The 85-year-old Australian feminist gave an interview to the British-American broadcaster from her aged care home in Victoria.
But the British-American broadcaster, who has long warned that too many of his peers play it safe and avoid difficult subjects for fear of causing offence, dived head first into peril.
Asked why she thought ambitious women should marry truck drivers, Greer said: “I think it’s the notion that you should be in competition with your husband is a bad notion. But we always think that we need that status in our husband. He doesn’t think he needs that status in us. So there’s an imbalance at the very beginning.”she said she was living in an aged-care home in Castlemaine, north-west of Melbourne, where she has “almost anything I need” except she “can’t just take off and disappear”.
She said it was possible for men to be feminists, but they rarely were, and “they tend to feel as if they could take it over ... and do it better”. But Theroux later had to push back on several controversial statements, including accusing her of “victim blaming” women who fuelled the #MeToo movement. Pressed on her previous public comments on transgender people, including “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock”, she said she was “perfectly happy to accept people who think they’re transgender”.