Tuesday's Dominion Post was a rewarding read for aficionados of irony.
Occupying a fair chunk of the front page was a photo story revealing that the hysteria over the boy band One Direction - five lads who make Justin Bieber look like Brad Thorn - has reached the stage that two $93.50 tickets to their sold-out Wellington show next month fetched $2000 in a Trade Me bidding war.
The story quoted a Guardian concert reviewer's description of the deafening, primal howl generated by One Direction's audience as "the hive-mind battle cry of teenage girls scenting boy-flesh".
Buried inside was a seven paragraph report on 73-year-old feminist Germaine Greer's appearance at the Wellington Writers and Readers Festival, during which she despaired of the growth of a "paedophiliac culture" obsessed with celebrity and sex.
You could argue the Post's treatment of the two stories proved Greer's point, but that was merely the tip of an ironic iceberg.
This is, after all, the same Germaine Greer who in 2003 produced a book called The Boy, which a Guardian critic described as 200 pages of "succulent teenage male beauty".
It was either the same critic, or the Guardian requires its contributors to write like Vladimir Nabokov in his Lolita phase.
Greer claimed the book was "an attempt to address modern women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object, and to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for a right to visual pleasure".
Which is an academic's way of saying that women have as much right to be titillated by pornography as men. That's indisputable, but it seems at odds with her complaint that men prefer "girls on the internet, girls you don't have to talk to" to real women. It might also seem curious that a feminist should advocate treating boys as sex objects but, unlike some of the sisterhood, Greer has never seen feminism as incompatible with an enthusiasm for the recreational potential of the male gender.
Paul Thomas' full story at New Zealand Herald