Just how moronic is Julie Burchill?

[Lissa]

I picked up "i" today to see what it was like. Julie Burchill's column was promoted on the front and was about Stephen Fry so I turned to it and read one of the worst things anyone has ever been paid to write. I'd heard of Julie Burchill - more as the creator of the fantastic "Sugar Rush" than anything else - but didn't realise she was such a wanker. She opens with

My husband claims that it was I who coined the line about Stephen Fry that he is "a stupid person's idea of a clever person". And if I weren't a sober person's idea of a booze-addled person, I might be more useful in remembering whether this is true or not. Whatever, it's pretty damn good.

Fry did an interview with Attitude magazine which he claims misquoted a point he made about the differences between gay-male, straight-male and female sexual practices. This misquote was then misquoted again by the Observer at the weekend and people started having a go at him. Burchill uses this misquote of a misquote of a misunderstanding to launch an attack on... just about everyone really. Except where hypocrisy means she keeps quiet.

When the Loaded/New Lad culture took hold, back in the Nineties, it brought with it a raft of unlikely bedfellows. One was the ethnic minority comedian who, though he made sure that his fellow drolls no longer told race jokes, thought it perfectly acceptable to tell the most extreme sexist jokes. Another was the gay man, previously respectful of feminism, who took it into his head to start behaving like the worst sort of saloon-bar oaf. This, combined with old-school drag-queenery (tell me why drag queens are OK and the Black and White Minstrels aren't, because I'm really curious), helped develop the climate of full-on male-to-female abuse which exists today, where male DJs/comedians/media-ocrities with faces that surely only a blind mother could love feel qualified to sit as judge and jury on female attractiveness.

Be it the hideous gay comedian and talkshow host who read out an item about "five dogs trying to sing" before asking "Do they mean Girls Aloud?" to the vile gay fashion guru who seeks to help women love themselves by stripping and abusing them, there seems to be some misconception abroad that as long as you don't screw women physically, it's perfectly OK to screw them over verbally. In the way that black people can freely use the N word among themselves (apparently – I still find it vile) so gay men seem to think that because they sometimes call each other "she", they are honorary women and thus can chuck the gynophobic abuse around like there's no tomorrow.

There is so much that is wrong about this that I'll leave it to someone else to point it all out because I'm already sick of reading her words but I will say that she's been a lesbian in the past and still mixes in lesbian circles (that's not a euphemism) so she has to be aware that there are some within that august chapter who are a bit anti-male. Indeed, if we're talking about hatred - as opposed to a sort of ironic iconography - then it is hypocritical in the extreme to write about gay men hating women without even acknowledging that a lot of gay women hate men.

Then she uses the Stephen Gately incident to make her point again.

But let one woman – the real kind, not the pretendy drag-queen kind – pass a comment on gay male sexuality, as the journalist Jan Moir did on the death of Stephen Gately, and seven sorts of hell break loose.

Yeah, implying he died of gayness and quite rightly so is just "passing comment" and it's fine because Moir's a woman and Gately deserved to die anyway because he's a man.

She then turns the current debate about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote - a complicated philosophical argument about what liberty actually means and whether the law should be changed because it could be perverted by a corrupt regime - into a dumbed down, hysterical, selective and downright offensive rant that even the Daily Mail would be ashamed of.

Europe's democracy means pandering to wife-murderers

No doubt all the forgive-and-forget types (forgive the criminal, forget the victim) are positively salivating at the idea of prisoners being given the vote for the first time in over a century, but I find it deeply creepy. However, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights we may soon find our politicians pandering to the wife-murdering vote. Two women a week are currently being killed by partners and ex-partners, so it's not to be sneezed at.

Not that it will do them much good. I would bet my last nail file in a cake that the majority of violent criminals will go for the raving loony fringe – that is, the BNP and Respect – no matter how low the next Liberal Democrat conference may try to push the age of consent in the hope of picking up that all-important paedophile vote.

Wife murderers? This isn't about wife murderers, it's not about gender at all - it's about criminals (some of whom are, admittedly, men) and voting. She's the sort of self-styled militant feminist that gives the rest of her gender a bad name. She looks for angles that aren't there and rants about them in such an ill-considered and absurd way that it makes it that bit easier for anyone who might be that way inclined to think that's how women are when you let them think for themselves.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Yeah I've heard of her before. One of those journalists with some nasty opinions. Who probably thinks "hey as long as I get hate mail, at least I'm getting a reaction".

As for John Lennon ...

I don't remember where I was but I was really pleased he was dead, as he was a wife-beater, gay-basher, anti-Semite and all-round bully-boy.

What a twat huh?

[Awesome Wells]

Burchill is a spiteful, bile-riven, self-righteous horror who hasn't written a single thing of interest or worth in three decades.* The rights and the wrongs of Stephen Fry's (apparently misquoted, anyway) remarks about gay men/straight men/straight women and casual sex can be debated without recourse to the self-indulgent praising of oneself, aggressively anti-gay-men sentiments and wild tangents that have nothing to do with the original topic. Unfortunately, these are all Burchillian trademarks.

The supporting of Jan Moir's attack on the late Stephen Gately is bad enough; claiming that this is somehow comparable - better, even - than Fry's remarks is even worse. Not only is such a comparison mind-numbingly inappropriate, it is also utterly, dreadfully offensive - about a million times more so, I would suggest, than saying straight women don't enjoy sex and gay men just love it, particularly with strangers in cottaging hotspots.

The sooner the Independent pensions off this has-been harridan to enjoy the royalties from her "she was a living saint" Diana biography away from decent-minded newspaper readers, the better.


*Including Sugar Rush, I'm afraid. Sorry Lissa.

[Captain Tancredi]

I think Julie Burchill has made a career for herself out of bringing together two opposing points of view and making a third. About twenty years ago she was a Stalinist Tory, then she had a very public lesbian relationship while married to a man, although I didn't know she'd gone back to men again. I mainly remember her columns from when my grandma used to take the Mail, albeit this was back in the day when the Mail still had a core of middle-of-the-road Tory correspondents keeping a lid on things.

[SiHart]

Just how moronic is Julie Burchill?

On the available evidence, very.

Si xx

[Si Hunt]

What the hell has she got against the poor drag Queens?

Si.

[Captain Tancredi]

Not enough, evidently. She seems to miss the point that drag queens are a strand of gay culture and are apparently quite happy doing what they do. The Black and White Minstrels weren't part of black musical culture- they were white men (surely not a spoiler by now) made up as caricatures of black musicians to sing old vaudeville songs.

[Si Hunt]

More to the point, how have they "helped develop the climate of full-on male-to-female abuse"?? All they've done is to dress up to look fabulous and sing in clubs. Leave them alone you stupid woman!

Si.

[Captain Tancredi]

She's probably just jealous because most drag queens have better legs than her.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I have to wonder - is she who Private Eye bases Glenda Slagg on?

It's kind of the easiest gig in the world though an opinion column isn't it? Just keep being vile. And don't allow anyone to hold you to anything you say.

It probably says something that she works in journalism, if she was a TV Presenter and said stuff like that, she'd be hounded out - or at least I hope she would.

I bet she does package holidays with Jim Davidson - lol.

[Rob McCow]

She does one thing that's fairly clever - By not attacking anyone directly by name she's escaping some big lawsuits. Shrewd move.

I know the Independent aims to show a variety of views, but do they have to include this woman? It begs for someone else to write a 'rebuffing' column every week, or month, or whenever she can be bothered to spill her hate guts onto paper and spread them across the country like exploding death testicles.

[brandynigma]

She's probably just jealous because most drag queens have better legs than her.

Flattery will get you nowhere.

I think I said about the Stephen Fry nonsense- would Germaine Greer had received the same bile for similar comments?

And why the hell can't we do the same to David Cameron as has been done to Fry?

[Paul Monk]

Hang on. We can't see your legs in that photo

[brandynigma]

Hang on. We can't see your legs in that photo

Fine.

I'm not so fond of the face in this one (I look like an extra from The Hole), but at least you can see the legs...