Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton.
For months now, since I first read about the plans for the Steven Spielberg/Tony Kushner remake of West Side Story, I’ve been musing on how the heavy hand of political correctness may well crush this most sumptuously subtle of musicals. And now, as an overture, the singer Sierra Boggess, after being judged too pallid for
I’m keen on all sorts of my fellow females — broads, gold-diggers, career girls — but the best is the adventuress. According to Merriam-Webster, she is ‘a) a woman who seeks dangerous or exciting experiences; b) a woman who seeks position or livelihood by questionable means’. To me she is an admirable character who simply
Time flies when you’re being shunned! A whole five years have passed since a piece I wrote about male to female transsexuals (typically temperate sample: ‘A bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’) was published by the Observer – and then pulled. And what a lot of water has flown under the bridge – under the
There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It’s fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second, hence the preponderance of male fans of science fiction and fantasy — and dewy-eyed reminiscence about children’s
It’s no secret that my career isn’t quite what it was (lucky I’m rich!) so imagine my feeling of glee when I opened up my email account last Wednesday to find messages galore from all over the mainstream media. TV news programmes, radio shows, newspapers – even the Guardian! – were keen to have my
You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant ‘Suck up to Weinstein for years’ or
Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars – and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape – have very much changed since the first
What do we talk about when we talk about Jordan? Not the country, or the river, or the cultural commentator Jordan Peterson but – as is my Philistine wont – the glamour model and businesswoman Katie ‘Jordan’ Price. Last week, Katie Price addressed Parliament on the subject of social media trolling – which her 15-year-son
How I love short stories! Long before the internet realised that we can’t sit still long enough to commit to the three-volume novels of yore, these little beauties were hitting the sweet spot repeatedly. I especially love female short story writers — Shena Mackay, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley — as they often read quite gossipy
Today is the centennial of that happy day when British women finally won the vote. Women over the age of 30, that is, who owned property – only ten years later would we be granted the vote on the same terms as men. A century on, and the most common current phrase used about feminism
For the past few years, another seasonal story has joined the traditional tales of woe about this mysterious, random thing called Winter causing chaos – always at the same time of year, it seems – on the railways of this fair land and of roadworks unexpectedly coinciding with the peak time for people taking long
‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open,’ wrote the American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser in 1968. It took just short of half a century, but 2017 was the year in which #MeToo made this prophecy a reality. The phrase was coined in 2006 by
Of all the interesting combinations which sexual geopolitics has come up with, that of the American girl and the English man is one of the most enduring, giving a saucy spin to the phrase ‘Special Relationship.’ It started with cold hard economics when the second half of the 19th century saw the creation of the
It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there
It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, myself), the dregs are drawn to Islam. And leaving aside the dozy broads who gravitate to it for kinky reasons after watching one too many Turkish Delight ads (Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Booth), there
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive
When Republicans like myself mouth off against the Windsors, we always add the caveat ‘But the Queen’s different!’ What we mean is that among a menagerie of malingerers – her mother left behind £7million in debts when she died; her sister, a sottish snob who crippled herself during a miscalculation with boiling bath water; her
My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant — and like most women of her kind who grew up before the 1960s, she never swore. Not a ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ ever passed her lips, though she certainly loathed a lot of women
I am not a bad friend. I enjoy my mates, and I am generous, showering them with fun, money and sympathy. But I do not crave their company when I am without it, for whatever length of time, and should we lose touch, I do not miss them. In fact, I find there’s a profound
As a tot growing up in a provincial proletarian Communist household in the 1960s, I’d been led to believe that socialism was colour-blind. But when I moved to That London in the 1970s, I quickly became aware that the non-working-class Left operated what was best described as Paint-Chart Politics – the further from white, the
