Julie Burchill: 'Why I love abuse from Indy readers'

Julie Burchill celebrates her first year as a columnist on the Independent today by telling readers how much she loves their abuse.

Burchill reveals she turned down a job travelling the world for the Sunday Times magazine to join the Indy.

She writes: "One of the most delightful aspects of my time here has been the abuse. Before I took this job I was offered the cushiest billet you've ever heard of by The Sunday Times magazine, basically flying round the world at the front of the plane hanging out with whoever I pleased and writing about it.

"The problem was me. I hummed and hahed and kept making excuses not to start my job there. I'd miss my husband. My feet would ache from the travelling (I really said that!) But I had to admit the truth: I didn't want to do a job where I wasn't going to get abused. Then The Independent found me, and the rest is hysteria.

"I can't explain why I enjoy being disliked; it might have something to do with being an adored only child and growing up with an almost sociopathic sense of self-esteem. Verbal humiliation for me is what flagellation is for judges; when you feel so impervious, what could be more exotic than, momentarily, being treated like the lowest of the low?

"It's a perk for me, like a company car. I can't drive but I know what gets my engine running. More, now, again!"

Burchill: 'Why are injunctions only used by men?'

Julie Burchill lays into privacy injunctions in her Independent column today claiming that they are only used by men to gag women.

She says: "Though injunctions are modern inventions, their intention is as old as Adam; they seek to return relations between the sexes to the level of those idealised in Downton Abbey and shown in surprisingly harsh reality in the earlier and far superior Upstairs, Downstairs, when rich men could do exactly as they pleased to parlour maids, prostitutes and showgirls and get away with it.

"If there is a law which is used by one gender only, we should surely be very suspicious of it, as the MP Louise Bagshawe has pointed out. The feeling that women and girls should be seen and not heard, which the law seems to perpetuate with the light punishments it hands out to rapists, child abusers and wife-killers, has now been extended to take in this new development whereby men, if they are rich enough, can be heard and not seen.

"The monstrous regiment of right-wing judges who haven't heard of Emmeline Pankhurst is compounded by the liberal lawyers who seem to believe that once you have ticked the box that says brotherhood of man, you can treat women in a way that you would never dream of treating ethnic minorities."

She also tells a great story about being doorstepped by the Daily Mail: "When I had an adulterous affair in the 1990s, and the Daily Mail found out and sent a man in a grubby mac to doorstep us at my girl's flat, I actually tapped on his window when he fell asleep in his car outside, all the better to give a fellow hack a fighting chance of going back to the DM with his smutty story."