Oppressive Flattery

Germaine Greer reportedly argues, in her book Slipshod Sibyls, that female poets have been historically disadvantaged by our evil patriarchal society not just by being told to shut up, but by being over-praised for too little, preventing them from properly developing their craft.

But this strikes me as a perfect Catch-22, or perhaps also, Procrustean bed. Opposite evidence is taken to mean the same thing.

It even seems to me intuitively there is something to what Germaine Greer is saying. Too much praise at the beginning can lead to less effort, hence poorer results in the long run. That's what spoiling children is supposed to be about.

But to see this as a form of oppression of women strips all meaning from the term. It is, by normal definition, the reverse. You might as well see pogroms as bias in favour of the Jews, cruelly spoiling the Germans and Russians and encouraging Jews to work and achieve. You would have to see England as putting centuries of self-sacrifice into the literature of Ireland at their great expense, and credit enlightened Jim Crow with increasing the vitality of the blues.