Lots of differences
Our Jolyon walks into these things.
Erm…Jolyon Maugham is white and “cis” and not all that young and – the one he carefully didn’t mention – he’s a man. (He didn’t mention it because mentioning it would remind people that women don’t have male privilege.) He’s not as poshly educated as Cleese, I’ll give him that – but then he’s not as clever, either.
To sum up, Jolyon Maugham is sneering at John Cleese for having kinds of privilege that Maugham himself mostly shares. It’s almost as if Maugham thinks he’s Special. Wouldn’t that be a kind of privilege?
But it gets better.
You WHAT?????
Jolyon Maugham is not using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong? He does it every day!
Oh but wait – I just said – he doesn’t see women as having less privilege than men. I keep forgetting that people men like him think of women as privilege-laden tyrants. So that means he doesn’t see his using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong as…using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong. I guess he sees it as using his pure limpid Rightness to tell those with muddy smelly Wrongness they are wrong.
This ought to be interesting… Cleese’s show, I mean, not that posh wokebro Maugham’s compulsive misogyny.
That second tweet is hilarious. It stands as the most sublime self-satire all by itself with no context at all.
Someone should print it out and hang it in the centre of an otherwise empty art gallery and charge people £500 a pop to look at it.
latsot, we should get Jenny Holzer on it.
This particular part of JM’s Wikipedia entry might explain whence he got that outsize chip on his shoulder:
tigger:
God, yes, I’d managed, with great effort, to block that Maugham fact from my mind. It is too enraging to contemplate. It’s hard to imagine anything that could better describe his utter contempt for women than that incident (of which he is proud). Fortunately, we don’t have to imagine it, because everything he’s ever said or done does a perfectly good job.
Yes I don’t think I knew that fact until seeing Tigger’s comment. Jolyon’s misogyny is what used to be called overdetermined.