The Lonely Echo Of Bindel's Voice

There may be just one theme that Julie Bindel and myself agree on, and that is gay men and lesbians have often made for a rather unholy alliance. The only glue holding these two diametrically opposed forces together being the "gay" epithet, and the shared experiences of coming out to family, friends and work colleagues. In every other respect we can be allowed to celebrate the fact that as gay men and gay women, we really are chalk and cheese.

Julie, it seems, has struggled for much of her life to get along with most anyone at all. She gave voice some time ago in a Guardian article, "It's not me, it's you", at her distaste at being dumped together with bisexuals, intersex, and, ironically, she genuinely seemed confused when she was rebuffed by the transgender community. This is hardly surprising after writing an excoriating attack on the transgender community, "Gender Benders Beware", in which she denied the difficulties and stigma faced by transgender people in the worst possible terms - in fact she decided to get the Transphobic-Cheerleading Pompoms out herself. She saw fit to treat this section of our community as fodder for ridicule and denigration. After all her bullying, not only towards the Transgender Community, but in frankly absurd and risible articles & interviews she accused the Gay Male community of wholesale misogyny - weirdly with no empirical evidence to back up this nonsense, the LGBT community were starting to snap at Ms. Bindel's ankles.

This caused her to her to go her room in a jolly old huff and pen, "It's not me, it's you" for The Guardian. The upshot of this article was that poor spoilt Julie had been ostracised because the LGBT community were sick to the back teeth of her transphobia and misandry, so Julie was going to throw all of her toys out her pram and go and play on her own. Suffice it to say, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when she did.

Julie is what I'd call a Dino-Feminist - ideologically speaking; a carnivorous, male-gobbling beast, with forward facing, myopic eyes, unable to see the full horizon, but with a pathological, rather crazed scent for blood, and a herd mentality which includes other like minded Dino-Feminist lesbians only. Her coterie includes other misandrists, such as Gail Dines, Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill, the subject of my last blog.

Some girls of Bindel's age would have had posters all over their bedroom walls of the Bay City Rollers or the Nolans, I fear Julie's walls would have been covered with pictures of saucy images of the feminist to eat all feminists - Andrea Dworkin, probably provocatively posing with a copy of Women Hating: A Radical Look At Pornography.

Julie's feminist ideals are really quite simple to grasp, which makes one question why they're so simple to grasp. Is it because she couldn't come up with anything more sophisticated, a là Camille Paglia, who really was twenty years ahead of her time in understanding New Feminism, and making it workable for women in the 21st century? After all, not all women want to wear sandals made out of bean sprouts, polo-necked, long-sleeve jumpers fashioned from biodegradable camel dung, knitted by a women's collective and fair trade corduroy slacks dyed with elderberry juice. No, Julie's mandate is this: hate and despise everyone apart from radical lesbian feminists. Simple! You could become a journalist with a mandate like that! Think of all the nasty, emetic, muck raking, bile-filled columns you could write! And this is exactly what Julie did.

For what seems like centuries, Julie has been an ardent man-hater of the first order, conveniently forgetting that if it wasn't for a man, she wouldn't be here in the first place. Articles entitled "Why I Hate Men", suggest more than dispassionate analysis, and point to a worrying, compulsive behavioural malfunction. Julie, the rebel, likes to write inflammatory pieces for The Guardian - which seems for some perverse reason to allow puritanical bigots such as Bindel to publish articles stuffed to busting with misandry, hatred towards other women who don't get her brand of misanthropic feminism, and other venom filled toxic rubbish.

As such a notorious name on the political lesbian political scene, she endangers all others in that field who are reasoned and non-reactionary with the risk of being tarred with Bindel's taint of fanatical brainwashed extremism. Here's a little extract from "Why I Hate Men", just for us boys, to cheer us up a bit:

"Before the misogynists start ranting on about how many men are abused by women, how many women kill their children, etc, etc, don't bother. Every piece of credible research produced in every country in the world where this work has been done shows that sexual and domestic violence is committed overwhelmingly by men against females. The men who regularly get very offended on this blog, protesting that they have never hurt a fly, probably do not do an awful lot to stop other men harming women. Where are men's voices of protest in this war against women? When can we expect your support in reducing numbers of females killed and raped by men? I will not be holding my breath, but in the meantime, I will say loud and proud, yes, today I hate men, and will tomorrow and the day after. But only the men who perpetrate these crimes against my sisters, and those who do nothing to stop it. Are you in either one of those categories? If so, then I despise you."

I left a response to this in the comments section, but of course it would have fell on deaf ears. I said that no one had screwed up my life like my birth mother had, due to her neglect and abuse prior to my adoptive parents taking me in. No man had caused anywhere near the kind of damage that had lasted until I started receiving psychoanalysis. But as you can see from the above, Ms. Bindel doesn't give a shit. She's only interested in her one woman freak show feminist agenda, not humanity, not small babies, as I was, who are totally defenceless. She's just interested in Radical Feminist Lesbians. She's a caring soul, isn't she, our Julie?

But, wait... It gets, well, worse. Very recently our Oracle, our Esteemed Julie of The Mighty Vadge took to Twitter and merrily tweeted away. But I ought to give a bit of a back story. Julie claims to be a champion for women who have suffered at the hands of men. She has helped women find safety in refuge centres. So she's not all bad. Or so it would seem. But her kindness is highly conditional if this tweet is anything to go by:

"Those women that proclaim “I’m not a feminist” should be paid less than men, have no maternity benefits, no access to refuges, and no vote"

Read another way, any woman that did not proclaim before her that she were not a feminist would not receive her help if her life were in mortal danger at the hands of a murderous partner - that she would turn her back on someone in an incredibly needy and vulnerable situation, simply because they did not agree with her ideologies. I assume by that she'd turn away prostitutes because they wouldn't fit into Julie's scheme, or a young seventeen year old that didn't understand what feminism was - or more accurately and pertinently, what Julie Bindel's kind of feminism was.

I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind about the rest of that tweet, but I know what I think of it. What it says to me is there stands a woman so consumed by her own grandiosity of thought, a woman so deviated from the path of simple humanity by the iron rod of feminism for feminism's sake, that she has forfeited her own conscience and empathy in exchange for a fascistic empty and worthless set of ideals. Ideals which she has used to barter the value of other women's safety and value against the currency of a devotional obsession to feminism - which, clearly, to Julie Bindel, is nothing more than a word: F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M.

In that one tweet she has betrayed womankind in one fell swoop. I'm not a woman, but if I were, my response to that tweet would be, "shove it up your tofu-filled arsehole, Julie".

Because Miss Bindel belongs in Dworkinland, a bit like that place where the Teletubbies live, you know, not real life, because the strategies she has for living are so far out there, she really is on the next planet and can wave to Po and La-La - the feminism she tries to sublimate onto other women simply bounces off. Women don't want to live like Julie Bindel. They want to be free, not miserable, with their noses stuffed in their belly buttons, raging with anger towards other men, other women - exploding with misanthropy. That's exactly why Camille Paglia was so ahead of her time, because she realised that women liked to have fun with their sexuality, with their bodies. They didn't want to be like Julie - registering all the passion of a parking meter and the sexual allure of a body bag. Paglia saw that in women that they didn't have to be commodities for men by dressing how they wanted to - they could dress for themselves, to make themselves feel great, and still be a feminist.

But like everything she does Bindel has to go too far. Whether it's offending others, or sticking to her feminorexia-nervosa. In doing this, Bindel has become a very weird anachronism, a not-so-quaint relic - a voice that has, curiously, become a little like Julie Burchill's. Antiquated, irrelevant and something no woman I know of today, in 2013, can relate to in any shape or form. Her radicalism has turned into hate speech, akin to Burchill's - perhaps that's why they get along. With Gail Dines, another utter irrelevance of the 21st century, they form an Unholy Trinity of Neo-Mary Whitehouse Gorgons - Thou Shalt Not Watch Pornography, Thou Shalt Not Show Thy Breast, Thou Shalt Not Lay With Both A Man And A Woman, Thou Shall Be Miserable All Thy Life, Thou Shall Only Be A Bloody Radical Bigoted Lesbian Feminist.

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It's Time Julie Burchill Put Down Her Pen

Julie Burchill has been oddly quiet this week. Or maybe not so odd, after the gigantic backlash witnessed in the wake of her recent Observer piece, which has been received with wholesale revulsion. This time, Julie went way too far. Her targets this time were perhaps one of the most misunderstood, marginalised and vulnerable people in our society - the Transgender community. The entire article can be found here (it was taken off the Guardian website, where it had originally appeared, along with the Observer newspaper, but the Guardian removed the article after widespread complaint. Ms. Burchill then happily gave her permission for this pile of stinking prose to be reprinted in the right-wing press):

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100198116/here-is-julie-burchills-censored-observer-article/

Some of her more offending remarks include referring to transgender women as a "bunch of dicks in chicks clothing", "screaming mimis", and "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs", amongst other disgusting stuff. All of this was embedded in a manure of bigotry and prejudice that had seemingly been rotting away since the times of "Love Thy Neighbour" and a Bernard Manning T.V Special.

The whiplash from this event was swift and sharp. The Guardian received hundreds and hundreds of complaints in their comments section, and over 200 emails. In a contrite appraisal of events, the Guardian editor acknowledged that many of the complaints had not emanated from the Transgender community, but from others, who were astounded that the article had been passed as editorially safe, and had so clearly broken the Guardian's own journalistic editorial code. There was a sense from many that if the article had been written about disabled, black or gay people it would never have been printed. The editor apologised in no uncertain terms, and conceded that a dire mistake had been made in allowing such a dreadful piece of bigoted commentary through.

In two paragraphs, Roz Kaveney so succinctly put into a nutshell everything that was so wrong, and so upsetting about Julie Burchill's article:

"Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.

What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying."

Whilst there is no doubt great damage was done by the editorial staff in letting Burchill's diatribe slip through the net, we see the real Modus Operandi of Burchill in her reaction to the Guardian removing her article - by her then giving permission for it to then be reprinted in the right-wing press. This is an act of revenge, of spite, and damn the consequences. Because the consequences won't affect Julie Burchill. As Roz Kaveney reminds us above, it will be the elderly transgender woman, or the young trans boy, trying to wrestle with the Dysphoria that so often comes before decision that will suffer at the hands of bigots, educated on the fodder of Burchill's monologues. This is dangerous stuff.

There was a time when Burchill could write her short snappy commentaries, always a bit shocking, but never cheap or brain dead. But more than one thing in Ms. Burchill has died. One of these things is her ability to use her nib as a scalpel - now she can not write without resorting to the lowest common denominator - the cheapest thrill, that horrible cheap perfume that makes you gip. Now she writes the equivalent of "I hate Tracey Drew", with a biro on those wooden school desks you got in the 70's.

The second thing that's died is her sense of time. She's still lost in Fleet Street. She even references it in her article, like some ageing demagogue with a weird kind of selective dementia, her stance and attitude is clearly the key that fits the lock of the Loadsa Money era, when bad jokes were good, and even better when they got printed in a newspaper - preferably the Red Tops, as she forever reminds us until we fall off our social club stools that she's a working class girl. She doesn't even notice how out of time she is. I can imagine her dating Alf Garnett - they would have a lot of common ground. If you imagine the article she wrote on the Transgender community being written in 1982, you wouldn't be shocked by it, and poor old Julie is probably wondering what all the fuss is about. She's probably got a mobile phone the size of a breeze block too.

On a serious note, what is heartening to see is the sheer might of the Transgender community and how interlinked they are. Julie Burchill doesn't stand a chance. Even more heartening are their supporters, the you and me's - and there are more of them than there are less of them. And this just goes to show just how out of touch that old Fleet Street hack Ms. Burchill really is. She should be writing period dramas, not ersatz commentaries, spewing bile on current affairs. Julie, for God's sake, put down your pen.

 

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