[burchill] Julie Burchill takes a vast mental leap in Guardian Unlimited and draws parallels between self-pitying Radiohead listening males, the poor performance of boys compared girls at A-Levels and GCSE’s and “certain self-pitying” paedophiles. ‘But male self-pity is not always funny; sometimes, it serves as an excuse for the most loathsome sorts of behaviour. A handy catch-all cliché that the ivory-tower-dwellers among us have been dishing up in an attempt to turn popular feeling against those appalling oiks in Paulsgrove (my God, I bet none of them has even read one Julian Barnes novel!) is, “The abused, in turn, abuse”. This is, rather, one of the silliest and most easily disproved of modern myths. Some 90% of abused children are women; some 90% of child abusers are men. If it was really true that “the abused abuse”, then 90% of all child abusers would be women, wouldn’t they?’

Julie Burchill On Male Self-Pity

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2000 at 9:12 am and is filed under Life.

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