Germain Greer Rocks
Germaine Greer's Orwellian Ordeal on 'Big Brother'
By SARAH LYALL in the 1/20/05 NYT
LONDON, Jan. 19 - Possibly the only thing more surprising than the news that Germaine Greer - the Australian feminist, literary scholar and cultural critic - had joined the cast of the latest "Celebrity Big Brother" series was what she did when she quit, five days later.
Contestants habitually complain about their experiences on reality television shows. It is one of the standard features of the entertainment, like groveling for meals or getting drunk and falling over. But the complaints are usually directed at the other participants. As one said about another in a past season, "If I had stayed in that house a minute longer, I would have murdered Les."
What made the 65-year-old Ms. Greer's departure last week so riveting, by contrast, was that her attack was not a personal whining session, but a blistering cultural and literary critique of the show that revealed her as perhaps the only contestant who has ever actually read (or at least admitted reading) George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," where the whole notion of Big Brother was born.
Ms. Greer, still best known for her 1970's feminist manifesto, "The Feminine Mystique," [correction: "The Female Eunuch"] compared the show, in which celebrities are confined together as viewers decide who goes and who stays, to "a fascist prison camp" where bullying was encouraged and sensory deprivation used as a weapon of torture.
Read the rest at the NYT site!
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