FEMINISM - THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM - Julie Burchill
"Until January 2013, I’d never thought much about transsexuals. If pushed, I’d have said I felt vaguely sorry for them, as I do white people who pretend to be black or my teenage self when I pretended to be Jewish. It’s unfortunate to be confused about what you are once you’re past adolescence.
And then they went after my friend.
I don’t mind anyone having a pop at me. I’ve enjoyed copious fame and fortune from dishing it out, and not being able to take it would make me a sissy and a hypocrite. Also, kinkily, I enjoy a bit of verbal abuse, finding it bracing in the manner of a cold swim.
But my weak spot has always been people picking on my mates; when that happens, I see red. Ironically, the piece that the angry trans-mob took exception to was part of a compilation about Female Anger, in which my friend mentioned that are women are sick and tired of being told to aspire to impossible ideals in all areas of their lives, one of which was achieving ‘the body of a Brazilian transsexual.’
I was exchanging some bitchy quips on Facebook about the ensuing Twitter brouhaha while getting ready to go out when an Observer commissioning editor asked me - BEGGED ME! - to fashion them swiftly into a piece. When I said they were just for my friends entertainment and that I was busy, I was offered twice my usual word rate. I’m only human! I dashed off a quick piece, in which intemperate language such as bed-wetters in bad wigs may have been used. But I was by now an Angry Female - my mate was getting death threats and the police had been called in. I went out and thought no more of it.
I awoke on Sunday morning to a right old rumpus in the small and self-important world of the media. Some Lib-Dem MP with delusions of adequacy was calling for me to be sacked from the Observer; this would have been difficult because I had no contract with them even though I wrote for them regularly - a situation which, the editor John Mulholland was soon murmuring comfortingly on the phone, would continue.
Within 24 hours the column had been expunged from the Guardian/Observer website and I was never hired by the Observer again. Luckily, I was richer and tougher than all the bed-wetters (bad-wigged or otherwise) who both pilloried me and lost their nerve when it came to hiring me and survived my Wilderness Years pretty well, writing only for the bold and unbowed Spectator and Spiked until the Telegraph hired me last year.
Looking back, I see that I was the first person to be demonised by the allegedly liberal, free-thinking Establishment who have continued to crumble in the face of the surreal demands of the Call-Me-Madam mad-men; in academia, in psychiatry, in medicine and now, most bizarrely, in the case of the Canadian beauticians being prosecuted for refusing to wax the scrotum of a repulsive cross-dresser. Whereas misogyny was historically Right-wing, it’s now hysterically Left-wing. We see it best in those vile cry-bullies the Woke Bros, who have found a fresh’n’funky way to hate women without seeming like sexist dinosaurs.
There’s a really good way to justify hitting women if you’re a Woke Bro - just call them TERFs and punching them becomes a brave anti-fascist action instead of the default setting of every cowardly wanker who would never dare to hit a man. 62% of women at university have experienced sexual assault, 56% by known perpetrators - a lot of them will be Woke Bros. Women report being choked by male sexual partners - ‘Breath-Play’ to give it its innocent-sounding sex-name - to an extraordinary extent; that’ll be those Woke Bros who feel no guilt about watching porn because, hey, sex work is work like any other kind. (Except when it comes to their sisters.) Pornography-using men who call themselves feminists are so monumentally dumb that they probably delude themselves that the reason why the average age of death for a female performer is 37 is because they die of pleasure - having all those orgasms! An astonishing number of the showbiz sleazes called out in MeToo identified as feminists - Woke Bros to a man. But most of all, you’ll find them taking the side of female impersonators against born females.
The Woke War Against Women is well and truly under way and the Woke Witch Trials have started. So I’m extraordinarily pleased that I called out the poisonousness of the New Misogyny right from the start - and to be financially supporting this event by MAKE MORE NOISE. I’ve said it before - but I knew I was right. What a fascinating time to be a feminist!"
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