Julie Burchill

I was amused to hear that Eminem has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy – who ‘rapped’ in his youth under the name ‘Da Vek’ – warning him not to use the song ‘Lose Yourself’ again.  Ramaswamy sang it onstage at the Iowa State Fair whilst on the campaign trail two weeks ago. Mr Em did allow Joe Biden to use ‘Lose Yourself’ in his 2020 presidential campaign for a television commercial though, and even shared it online with the caption: ‘One opportunity… #Vote.’ Bit of an unfortunate choice there – if any politician doesn’t need encouragement to lose himself, it’s the befuddled, bemused and bewildered Biden.

There’s a ghastly predictability to the news that the University of Sussex – in Brighton, naturally – wants to set aside nearly half of its land for ‘rewilding’. According to our local paper, the Argus :   ‘The University of Sussex will rewild 42 per cent of its campus land in a move which aims to promote more biodiversity, achieved by designating land into areas where the grass will be cut a limited number of times a year as well as other areas where no mowing will take place.

Reading that a 16-year-old autistic girl had been dragged from her home by seven cops after reportedly saying a female officer looked like ‘a lesbian like nana’, I had to check that we weren’t back in the 1970s of my girlhood when ‘lezzer’ was the worst thing you could call a woman. Once again we are faced with the proof that wokeness, far from being ‘kind’, is often just a shiny new way to bully people Yet here are the coppers going all Life on Mars on some poor neuro-divergent kiddy – who also suffers from spinal disability scoliosis – in her Leeds home after (irony of ironies) she was driven home by police officers attending a gay pride celebration.

Remember when we all loved Lizzo? In 2019 ‘Juice’ (the last great party anthem BP – Before Pandemic) was a thrilling throwback groove, variously described as ‘delightfully outrageous’ and ‘a self-esteem boosting anthem’. Having lived in her car at one point during years of rejection from the music industry – partly for not possessing the usual video-vixen hotness required from young black female singers – it was lovely to see Lizzo suffering from neither modesty nor the #BeKind blight. ‘I just took a DNA test/Turns out I’m 100 per cent that b****’ she crowed in the break-up song ‘Truth Hurts’.

BeKind is one of the Great Icks – to use the vivid word so beloved of Love Islanders – of our age. It’s a form of brainwashing which is particularly insidious as it’s generally applied to females, starting out in childhood when numerous items of BE KIND clothing can be found in the girls’ section of shops but not in the boys’. (Note to clothing manufacturers and retailers; it’s not girls who need reminding to be kind, judging from the violent crime stats.) As well as a conditioning process for female children, it's a shaming mechanism for adult human females regularly used by the trans lobby to reward women who give up their rights – and to rebuke women who don’t.

When I was a girl, sportsmen were amiable dolts. If they were old-school, they liked blokes and beer; if switched-on, they liked boogieing with blondes at Tramp and dreamt of opening boutiques. But with both, you could rely on them never to let you know what they were thinking about the three-day week or the situation in Cyprus.  There’s nothing like the sight of men earning £100,000 a week for doing the thing they love lecturing us about colonialism to remind us of our privilege When Andy Murray declared his support for Just Stop Oil this week, he joined that ever-burgeoning brigade of what I think of as the Schlock Jocks, or perhaps the Poppycock Jocks.

It’s generally agreed that sex-selection is a Bad Thing. In India and China, sons are favoured over daughters – but so are they in the USA, where the margin has only moved a few points since the 1940s; 38 per to 24 per cent then, 36 per cent to 28 per cent now.  Not surprisingly this overall preference is driven by men; 43 per cent preferred a son compared to 24 per cent who preferred a daughter while women showed no preference. This may be down to the somewhat doomy male perception that, as Billy Bigelow sang in the musical Carousel ‘You can have fun with a son – but you gotta be a father to a girl!’ This led Bigelow to take to a life of crime and be shot dead by the police before his daughter was born – so that worked out well.

It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning. Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders and teachers call students ‘despicable’ and ‘homophobic’ when they understandably ask a fellow classmate ‘How can you identify as a cat, when you are a girl?

Is anyone actually watching the Oscars anymore? Until ‘The Incident’ between Messrs Smith and Rock last year the direction of travel was clear. Between 2014 and 2020 the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, the number falling from 43 to 23 million. This year, in March, they were at 18 million with punters only tuning in perhaps to see some bitch-slapping between Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep. As the importance of cinema has dwindled, the po-faced self‑importance of the film industry has grown The first Oscars were presented in front of 270 people with tickets costing five dollars and a ceremony which ran for 15 minutes; now it’s – as the 1979 host Johnny Carson quipped – ‘two hours of sparkling entertainment spread over a four-hour show’.