much more fun being in love than being beloved. I'm not very good at being beloved. I get terribly impatient with sort of mawkishness and clingingness and jealousy and all of that. But to actually be in that state, that adult state, is quite terrific. Let's have another record. When I was in Cuba, I... Discovered that there's a whole other culture on the other side of the world. And there are two singers called Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanese. Who travel all over South America, singing to enormous audiences of kids, to whom they Now the New Dillon and this boiling movement of popular ferment and optimism about the future is led from this tiny island of 10 million people who are telling El Continente to go jump in the lake.

Song I've chosen. Pablo Milanese and Silvio Rodriguez singing Was that right? You seem to me to be at least two people, certainly the academic, the intellectual, who enjoys nothing better than sitting in a university library researching 17th century female poets or whatever. And then on the other hand you are this outspoken, sometimes

Person who will turn up on a on a chat show or knock off a quick article for a tabloid newspaper on something topical I mean Germaine Greer, do you prefer? I don't think about her at all. I think she's a crashing bore. You know that diagram that used to be called Foo? Which is just two eyes and a nose over a fence. I mean, I see myself like that. But you must know, really, whether you would rather be seen, if you like, as the sage or the clown. Difference. And that's an important part of being who I am, I suppose. I think folly is a wise state to be in. And I used to say to my...

Students at school always at the university. What I'm trying to do is confuse you. When you are confused, you'll have begun to understand. As long as you are not confused, you haven't begun to think. And that's how I think of my mental activity. - Let's have your last record. - Now my last record is a really bittersweet thing because when I was in Ethiopia, having my life completely changed and my lens completely adjusted. So I now see life in a very different way and take a different yardstick to absolutely everything, which has a good side and a bad side. It fills me with great tenderness for the vulnerability of things, as well as great grief for the massive amounts of human suffering that we really can't even begin to comprehend. This song that I've chosen was Top of the Pops in Ethiopia when I was traveling around the resettlement areas. So looking at people who'd lost everything, who were dressed in a rag,

out all over again in a hostile land full of new diseases and new parasites of all kinds. This ridiculously jolly sound would come booming out in the estaminé of the filthy little towns without sewage.

To me about the indomitability of the human spirit of this noise. A Ethiopian pop song sung by Noe Dibibi. So Germaine, the moments of choice. First of all, which one of those eight records is the most special for you? I can sing the others. The one I can't sing is...

Is Gustav Leonhard playing the Couperin. And because it's so concentrated, that musical experience, and the actual shape of each note and the positioning of each phrase, that's the one I would have. It would be, it would sustain me the longest. - And your book, I think you know that you have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. - But I don't have the Oxford English Dictionary, and that's the book that I would take. - And your luxury? I like to take my spice box, my big spice box with all my spices in, but you're going to say no, no, that's too many things. So I shall just have my garam masala. What's that? My hot spices, so that I can vary my diet at trifle on this island, and give my shellfish a bit of a tingle from time to time. To me, and Grier, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

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