Julie Burchill

I consider myself such an extreme feminist that I make Germaine Greer look like Greer Garson. (Ask your gran.) But this doesn’t mean that I have to believe women are superior to men in every way. Yes, we violently attack, sexually assault and feel the need to commit murder far less than they do. But when it comes to the little things, there are many ways in which manning up would make women better. Maturity is one of them. We are told from the get-go that females ‘mature’ far earlier than males. It’s weird that feminists go along with this, because it’s one of the main justifications for adult men having sex with female children: ‘She looked at least 18, your honour!

I must admit to snigger-spitting my Sugar Smacks recently as I read an interview with Eddie Izzard in the Times. (Odd, because he’s never made me laugh before.) He spoke thus: ‘I would have been a soldier if I’d knew which war I’d have to fight. I was ready to apply but when you join the armed forces you fight where you’re sent. I parked the idea.’ Later on in the interview he opines - and Izzard is a proper Opiner, whereas most of us just say things - 'Fears are there to be conquered. I’ve gone from playing the streets of London to the Hollywood Bowl. But the biggest thing I ever did was walk out of the door 31 years ago in heels and make-up.

I was interested to read recently that Her Majesty The Queen’s party planner, Lady Elizabeth Anson, makes a point of putting boring guests together as ‘They don’t realise they’re the bores, and they’re happy.’ Knowing what passes for sparkling wit among the English aristocracy, this did make me chuckle - the social Siberians are probably the interesting ones, and the rest of the guests are too busy boring on about hunting and shooting to get it. For what is a bore? - nothing more than someone we personally find uninteresting. But what if we’re boring, and we just don’t get them?

I’ll never forget the first 'Funisher' I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was annoyed by some roué writer who seemed to think he had droit du seigneur over all the PR girls at his publishing house, of which she was one. She fussed and fumed about it for a bit, then three vodkatinis in, a serene smile swallowed her face and she said ‘I know how to punish him - I'll have sex with him!’ My second husband couldn’t help exclaiming ‘Gee, I wish women had punished me like that when I was single!

I’ve pointed out before that to be a woman who sucks up to Islamic extremists is to be a somewhat upmarket but equally self-deluded political equivalent of those strange women who write love-letters to incarcerated rapists and serial killers of women. I’ve recently spotted another septic sister-under-the-skin, though I imagine this one will be better-dressed and better-read. She is the consumer of the recent glut of ‘Death of a Woman as Hipster Diversion’ programmes: Serial, Undisclosed, Making A Murderer, The Jinx. This is true crime for those who know how to pronounce quinoa, but it is no less nasty a habit. Those who indulge in this particular 'guilty pleasure' should, indeed, feel guilty about it.

Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter, and from the comments you’d have thought that I’d shot, cooked and eaten Shergar the Racehorse. But I stand by what I said. Like Princess Diana and Nookie the Bear before him, Bowie was not some selfless saint; he was a sharp-eyed, ambitious creature who once floated himself on the Stock Market in the 1990s, and sold himself for the advertising shilling - when already a millionaire many times over - in 2006 to a bottled water company.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3" title="Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton's Brideshead set" startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs. But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since the Prince Regent pushed off.

On hearing that a ‘transgendered flag of remembrance’ was being flown by a government department for the first time (the Department of Education, on November 20th, the Transgender Day Of Remembrance) I was reminded of that old line about prison food - ‘It’s rubbish, and there’s not enough of it!’ It seems the height of duplicity that the sort of people who would mock a flag being flown to support our war dead (indeed, they might well use it as an excuse to break out the DIE TORY SCUM spray-paints) suddenly approve of running a bit of flimsy tat (which looks unpleasingly as if an Argie flag got put in a washing machine with a job-lot of red bedding) up a flagpole to celebrate a man’s right to tuck his tail between his legs and call himself Linda.

Growing up in the West Country in the 1960s and 1970s, summer left me cold. There was only one place where I could bear to be when the sun shone — the lido at Weston-super-Mare, the nearest coastal town to my Bristol home. Unlike most of the banal backdrops to my childhood, it seemed a suitably grand place in which to plan my escape to get to That London and be famous. I would swerve my companions — at first my parents, then later my friend Karen — and hide on the upper level of the lido, slipping in and out of sleep in sunshine, dreaming of freedom.

Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate medical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes themselves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise. Nevertheless, women tend to see themselves as less attractive than they are. A sizeable number of men, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite delusion. I call them Magic Mirror men, because they seem to possess an inner looking-glass which tells them that they are, indeed, the fairest of them all. Why else do ugly men not feel ridiculous passing judgment on the attractiveness, or otherwise, of women?