Germaine Greer, On Rape

- Greer has written a thoughtful and measured essay on rape and all the difficult issues surrounding it.
- The issue of consent is the most difficult and controversial. While Greer recognises the sensitivities around defining it, she doesn’t flinch in dissecting the real legal and sexual behaviour issues it raises. She refuses to acquiesce in the 'presumption that the issue of consent is not problematical'. She rejects contemporary slogans such as 'No means no and yes means yes' and 'Consent is not the absence of no but the presence of yes' and so forth.
- She presents a lot of global data and statistics that underwrite her questions and concerns about how various societies and institutions currently navigate this legally fraught terrain. Her views are well researched and grounded. 
- Fearlessly she never descends to the black and white entrenched views that refuse to engage in nuance or subtlety, or recognise the murkiness and lack of clarity surrounding almost every instance of the offence. 
- Her perspective is mature, evidenced here: 'Women in search of romance are coming to grief at the hands of men who are after conquest. When they meet with casual brutality they are deeply humiliated and traumatised. If they look for redress they will certainly be further harassed and intruded upon, and their cause is all too likely to fail, leaving them further injured and demoralised'. 
- And provocative, evidenced here: 'If non-consensual sex is, as seems obvious to me, commoner than deep communion between male and female, we must make an attempt to stem its deadening spread. But how?'
- An enlightening read.