JK Rowling's takedown of Boy George was a joy to behold
Few things are more delicious to watch than an uneven battle of wits – and it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than one between Boy George and JK Rowling.
'Which rights have been taken away from trans people?', Rowling asked her followers on X this weekend. 'The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!', Boy George responded.
'I've never been given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain,' wrote JK Rowling
We waited with bated breath for the inevitable response from the Harry Potter author. When it came, it didn't disappoint.
'I've never been given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain,' wrote Rowling – a reference to when Boy George was jailed in 2009 for handcuffing an escort to his bed and inflicting what a judge called 'wholly gratuitous violence'.
'You yourself have been convicted of violent assault,' she said. 'The overwhelming number of people who commit crimes of violence are male, just like you. That's why I don't want to see men identifying into women's prison cells or any of the spaces mentioned above. Not all men are violent or predatory but enough are to make safeguarding necessary.'
In just a few direct and fluidly cogent paragraphs, Rowling patiently detailed her actual objections to men crashing into women's spaces – and no doubt left Boy George regretting ever wading into this fight.
Still, I'm glad he did. One of the great delights of recent years has been witnessing Rowling running out of monkeys to give. It's been bracing to witness the intellect that created an entire imaginary world out of thin air demonstrate another string to its bow. Most of us can do only one or two things passably well, and that's enough. When somebody can do one thing extraordinarily well, it's a sensation. Now we find that Rowling can do this too. It's thrilling. It is so refreshing to see someone 'schooled', as the youngsters say, in this case almost literally.
What of George, the Goliath in this fight? And he is the Goliath, with almost all the public and private institutions still on his side.
I'm all for rehabilitation, penitence and welcoming the sinner back into the fold. But it is astonishing that George's conviction for false imprisonment and assault has been forgotten. This fits in with my long-standing suspicion that we homosexual men just aren't taken very seriously, or at least not as seriously, no matter what we do, good or bad. We are festive and fun, hurrah, which is why we often appear festooned with streamers and tinsel.
Don't worry, I'm not suggesting this is some terrible societal sin that needs to be rectified by copious municipal funds and even greater quantities of variegated bunting. I think it is more likely simply because a double standard inevitably applies to men's bad behaviour among themselves, compared to men's bad behaviour towards women. A man socking another man in the jaw, however hard, will always be less viscerally repulsive than a man socking a woman in the jaw. Yes, this is technically a sexist hypocrisy – but, as double standards go, it is a good one to have, I think.
There is, however, a flip side to that equation. If George had done time for exactly what he did but the victim had been a woman, I doubt that he would be sniping away blithely from the moral high ground on social media. He would not have been ushered back in to the bosom of reality TV.
The divide in George's soul – between his Hare Krishna 'war is stupid' mantras, exotic whole food fig-and-brown-rice recipes versus his snappy, snitty, salty persona – is rewardingly comic. But again, if the person he handcuffed and assaulted had been female, we would not find this mismatch such a big chuckle.
One of the great qualities of the old gay culture was its telling of truths; in fact, George himself was once a proponent of this, casually puncturing all sorts of pomposities and pretences in the pages of Smash Hits. It was one of his delightful qualities. But, while Marilyn, Boy George's chum in 1980s gender-bending pop, has stayed true to that form, George switched when the milieu changed. As Rowling stated in her reply, the great non-conformist rolled right over for this palpable rubbish.
Has George 'taken the L' from his drubbing, as the youngsters also say? It appears not. He has not even tried to make an actual case in reply to her points, so perhaps even he is aware that stringing a coherent argument together is not his strong suit.
No, he's back to the Edina Monsoon-style 'I am yogically serene and above all temporal things, honest, I REALLY BLOODY AM, sweetie darling' schtick, which is unintentionally hilarious. On Monday he posted the gloriously Pooterish one-two, 'I am happy to say I hate nobody and that serves me very well. Even JK Rowling who is clearly a deeply unpleasant woman'.
To show further that he REALLY DOESN'T CARE, he then hit back at her with the devastating riposte 'Turns out she's a Muggle!' I bet she's never heard that one before.
'Words are few I have spoken, I could waste a thousand years,' George once sang. Indeed.
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