on Greer

"Right from the get-go, she understood that to influence people's ideas on issues of gender, her means of doing that was to put on a public performance. Australians of that era will remember her displaying her long legs and talking dirty, and talking about sex on television and shocking people."

She posed nude for Suck. She wrote about groupie culture. She had a three-week marriage to a builder's labourer she had just met. "She paraded him as a piece of rough trade. She really was fabulous,"

Spender agrees and notes that gender plays a role, too. "If she were a man, she would be on a pedestal. And if Australia had a bit more maturity, we might claim her as one of the leading intellectuals of our time."

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