Germaine Greer's Eulogy for Steve Irwin

Germaine Greer deserves some credit. Her existence, in the end, has done some good to the world. In her recent piece on the death of Steve Irwin, she has once and for all exploded the feminist claim that women are necessarily somehow more caring and more sensitive to the feelings of others than are men. Irwin died at the untimely age of 44, leaving behind two small children, and his funeral had not yet been held; but Greer rushed into print with the suggestion that he deserved to die. Because, like a typical man, he was trying to “dominate” animals.

Was she not concerned about being out of step in her views with most Australians? Not at all. Greer responded that most Australians are “idiots.”

Only an invincible sense of privilege and superiority can account for that sort of callousness. Surely it is right up there with Marie-Antoinette’s legendary “let them eat cake.”

And note this fanciful passage from her column:

You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's sake.)

Here she is, quite literally, talking to herself in print: she is arguing, not with Irwin, but with an imaginary character. This is a person out of touch with reality.

There’s more:

The crocodile would rather have been anywhere else and the chicken had had a grim life too, but that's entertainment at Australia Zoo.

She seems to believe she can tell exactly what a crocodile is thinking. A crocodile she has never met. She effortlessly assumes she knows more of what he is thinking than Steve Irwin does—a man who has spent his life with crocodiles, and its life with this crocodile. Her inner sense of superiority is invincible.

She is also apparently well aware of what snakes in general think, and can report this to us in detail.

Yet she accuses Irwin of “self-delusion”!

Here too she does us a service. She demonstrates something about feminists in general: they do not follow accepted rules of logic or evidence. They just make things up. Not to put too fine a point on it, the most charitable interpretation is that they are simply insane.

Remember Andrea Dworkin’s conviction that she had been raped in her sleep in a locked Paris hotel room? Perhaps she believed it herself; but it shows either unbelievable arrogance or a real disconnect with reality to have made a public case of it.

Or how about Betty Freidan’s claim that her husband abused her? She later clarified: it turned out she had hit him. This is a word in which up can be down and black white, if that is what you really want.

Come to think of it, maybe feminists really can read the minds of snakes and crocodiles. Certainly, I cannot begin to figure out how their minds work. Perhaps I should accept their own word that they are working on the same moral and intellectual level.