Leave David Bowie Alone

By Bill Maher

To the surprise of nobody, Westboro Baptist Church has pledged to picket any memorials to David Bowie. But when it comes to intolerance, the Westboro gang has nothing on the aggrieved feminists of the Internet. 

Most Americans of a certain age were still weeping and playing their scratched copies of Hunky Dory when someone on Twitter dug up an interview a retired groupie named Lori Mattix gave VH1 a few years ago in which she said she lost her virginity to Bowie when she was 15. As was the custom in 1972. To hear Lori tell it, it was one of the greatest events of her life. She was a willing partner, he was wearing a kimono, they were in a suite at the Hyatt House, there was champagne and hash... so what if she was 15? She had a better deflowering than 99 percent of humankind. But according to the social justice warriors of Twitter and Tumblr, as well as websites like The Establishment (“Remembering Bowie: the Man, the Legend, the Sexual Abuser”) Bowie’s 50-plus year career can be boiled down to: he was a rapist.

Never mind that Lori Mattix called the experience “fabulous.” Modern feminism has spoken, and it knows better than Lori Mattix knows how Lori Mattix should feel.