Hey Greer, WTF sista? Maybe you should zip it

There’s probably a long German word for that feeling of creeping existential disappointment you experience when a public figure you have long admired reveals themselves to be a twat.

While you’d expect nothing better of Kanye West, bigging up the orange Cheezus in the White House as his missus flogs appetite supressant lollies — in fact, it’s exactly what you’d expect — that slow spread of dismay once reserved for Morrissey has now fully wrapped itself around the pedestal on which you had previously placed Germaine Greer. (Well, okay, mantelpiece — only David Bowie ever got an actual pedestal — but still. He deserved it. Not just his body of work, but all the testaments about his genuine good egg status.)

So is Germaine Greer a bad egg, or a cracked egg, or do her current spate of pronoucements — that heterosexual rape is just bad sex and women need to get over it — mean that she is merely a skilled self-publicist, adept at media manipulation? Her next book, On Rape, is published by Melbourne University Press this September. It’s uncanny.