Letter: Prophet for profit
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Germaine Greer ("Dr Greer, I presume", 4 November) is best understood as one of a multitude of prophets for profit who simply got it wrong when they wrote their premature blockbusters for cash and lived to find that much of what they propagated was garbage.
Earlier in life Germaine Greer helped to lay the foundations of behaviour and belief for the mothers, role models and teachers of today's younger women - all that wonderful "talking dirty about sex" and posing for "a close-up of her pudendum" that your columnist appears to find so brilliant.
These self-advertising gestures of long ago may have been necessary for women's greater equality - though the girlie mags, beatings, rapings, glass ceilings, low wages, single mothers, poverty, misery and despair suggest that Greer and others led women down a deeply unpleasant (for them) garden path.
The answer is not her form of female laddishness, or her massive generalisations from limited personal life experience.
It lies in a campaign by both sexes to divest all social, political and cultural institutions of their anachronistic male-formed structures and to rebuild these on a fresh and equal basis.
Put simply, women should not want to fight for admission to the Church of England, the MCC, the clubs of St James's, Eton, or any other masculine antiquity.
Their wish to join them enshrines their value. New institutions, with new ground-rules and structures, must be created for the new century and new millennium, with women as the architects.
Germaine Greer's lucrative female laddishness is as irrelevant and extinct as the dodo.
IAN FLINTOFF
London SW6
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