Such alleged empaths
Julie Burchill holds Laurie Penny’s whiny self-indulgence up for laughter:
Penny also squeals about Western sexism while giving Islamism a hall pass. They once wore a hijab and gushed about how great it felt, while Their opinion on the 2015 Paris massacre was, ‘Racist trolling is not heroism. Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.’
You’d think the war in Ukraine might have given such alleged empaths a moment’s pause in their navel-gazing and belly-aching, but it’s business as usual. I’ve been suspended from Twitter after saying that unarmed Ukrainians facing down Russian tanks are braver than men who dress up as women. However, I will scatter my pearls before the whiny non-binary and warn Them that the reviews can only get worse.
You would think that, wouldn’t you. If only from motives of self-protection you’d think she’d put the self-drama on hold for a few weeks.
Last year, Penny caused revulsion among actual feminists when commenting on an incident in a California spa, when a woman complained that her young daughter shouldn’t have to share the female-only section of the spa with naked men who identified as women. Penny said that the child should not ‘stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. So that’s my advice to Them, on how to deal with negative critical reaction to Their ever-deteriorating work: ‘If you don’t like it, don’t look.’
That’ll be an episode of Even More Complex PTSD.
EXCEPT that staring out of curiosity at some phenomenon or other could be the start of a stellar career: in science, one of the arts, or whatever. It has been so for many in the past. And anyway, how else can anyone learn.?
Heh, I forgot about her “just don’t look” controversy. Poor LP, she’s got years’ and years’-worth of gaffes detailed on the Internet now. People will be laughing at them centuries from now.
Penny always has to be in the herd of the avant-garde. Re the PTSD thing, she said that she knew it was not the done thing to talk about mental health. That was true about 20 years ago, but not now – mostly to the good as poor mental health used to be a shaming thing to admit, but half the world is talking about it now.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PennyRed/status/1500552005156229122
An FB friend responded furiously to that.
“Very much the done thing to talk about mental health these days. Having been associated with introducing concept of PTSD into SA jurisprudence in defence of political detainees tortured into confessions, its galling to see it appropriated, trivialised in this self serving way.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/amijudjes/status/1500756832830242818?fbclid=IwAR1xfX-uR3hCXazQNQ4NEe10Vl2FgLJ4gXTX0K5iwk2IllelEBuc1mXwHTs
I sincerely think that Penny Redful was expecting to gain sympathy from that tweet rather than blowback from people who experienced PTSD as a nightmarish result from traumatic incidents. She claims that she wasn’t saying that it was caused by the reviews, but that’s not the way her tweet reads. She tweeted that she was suffering CPTSD following the reviews, which implies that it was due to them.
Julie Burchill is still boasting about her working-class background, as she has been for the last 40 years. She isn’t my favourite writer, but she does have her shrewd and amusing moments, and I’d read her over Penny any time of the day. Penny is utterly humourless.
I generally find Burchill irritating, but not this time.