Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1988 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and an academic. Nearly 20 years ago she published a book in which she argued that women were repressed and reduced to stereotypes of male fantasy.

More recently she wrote another book in which... stereotypes of male fantasy.

More recently she wrote another book in which some detected a mellowing of her views, but she

denies that her opinions have changed and whichever side you take she remains unarguably feminism's most assured

apostle. She is of course Germain Greer. Germain feminism scares most men to death.

Do you find men are terrified of you?

No, not all.

I find mostly they ignore me without very much difficulty.

And they also patronize me, which amazes me still.

I still can't get used to it. In what way? Well this thing of assuming that

you're asking them for something or

or for example you can't change attire tire. I change a tire because I have a house in the

country in Italy where we do a tire a week. I can change a tire in about four minutes

flat but men are always elbowing you out of the way and then taking 20 minutes

which is so irritating.

What about women?

When you introduced a sort of a strange woman at a party, how does she accept you or not?

Well it depends whether she's younger than me, older than me,

whether she feels that she is more feminist than I am. There are many many women in

England who would consider themselves to be a lot more feminist than I am, even though they're

...