I do not stand by the comments that
appear below. I simply took Julie Burchill's original "Transsexuals..."
piece and substituted all reference to transgender persons with "women",
and made the writer a chauvanist man railing at "feminism" (as Burchill
is a self-defined "feminist").
This was deleted by The Guardian website after being posted as a comment underneath the original article.
This suggests that The Guardian considers the transgender community "fair game" for attack, but not so feminists. The content is the exact same, only the terms of abuse and genders of the participants have been changed. Well, not the exact same - I left out the first two paragraphs and Burchill's clunking product-placement (because no-one's asking, Julie).
WARNING: some rude language follows.
With this in mind, I was incredulous to read
that my friend was being monstered on Twitter, to the extent that he had
quit it, for supposedly picking on a minority – women. Though I imagine
it to be something akin to being
savaged by a dead sheep, as Denis Healey had it of Geoffrey Howe, I
nevertheless felt indignant that a man of such style and substance
should be driven from his chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of
chicks in slutty clothing.
To my mind – I have given cool-headed
consideration to the matter – a gaggle of women telling Simon Moore how
to write looks a lot like how I'd imagine the Black and White Minstrels
telling Usain Bolt how to run would look. That rude and ridic.
Here's what happened. In a book of essays called "Rad, The Whassup
Anthology" Si contributed a piece about men's anger. He wrote that,
among other things, men were angry about "being criticised for not
having the perfect bottom – that of a Scottish night bus driver". Rather
than join him in decrying the idea that every bloke should aim to think
like an oven-ready heart attack, the very vociferous women's lobby and
their grim groupies picked on the messenger instead.
I must say that
my only experience of the women's lobby thus far was hearing about the
vile way they have persecuted another of my friends, the veteran men's
rights and partner-ownership activist Jake Barrington – picketing events
where he is speaking about such issues as the decriminalising of child
labour just because he refuses to accept that their menopause is the
most pressing problem that men – real and pussy-whipped – are facing
right now.
Similarly, Simon's original piece was about the real
horror of the bigger picture – how the savagery of a few old hags is
having real, ruinous effects on the lives of the weakest members of our
society, many of whom happen to be men. The reaction of the women's
lobby reminded me very much of those wretched inner-city kids who shoot
another inner-city kid dead in a fast-food shop for not showing them
enough "Pokemon cards". Ignore the real enemy – they're strong and will
need real effort and organisation to fight. How much easier to lash out
at those who are conveniently close to hand!
But they'd rather argue
over semantics. To be fair, after having their fannies all dried up
(see what I did there?) by endless decades in academia, it's all most of
them are fit to do. Educated beyond all common sense and honesty, it
was a hoot to see the screaming tarts accuse Si of male privilege; it
may have been this that made him finally respond in the subsequent salty
language he employed to answer her Twitter critics: "People can just
fuck off really. Stick a pad up their kludge and be more ableist than
me. Good for them."
He, the other JB and I are part of the minority
of men of working-class origin to make it in the female-dominated
lesbian porn industry and I think this partly contributes to the
stand-off with the hos. (I know that's a wrong word, but having recently
discovered that their lot describe men as 'Bros' – sounds like crow,
dross, Bromley; all nasty stuff – they're lucky I'm not calling them
bitches. Or cunts.) We know that everything we have we got for
ourselves. We have no family money, no safety net. And we are damned if
we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of dolly slags
in fuck-me pumps.
It's been noted before that cyberspace, though
supposedly all new and shiny, is plagued by the age-old boredom of women
telling men not to shut-up and threatening them with all kinds of
nastiness if they persist in saying what they feel.
The women's
lobby is now saying that it wasn't so much the initial piece as Simon's
refusal to apologise when told to that "made" them drive him from
Twitter. Presumably he is meant to do this in the name of solidarity and
the "struggle", though I find it very hard to imagine this mob
struggling with anything apart from the English language and the concept
of free speech.
To be born without a cock and then plead special
privileges – above wholesome, natural men, who don't know the meaning of
suffering, apparently – is a bit like the old definition of chutzpah:
the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency on
the grounds he was an orphan.
Bitches, hos, whatever you're calling
yourselves these days – don't threaten or bully us lowly wholesome,
decent men, I warn you. We may not have as two lovely big bouncing PhDs
like you, but we've experienced a lifetime of pissing standing up and
female admonishment and many of us are now staring viagra and the
middle-age spread straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust
me, you ain't seen nothing yet. You really won't like us when we're
angry.
