GERMAINE Greer’s opinions tend to arrive like a grenade through the letterbox. Explosions result within seconds. So it was when recently she opined that most rape was just “bad sex”. In her view, it was generally a failure of sexual etiquette rather than deliberate viciousness: “Rape is a jagged outcrop in the vast monotonous landscape of bad sex...” This, it should be remembered, by a woman who as a student was raped and badly beaten by a rugby player she had met at a party.

What might have been a single detonation turned into a fireworks display when she called for shorter sentences for rapists. As she now knows, hell hath no fury like the #MeToo generation when it feels belittled. It is worth noting, though, that as Greer’s increasingly counter-cultural theories go viral, younger women are proving no match for her wit, vigour, or self-belief. They might dismiss her as no longer a feminist, or even a pariah, but that doesn’t diminish her power.

As with most of us old-style feminists, who came of age when Greer was in her prime, today’s gender warriors need a hashtag or movement from which to launch their ideas. Greer, meanwhile, remains singular in being self-propelling and self-motivating, always her own person. When some expressed horror at her belief that transgender women are not “real women”, she would not have lost a moment’s sleep.

There is so much to admire about her that reading her latest essay, On Rape, a very slim and at times unfocussed manifesto, I wished I could shove it behind the sofa and pretend it hadn’t been written. It’s not all off-beam, of course. Here, for example, she describes a friend whose protests at her husband’s nighttime importuning could be heard throughout the house: “Rupert! Leave me alone. Stop it! Get off me!”. The wife always gave in rather than create too loud a fuss. Decades later, that couple is still together, yet Greer is in no doubt about which category these battles of wills fall into.

More controversial is her view of the ubiquity of unwanted sex: “From the banal to the bestial rape is part of the tissue of everyday life.” For her, “non-consensual sex is, as seems obvious to me, commoner than deep communion between male and female...”

It is a staggering statement, based on a bit of googling, her old friend’s experience, and her presumption that the majority of women are reluctant to have sex with their partners most of the time. It further assumes that their wishes are commonly overruled, or that they are simply, and frighteningly, overpowered. By this measure, we are in living in the midst of a rape pandemic.

This dismal vision of society surely says more about Greer’s psyche than about the facts of most people’s home life. It also, worryingly, indicates that Greer has reached a point where she feels free to pontificate without the framework of intellectual rigour and personal history she brought to her earlier and revolutionary works.

When The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, Greer lit the feminist fuse beneath patriarchy. She was a latter-day Guy Fawkes: “Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.” Who can forget the impact of first reading those inflammatory, liberating words? And to listen to her today, even if you don’t always agree, she remains trenchantly sharp, funny, and clear-eyed. Only on rape does she seem seriously to have lost her radar, her fiercely corrective critical edge.

You might of course argue she has earned the right to think whatever she likes. Sometimes, indeed, her remarks are so provocative, you suspect she enjoys winding up the more earnest feminists scaling the cliff behind her.

The problem is that now, at almost 80, Greer is in danger of damaging the reputation she has spent a lifetime building. In so doing, she risks allowing detractors or dinosaurs to ignore her hard-won, hard-hitting truths and depict her as a relic of a pre-digital age. When those sort of accusations are thrown around, especially by women, the bedrock of gender equality begins to crumble, and the entire feminist project is undermined.

Of women who deserve to be celebrated, she is near the top of the queue. In terms of intellect and personality, talent, generosity and outrageous courage, few can match her. It is thus a melancholy prospect for those who have held Greer in awe all these years to see her slipping to the edge of her pedestal.

Doubtless, she will not be troubled by any of this. One of her earliest lessons, after all, was the importance of individuality: “It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.” Perhaps it is not Greer but those of us seeking a flawless idol who should get real. As with Cromwell, another exceptional iconoclast, we need to cherish her, warts, nuttiness and all.