Mary Beard on Greer and rape in LRB:

"How is it then that, a few decades on, Greer has written a ‘deeply ill-informed’ book about rape that has been criticised for going soft on the crime, for ‘sham[ing] victims who allow themselves to be deeply affected by rape’, and for focusing on women’s ‘rape fantasies’, while advocating lower penalties for rapists, as if we simply had to ‘accept rape as “part of the psychopathology of everyday life”’? Worse still, how could she harangue the audience at the Hay Festival last year, ‘posturing like some rad-fem Katie Hopkins’, claiming that rape was ‘often not a “spectacularly violent crime” … but, more often than not, just “lazy, careless and insensitive”’ – meriting perhaps two hundred hours of community service, or maybe the letter ‘R’ tattooed on the culprit’s cheek? Is it really the case, as Naomi Wolf, one of the book’s most hostile reviewers, claimed, that ‘one of the best minds of her generation’ has woken up from a forty-year nap only to ‘blunder, again and again, into long discredited errors from the distant past’?

If these really were Greer’s revised views on rape, she would deserve the animosity directed at her. Happily, they are not. Many of the critiques of both the book and her Hay lecture were a combination of misrepresentation and careless (or wilful) selective quotation. It is hard to believe that those who attacked the lecture had attended it or watched it online (where it is still available). A large part of the thirty-minute talk is taken up with Greer’s very powerful account of recent cases in which brutal rapists were acquitted, and of the way in which the victim’s initial trauma was redoubled by the indignity of the legal process and the humiliation of not being believed. She also addresses her own rape, sixty years ago, and explains why she didn’t report it to the police. They are reasons (not least the imperative of just wanting to go home and wash him off you) that any person – myself included – who has been raped and has taken the matter no further, would understand."

(...)

'In her lecture, Greer was attempting to overturn some assumptions about rape, and to think differently about how to prosecute and punish it – to end the current impasse. It is hard to imagine things being worse: only a tiny number of successful prosecutions, which cannot possibly reflect true levels of guilt; those women who do report a crime feel assaulted all over again by the invasive procedures that accompany the investigation (courtroom interrogation is just one). Several of the questioners at Hay pushed Greer quite hard: some took issue not with her ‘victim shaming’, but with what they saw as her ‘victim-centred’ approach. Ella Whelan, Spiked columnist and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism, claimed that Greer disempowered women by focusing on consent and on the problematic nature of that notion (‘I’m quite capable of saying yes or no, even if I have had a glass of vodka,’ was Whelan’s line). Another questioner wondered whether Greer was being unfair to men. Do men really love their mothers less than mothers love their sons, as she had claimed? ‘Probably,’ Greer said.

Many of these topics are discussed in On Rape. The book, or pamphlet (at ninety pages, that’s really all it is), asks why the modern legal system fails to secure convictions for rape; why so few people pursue cases against their rapists, successfully or not; and considers the difficulties in dealing in court, pace Whelan, with the dilemmas of consent. (The amount of data that can now be offered as evidence has complicated this. In Greer’s own case, as she explained in the lecture, the rapist forced her to cry out ‘fuck me,’ which wouldn’t have played well for her in court had it been recorded, as it now could be, on the defendant’s mobile phone.) There are numerous misrepresentations of all this by Greer’s critics. To take just one small but telling example, she does write about women’s rape fantasies, but only in order to dismiss them as not relevant to sexual assault. Her point (as some critics recognised) is that in women’s fantasies, they are in control.

Greer’s argument isn’t a plea to ‘go soft’ on rape. She is trying to make the argument that non-consensual sex – with its long-term, repeated, low-level humiliation of women – is much more prevalent (‘in the psychopathology of everyday life’) than we like to admit. It was, after all, only in 1991 that rape within marriage became recognised as a crime in English law. Even now very few wives feel they have any redress against unwanted sex, least of all by making a visit to the local police station (it’s a price many women are prepared to pay for partnership and the other ‘advantages’ of marriage). Greer is also saying that if we cannot deal with the crime of rape by the traditional legal strategies, we might have to look for a radically new approach. If one of the main factors preventing convictions is the central criterion of consent (juries cannot convict if there is the smallest doubt that the rapist might have believed that the victim consented), then maybe we ought to lower the burden of proof. But, if we do that (to the necessary disadvantage of the accused), it follows that we should lower the penalty. This is not an attempt to diminish the seriousness of the crime. Whether you like the idea or not, Greer’s contention is that raising conviction rates is more important than securing lengthy punishment: better one hundred men found guilty than two locked up for five years. Little of this was acknowledged in the furore that followed the book’s publication.'

Beard ends the review with:

'My first reaction here is to feel uneasy about the unitary view of political and cultural virtue that underlies these reactions to Greer. Just because she is, let’s assume, wrong on trans politics does not mean she is wrong on rape. That said, she is more complicit in the furore over On Rape than she at first appears. It is clear from Kleinhenz’s biography that throughout her career Greer has combined a tremendous capacity for persuasive argument with an equal capacity to annoy and provoke. In fact, anger and its provocation are very much part of her approach – as is her apparent inability to suppress a clever quip once she has thought of it. It reminds me of the criticism levelled at Cicero: he could never, it was said, keep an ill-advised joke in; it was as if he had hot coals in his mouth. Greer has always had hot coals in her mouth. In many ways we have reason to be grateful for this (where would The Female Eunuch have been without them?). But On Rape and her Hay lecture might have had more lasting power if she had resisted the temptation to sprinkle them with irritants designed to annoy – a bait she must have known would be taken. It does nothing for her argument, for example, to take pot shots (as she did at Hay) at the celebrity actors who exposed Harvey Weinstein, as if rape doesn’t count if you happen to be rich and famous. When she writes in the book, ‘the mere suggestion will cause an outcry which is one good reason for making it,’ it is an honest summary of the Greer method.'

Read the complete review here.

Indeed, simply because Greer refuses to subscribe to the popular thought, at least in certain circles, that all victims are saints and martyrs and "we" decide of course who is a victim and who isn't, is not reason enough to twist her words and read het essay in the most negative way possible. Although some of the criticism of Beard is justified. I'm not sure what fake orgasms and rape have to do with each other, and whether porn, as she claimed yesterday during a public debate, is the cause of most trouble is debatable. Rape existed before the Internet. But all these issues are debatable without turning your opponent in an apologist for rapists.

As to the Greer method, last night she said: "People are outraged anyhow, they love to be outraged."
I would like to add: they believe that their own outrage is a sublime virtue.