Even intellectuals now have stalkers

Germaine Greer. What a woman. Tied up and roughed up in her own home on Monday night, she filed a column to The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, and nipped off to Galway for a literary reading on Wednesday. Her assailant, a 19-year-old student, is being held for psychiatric assessment, having been charged with unlawful imprisonment and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Psychiatric assessment? Isn't it clear that this girl must be absolutely insane? Who wants to get on the wrong side of Germaine? Only mad people.

It will be for the courts to decide exactly what happened on Monday night, but one can speculate about what form such a madness might take. Would it be a pro-Germaine madness, or anti-Germaine madness? Does she simply want the writer and academic to be her friend, but with funny ideas about how to go about it? Is she spitting mad that Germaine helped to unleash feminism and later revised some of her views? Or is she some kind of über-conservative young woman, who thinks that women have Gone Too Far, inspired by Germaine? What does it matter?

The one plain fact is that once again the headlines are dominated by the curious spectacle of a single individual latching on to another, well-known one, as if this latter person was responsible for everything, or held the answer to the world, the universe and all that.

This is quite literally individualism gone mad, and there is of course a lot of it about. Jostling with Professor Greer's ordeal for front-page domination were the faces of young, female Coronation Street stars, terrified by the unwanted attentions of an obsessed fan who has been given an official warning under the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997.

The case of Kevin Sedgwick is a great deal more familiar than that of the unnamed teenager who allegedly pounced on Professor Greer on her doorstep. We have become familiar with the idea that celebrities are stalked by people with sexual obsessions. Stalking is known medically as "erotomania" or "de Clerambault's syndrome". The typical perpetrator is described as "a single or divorced man in his thirties, often unemployed, of above-average intelligence and with a criminal or psychiatric history".

Those feminists from whom equality is all (and Professor Greer is certainly not one of those) may seek some kind of weird solace from the fact that women are increasingly turning to stalking, while men are increasingly becoming the victims of it. David Beckham was stalked by a young woman called Chinyelu Obue. At the more absurdist end of the stalking market, Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, of Changing Rooms, was subjected to a hate campaign which accused him of "ruining people's lives". That's when you start to realise that the interiors craze really has gone too far.

But women are still the main targets of obsessive attention from crazed individuals, the vast majority of them ordinary women who have somehow attracted the unwelcome attention of men. In 1998, the first full year after the introduction of the Protection from Harassment Act, there were 3,000 prosecutions, with 200 custodial sentences. In 1999, there were 4,000, with 300 offenders jailed.

Professor Greer's attacker is said to have gone further than those prosecuted under the Act, which protects citizens from harassment. The student had visited her home earlier in the weekend though, and had been invited in before becoming a nuisance and prompting Greer to call the police.

And while the idea of a writer and academic being subjected to such obsessive behaviour may seen more than a little bizarre, it seems that among high-profile women, no one is safe from such scrutiny. While tennis or pop stars are well advised to bear the danger of stalking in mind at all times, other women, like the Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo, and the comic writer Helen Fielding, have suffered harassment.

The headquarters of the BBC was fitted with new security equipment over the Easter break, after a stalker who had harassed Anna Ford walked free from prison after his period in remand had been as long as his eventual sentence. And of course, there is Jill Dando. A year on from her death the police have concluded that she was murdered by an obsessed fan. Most people reached that conclusion within a couple of hours of her awful death.

How terrified Professor Greer must have been by her ordeal. I dare say she counts herself lucky that the incident was not far more serious. But just as the motive for Jill Dando's murder appeared clear from the start, it also seems clear that what happened to Professor Greer must have been connected to her high-profile writing and media appearances.

Trust Germaine to attract an intellectual stalker stirred by academic matters and the intricacies of gender politics. No run-of-the-mill male crushes gone bonkers for Germaine. Instead, something far more surprising, something far more post-modern. Girls of 19 are not too old to be obsessed by the usual icons decorating the altar of celebrity. But this girl appears to have crossed over in her obsessive behaviour, eschewing her peers' crushes on footballers or film stars and going for something altogether more high-minded.

Not that this can be considered any kind of stalking progress. It's more of an exception which proves the rule. But it does prompt questions about whether stalking really is as straightforward as it is made out. Maybe it is not that much to do with sex at all. Maybe it only appears to be about sex because that is the way in which most people express their deepest needs. Maybe it is instead about something yet more sinister - a desire to focus on a supreme being who defines the world for an infantilised and inadequate adult in the way that a parent does for a toddler.

For the phenomenon of stalking does seem to embrace some of the more disturbing aspects of modernity - the focus on individuals as expressed though the culture of celebrity, the increasing failure of adults to accept responsibility for their own existence, and the tendency to imbue individuals with god-like spiritual qualities. Princess Diana, the most stalked woman in history, is a good example of these various tendencies.

Of course Professor Greer is no Diana. But perhaps it is not that surprising that among all academics and thinkers, she should be the one who attracts the kind of attention rather more usually associated with those in glitzier, shallower fields. For a woman opting for the life of the mind, Professor Greer has always lived in the blazing light of publicity. She likes to imply that this is none of her doing, an unwelcome consequence of her work.

She was recently bemoaning her fate as a woman who couldn't make an innocent move without causing a stir. She explained that she had been photographed this year by Polly Borland as part of an exhibition commissioned by the Australian National Portrait Gallery of celebrated Australian ex-pats in Britain. Ms Borland had suggested that she'd like to photograph the professor in bed, so Ms Greer had complied by posing besheeted in the nude as per usual.

Lo and behold it was naked Germaine who was selected as the poster girl for the exhibition and also for the show's outing in Britain. Who would have thought it, the professor asked. Everybody, came the silent reply.

Still, I for one am looking forward to seeing Germaine's portrait, presumably this 61-year-old will look sexy, provocative and charismatic. Maybe Germaine's stalker is no different from the others, but just likes to imagine that she is. Or maybe you're just a fool now to keep yourself in the public eye, no matter how much you have to offer. Maybe the world's just too mad now for any sensible person to put their head above the parapet.

d.orr@independent.co.uk