A "sable sapphist?"

Yowch:

Writing is really hard work--mostly because thinking is really hard work. When you don't want to do that work, but you want the meager payment it offers, the fleeting fame it brings, than you resort to thinking on the cheap. You go for shock. And you do it that way because you have nothing to offer except your rep as contrarian, and a provocateur. You do it because you are lazy.

To call his statements racist, or homophobic, demeans racist and homophobes. Indeed Hitchens displays something more than that--weakness. Weakness is the root of these sorts of slurs--an unwillingness to do the hard work of taking your opponents at their merits. So you name call and strawman. You mock what you don't understand, what you fear.

I guess this sort of fits with Hitchens' contention that wimminfolk just ain't funny. But that idea always had a fatal flaw: the fact that Hitchens himself is pretty much humourless these days. Since about 9/11, he's only ever gotten the shits, not the giggles.