Germaine Greer says women enjoy watching sexual violence on TV

Feminist author has been a vocal critic of the #MeToo movement

Germaine Greer has claimed female abuse victims of the #MeToo movement are "cashing in" and defended depictions of sexualised violence on TV.

The feminist author, 79, wrote in Radio Times that crime dramas currently receiving a backlash for gratuitous portrayals of violence against women are only trying to meet the desires of their audience.

"Female victimisation sells," she wrote. "What should disturb us is that it sells to women."

She continued: "Who is watching and reading the proliferating imagery of female victimhood? Women, that's who.

"The endless array of female cadavers laid out on slabs and dragged out of the undergrowth in crime drama on TV is designed to reel in a mainly female audience."

Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson in BBC serial killer drama The Fall

Greer went so far as to suggest that large numbers of female viewers fantasised about sexual assault.

Citing a 2008 study from the US, she said: "The fantasy is commoner than these figures suggest. The man who groans and clenches his teeth as he struggles to resist the heroine's fatal charms has been a staple of chick-lit ever since Jane Eyre."

Greer's comments were made following criticism of sexualised violence in big budget TV dramas including the BBC's hit series The Fall and Luther, as well as ITV thriller Paranoid.

She has sparked several controversies since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, which she has repeatedly criticised, and also caused controversy last month when she predicted the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would be short-lived.