Collective targeted abuse
Catherine Bennett analogizes misogynist abuse of Rowling to the abuse of Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued:
Anyone who was around for the Rushdie fatwa may have been reminded of remarks by some eminent UK figures to the effect that, since he had caused actual book burnings and whatnot, he really should have known better. You often got the impression that a British-born target would have elicited more sympathy. “I would not shed a tear,” said the historian Lord Dacre, “if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”
He wasn’t One of Us, and neither is Rowling.
In the case of Troubled Blood, not much changed after readers failed to spot any vilification of cross-dressers or of trans people. My colleague Nick Cohen’s reading is supported by early reader reviews on Amazon: “ignore the sensationalist headlines”, one writes, “this isn’t ‘that’ novel”.
But let’s abuse her anyway.
Maybe Rowling wasn’t trolling everyone via Strike, after all? Yes, but she is still JK Rowling, infuriatingly uncancelled by the latest Twitter charge sheet – and, maybe most galling of all, powerful and female. That’s enough, since nothing has been done to combat increasingly extreme and pervasive levels of misogynistic hate speech on social media, to guarantee an offending woman’s exposure to collective, targeted, sexualised abuse.
For the sake of standing up for those most downtrodden, fragile, vulnerable, at risk people of all…men. Women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are must face maximum level abuse; it’s only fair.
If you compare the online correction of male as opposed to female sympathisers with Rowling, what’s fuelling much of this new literary criticism is, as James Kirkup noted in the Times, dismally obvious: “It’s about people who hate women.” (Naturally, nobody immediately told Mr Kirkup to choke…) There were objections, but if the Rowling death hashtag was not rooted in misogyny, what explains the relentless rape speak, and the absence of similarly dehumanising insults when Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid in Harry Potter) volunteered his support for the author? That is, if it’s not the great misogyny facilitator, Twitter itself.
…The less easily her book could be represented as a suitable candidate for Goebbels treatment, the more last week’s indulgently curated insults added to the evidence marshalled by Laura Bates, and consistently indicated in earlier research, that the misogyny of the manosphere has permeated mainstream culture. In 2018, Amnesty identified Twitter as “a toxic place for its female users”. Now, regardless of earnest pledges to improve, the reach of its orchestrated abuse must be the envy of the most rabid subreddit.
So long as misogyny stays off the list of hate crimes, and endemic male violence against women remains a negligible political concern, it evidently suits both certain campaigners and this social media platform to keep up their contributions to the spread of professional, private and street-located hate.
We thought misogyny was going to fade away. We did not think it was going to come roaring back.
I can see why you wanted to quote basically the whole article. It’s amazing it got published. In the Guardian, no less.
I want to just contemplate that for a while. Because that’s what we’re dealing with. Is it the return of the repressed? Are these man-children conscious of what’s going on when they gleefully support transvestites, transsexuals, TWAW, strippers, sex-positivitity, pornography, etc., at the expense of, you know, women? Can “I support Trans Women” be translated to “Bitch, you serve me”?
Do these nominally progressive men “support” women so much they want to replace them (with more compliant versions, damn the chromosomes)? Would they rather have men playing slutty dressup than actual women (who might reject them)? Are they colonizing women’s space so that they can forbid women from being non-submissive to men?
Of course they didn’t. Because it’s clear that the implicit threat of rape in “choke…” is oriented towards females. They don’t hate Mr. Kirkup like they hate Ms. Rowling simply because he’s a man, and their hatred is sex-specific.
How deep does the misogynist hatred go? Is it at the bottom of the transgender trend? Is tranny dress-up a “get out of misogyny free” card? Are they attempting to destroy the thing they hate by embodying it? To possess the one thing they can’t by usurping it?
Yes, we did, once upon a time, think misogyny was going to fade away. But it didn’t, not at all; it just went underground, and grew more twisted. We are living through the ‘return of the repressed’ now.
I wonder how many of these straight wokebeards insisting that TWAW would even consider dating a trans identified male? How many AGP TIMs would consider another AGP TIM as a “lesbian” partner? Not quite “validating” enough?
I guess one can only be so progressive…
Dropped an audible credit on Troubled Blood, a book I’d not have heard of or considered buying if it wasn’t for the nasty “TERF stole my ice cream” crowd. GG.
There is also a defence of J.K. Rowling (a bit milk-and-waterish, but still a defence) in the Independent today.
More of a general rebuke of social media mobs though, with too much “no matter how you despise the content” for my taste.
The misogyny of the manosphere has always been in mainstream culture; it’s just that it was toned down, trying to hide behind polite politically correct manifestations. Now the obvious, screaming, foul hatred of women is the politically correct position, so they don’t need euphemisms or hiding the mashed potatoes in the cauliflower anymore. Twitter has stripped the clothes off the emperor, and he is revealed in all his misogynistic nastiness.
I suspect at least some of them get sexual excitement from the woman-hating. It’s the urge to overpower and dominate women, and it is really a visceral thing for them.