Germaine Greer: "Like all women of taste, I am a pederast."

[Jonny T]

I've seen this one knocking about a few times and wondered if anyone knew the source.

The quote is referenced here

Andrew Denton: You said in an interview with the 'Sydney Morning Herald' a couple of years ago, "A woman of taste is a pederast — boys rather than men."

Germaine Greer: Yeah.

Andrew Denton: What do you mean by that?

Germaine Greer: Well, boys are beautiful, see, they're not beardy and singlety.

However, the only article I could find on the Sydney Morning Herald website was this, which references rather than is a source for the original quote.

is it an accurate quote? I'm curious for the context if nothing else.

[Ana Ng]

I don't know, but she might be a Harry/Draco shipper...

[mags]

I did a web search, and didn't find anything good... what is "singlety"?

And for heaven's sake, if you don't want beardy, go for a woman.

[Phaedra]

Originally Posted by mags

I did a web search, and didn't find anything good... what is "singlety"?

Here's a beardy man wearing a singlet for ya.


Rab C Nesbit

[Wolf333]

She confirms it in this interview

[Bonnie]

The source of this quote is Jan Moir's interview with Greer, which was printed as a 3,000-word piece in The Sydney Morning Herald on 22 February 1999 ("She's Back -- and She's Angry," News and Features, Pg. 11):

Germaine Greer said she would never write a sequel to The Female Eunuch. But now, enraged by the complacency of 'lifestyle feminists', she has written a savage critique [The Whole Woman] of women's lives today. She tells Jan Moir why.

[...]

One day, [Greer] says, she hopes to escape from it all and live in total solitude in an isolated cottage deep in the Scottish highlands. "That would be my idea of heaven. I don't think I deserve to live with other people."

However, she reveals that she is not quite ready yet to slip the bonds of society. "Like all women of taste, I am a pederast," she announces. "Boys rather than men." This is rather surprising news, considering that in The Change she wrote convincingly of how the climacteric and the subsequent loss of her sex drive had given her a new and joyous freedom.

[...]

As I gather up my papers, I ask one last question, which was not the one I had written in my notebook. What is your type of man, Professor Greer?

"All sorts. Never you mind," she says, then relents. "Older women tend to like boys or, indeed, effeminate men. This man [she was currently seeing] is not effeminate in the least. He might be thought to look rather effeminate, except that you know very well that he is the opposite. An East End hard boy. A combination of the two."

So, there we have it. Germaine Greer has got a crush on a bit of rough.

-- Bonnie