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.
His latest pronouncement on female sexuality highlights this quite well, almost as brilliantly as his amazing claim that anyone who cared about MPs stealing huge amounts of public cash was basically being a narrow-minded buzz-kill, and that the oiks should be glad that the Golden Ones (John Prescott, for instance) saw fit to make merry on the oiks' hard-earned money. A duck-house for your moat out of our taxes, Your Honourable Member? Please, take two, and give me a kick to grow on while you're at it!
This time, it's straight men as opposed to bent MPs that Fry has looked down from Mount Olympus to pity. And he feels sorry for the straight man in the street because, as he told Attitude magazine: "The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want. Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?" He goes on to explain that if women liked sex as much as men do, there would be straight cruising areas much as there are gay ones.
Anonymous public sex can be as much about sexual compulsion as sexual desire, taking the whole business to a level of pathology which can hardly be described as getting one's jollies, pure and simple. Equating enjoying sex with strangers as enjoying sex per se is extraordinarily dense, but considering the way gay men have been condescending towards women for a while now, this was bound to happen.
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.
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. Indeed, Fry himself spat: "I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane."
I quip, he bitches, she makes a full-on hate-attack upon a persecuted minority and I'm going to report you to the Press Complaints Commission, so there! This seems to be the current attitude of a certain section of gay men to the tricky business of name-calling, and I can't begin to express what half-witted hypocrites it makes them look. A word of warning, boyz – you're still men, even though you're gay. If you insist on telling women what they are or what they want, be prepared to be judged right back in return by us. BTW, this wasn't an attack – think of it as a warning nip. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the bitching.
Islamists really are fascists – and here's the proof
On Monday, I briefly came across the morning television show Daybreak and in the few minutes before I turned it off, I saw the host Adrian Chiles chide Barack Obama for "losing his touch" and mock Wayne Rooney's huge pay packet. This would be the Adrian Chiles who is paid a vast amount for fronting a show which now has only a third of the viewers of its BBC counterpart.
I've noticed recently that hiding in plain view is more popular than it has ever been as a means of attack. For instance, Islamists are very keen on accusing those who criticise their ultra-reactionary attitudes to women and homosexuals of being reactionaries, and also have a vile habit of calling Israel a Nazi state.
So even considering my low opinion of these thugs, my eyes were very much opened by a Radio 4 documentary a while back called Hitler's Muslim Legions, about the tens of thousands of Islamic volunteers for the fascist cause. And Israel – the usual excuse for Islamist evil – didn't even exist then!
With Remembrance Day approaching, I for one – totally fed up with being branded a racist/fascist/imperialist just because I don't believe girls should have their noses cut off for cheeking their husbands – am certainly going to remember this piece of military history. Islamo-fascism– literally! Get out of THAT one, all you icky Western apologists for Islamism's worst excesses!
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.
