Some artistic works age badly and I think it’s okay. It becomes a problem if artist themselves is aging badly and doubling down on things that could definitely be better about their works.
Exactly. If Rowling was willing to own up the problematic stuff in her books and grow from it, it wouldn’t be a big issue. If she even disappeared into her castle and lived her life quietly releasing bad additions to the universe, it’d just blend into the background and only be occasionally brought up. Instead, JK became a Nazi who reinforces patriarchy, strengthens fascism, and made life hell for so many trans people.
I don’t like this speculation. While it’s fair to say she has issues with her own relationship to femininity, claiming she’s a closeted man is going too far. It reeks too much of the whole “homophobes are closeted gays” trope, which is a kinda homophobic in how it blames queer people for their own oppression.
On top of all that, nobody can decide other people’s gender for them. It doesn’t matter if the person is a suspected egg or a transphobe who spites their own gender; do not invalidate the gender of others.
All that is true but I think we need to acknowledge how JK started off a fairly moderate TERF and only became what she is today because of the interaction of her stubbornness with the reaction she got. If the goal is fewer bigots, there are lessons there for how to deal with TERFs.
Nah, she was already in too deep to rescue by the time she got pushback. She was too socially entrenched with bigots for anyone reasonable to reach her. Twitter drama is not responsible; her wealth, power, and how that impacted her social circle were.
People often think these descents into fascism are ideological, but it’s been mostly interpersonal in every case I’ve witnessed. If someone is a rich white “feminist” with conservative tendencies, they can easily find friendship with people already deep in the brainrot. They then become so reliant on that social group that leaving becomes costly, and decide “Fuck those minorities anyways. They aren’t my friends, so why should I care?”
Don’t think of the detached internet as a space for recuperating fascists. Deprogramming cannot realistically happen there, not without more personal influence. It’s parasocial to think otherwise.
The thing I just dont get is how someone who considers themselves a feminist has chosen a crusade where her greatest allies are people that would kick her back into the kitchen. Like all the groups that are as vocal as her about trans rights that take her side seem to be incels, manosphere idiots, and forced-birth christofacists.
I imagine that a lot of the Nazi views influenced her, so she became more ok with being their friend. She basically allowed them into her “acceptable allies” club and became more sympathetic to them from there. Needless to say, she’s lost the plot and only really cares about transphobia anymore.
I dont want to believe its that easy, but then shes advocated taking pictures and video of people in womens bathrooms to catch the trans women. So maybe it is.
This is an interesting perspective. In the case of JK it contradicts my understanding of the timeline but I’m only remembering some account I heard ages ago…
I think there is a synthesis though, because I think your social entrenchment could quite happily take place offline or online or “parasocially” if you prefer. Someone with offline friends who are reinforcing their beliefs is unlikely to be deprogrammed by the internet, but someone who doesn’t have many of those offline friends can be influenced. (Or they could work in concert)
That’s true. In Rowlings case, she is documented as having hung out with notorious transphobes for a while before she went full mask off. That’s why I say that she was beyond the internet’s reach by the time she became vocal
If all it took to turn a terf into a bigot was to give the author some moderate criticisms about the systemic failings of their world building to turn them into a Nazi, I think the only solution is to prevent terfs from becoming authors.
Either that or we need to accept that this was always going to be the outcome of some privileged rich white idiot who can’t handle the slightest bit of pushback who’d rather cozy up to Nazis than admit that maybe her writing isn’t perfect.
I really disagree that twitter arguments are the same as “moderate criticism”. Even if every single person who criticises someone does so moderately and reasonably, which is already very unlikely, simply being moderately criticised by hundreds of thousands of people is not something the human mind is equipped to deal with in a healthy way.
I disagree with the idea that she needed to be on Twitter and engage in twitter arguments. There was moderate criticisms of her across the net, the fact she WILLINGLY chose to engage in an opinion cesspool that let her drown in shit is her own goddamned fault.
Plenty of other people hired someone to deal with their social media accounts because they didn’t want to subject themselves to socially-acceptable-4chan, she chose to chug sewage straight from the pipe despite having plenty of money and the connections to have it. Honestly, her not engaging with criticism with hostility would have done wonders for the whole situation.
I think you’re focusing on what she could have done differently, and I’m focusing on what I believe will inevitably happen to some people, even if individuals can choose differently. So I’m not saying that “she needed to be on Twitter and engage”. I’m not disagreeing that you can attribute blame to her for engaging in that way, besides blame for her initial opinions.
I’m saying that, from a practical perspective, you can think all of that, but still acknowledge that many people just are not good at disengaging from criticism, and that services like Twitter will inevitably attract people because they’re designed to attract people. So it would be a good idea to try and move away from ways of acting which tend to cause that.
Basically I think we can break down JK’s personality into three initial relevant features:
somewhat bigoted
the kind of person to want to use twitter
stubborn in the face of criticism
Of these, I think only the first is a true flaw and worthy of blame. The second would carry some blame nowadays but back then it wasn’t owned by a Nazi. The second and third both describe a huge portion of humanity. I use Mastodon and other social media, so I don’t feel like I can judge someone negatively for being the same, and I too can be stubborn in the face of criticism, as can many people I know, so same. But bigotry is clearly wrong.
All this means I really only feel like it’s valid to judge JK as if she were the somewhat bigoted person she originally was, rather than today’s turbo-Nazi version of her.
I don’t disagree with a lot of what you wrote, other than the end:
All this means I really only feel like it’s valid to judge JK as if she were the somewhat bigoted person she originally was, rather than today’s turbo-Nazi version of her.
I disagree, we can judge her on the choices she made that brought her to this point. She chose to engage with negative criticism with hostility and surrounded herself with people who validated the beliefs and behaviors that culminated in where we are today.
She could have chosen to remove herself from those situations instead of jumping in with both feet, but there would have been a social/ego cost to it, so she continued letting herself be radicalized into the hateful thing she has become.
And I judge her as someone having almost walked a similar path. I was on the alt-right pipeline over a decade ago when they were getting their feet underneath themselves, and I had a combination of self-awareness/shame that helped me come to my senses.
I mean, I was an aspie kid who was fascinated by much of the mold’s writings but even I could notice some incredibly strange things:
House elves being treated as slaves and none of the wizards finding it odd. And Hermione, the typical person whom I felt most normal, was put away as an annoying brat and nerd. C’mon!
The suspiciously riches-obsessed and long-nosed kobolds
The overt discrimination of wizards w/o wizard parents (being called Mudbloods; or those who are ‘too Muggle-obsessed’.)
JK only wanting people from the UK to play, even though it wouldn’t always make sense. What about the Beauxbatons? The Durmstrang ones?
I disagree on 3 out of the 4 being particularly clear signs back then.
#1 and #3 always seemed like critiques of slavery and discrimination to me as a teen when reading those. I recall Hermione being the voice of reason that wizards ignored because slavery was convenient and the people who wanted “mudbloods” gone were shown as bad, with Voldemort in particular having no redeeming qualities.
#2 was pretty inexcusable back then but surprisingly enough is going to be found increasingly acceptable now that Israel has shown its true colours
#4 I don’t know the context but maybe she just didn’t want a bunch of Americans? Because the guy who played Krum is Bulgarian and Fleur’s actress was French. There was an actress from Bangladesh. To me that would make sense because the film industry is very America-centric.
Also before the entire TERFdom and now literal nazism saga, she said shit like “nowhere does it say Hermione has to be white” (which her own book disagreed with but this is an example of how she used to be more tolerant). She’s changed a lot and it can only be the money and the company people with money tend to keep (other people with money). Wealth cap starting to seem better by the day.
#1 and #3 always seemed like critiques of slavery and discrimination to me as a teen when reading those. I recall Hermione being the voice of reason that wizards ignored because slavery was convenient and the people who wanted “mudbloods” gone were shown as bad, with Voldemort in particular having no redeeming qualities.
#1 certainly looked like that was the setup, but the way it eventually played out sure looks like the author thought Hermione was just being stupid and annoying.
Also before the entire TERFdom and now literal nazism saga, she said shit like “nowhere does it say Hermione has to be white” (which her own book disagreed with but this is an example of how she used to be more tolerant).
I think this is an example of the author trying to gain “woke” clout without actually writing woke themes. Same with the “Dumbledore is gay” revelation, AFAIK it never appeared in any of the material she has written, certainly not in the HP books. That’s certainly better than going full nazi, but it always came off as insincere.
The older I get, the more I realize I think I can pick up on things about a writer’s worldview, even if the work isn’t trying to make a point of the worldview details I might pick up on.
I’m pretty sure Ari Aster is ableist, Christopher Nolan and S Craig Zahler are republicans, and Todd Field did something heinous, but diligently oversees his own Wikipedia article and Google Alerts to a degree that ensures it’s hard to find/I’ve been too lazy to really dig into it.
Same, when I read through the Bobiverse series it was quite evident the author believes in biological determinism, great man theory, is at least somewhat sexist and feels squeamish around queer people. He doesn’t outright say those things but it comes out in which characters are focused on, their actions, and the consequences of them. It’s an entertaining series but for me it was hard to ignore the red flags.
Yeah… The closer you look at the Harry Potter books, the more you wonder how we didn’t realise JK Rowling was a bigot sooner
Some artistic works age badly and I think it’s okay. It becomes a problem if artist themselves is aging badly and doubling down on things that could definitely be better about their works.
Exactly. If Rowling was willing to own up the problematic stuff in her books and grow from it, it wouldn’t be a big issue. If she even disappeared into her castle and lived her life quietly releasing bad additions to the universe, it’d just blend into the background and only be occasionally brought up. Instead, JK became a Nazi who reinforces patriarchy, strengthens fascism, and made life hell for so many trans people.
The UK used to be trans friendly, it stopped being so mostly due to Joanne’s influence.
Btw, she hates it when you call her Joanne.
I have no idea why she never uses her full name: Joanne Kowling Rowling
Removed by mod
I don’t like this speculation. While it’s fair to say she has issues with her own relationship to femininity, claiming she’s a closeted man is going too far. It reeks too much of the whole “homophobes are closeted gays” trope, which is a kinda homophobic in how it blames queer people for their own oppression.
On top of all that, nobody can decide other people’s gender for them. It doesn’t matter if the person is a suspected egg or a transphobe who spites their own gender; do not invalidate the gender of others.
Removed by mod
All that is true but I think we need to acknowledge how JK started off a fairly moderate TERF and only became what she is today because of the interaction of her stubbornness with the reaction she got. If the goal is fewer bigots, there are lessons there for how to deal with TERFs.
Nah, she was already in too deep to rescue by the time she got pushback. She was too socially entrenched with bigots for anyone reasonable to reach her. Twitter drama is not responsible; her wealth, power, and how that impacted her social circle were.
People often think these descents into fascism are ideological, but it’s been mostly interpersonal in every case I’ve witnessed. If someone is a rich white “feminist” with conservative tendencies, they can easily find friendship with people already deep in the brainrot. They then become so reliant on that social group that leaving becomes costly, and decide “Fuck those minorities anyways. They aren’t my friends, so why should I care?”
Don’t think of the detached internet as a space for recuperating fascists. Deprogramming cannot realistically happen there, not without more personal influence. It’s parasocial to think otherwise.
edit: grammar
The thing I just dont get is how someone who considers themselves a feminist has chosen a crusade where her greatest allies are people that would kick her back into the kitchen. Like all the groups that are as vocal as her about trans rights that take her side seem to be incels, manosphere idiots, and forced-birth christofacists.
I imagine that a lot of the Nazi views influenced her, so she became more ok with being their friend. She basically allowed them into her “acceptable allies” club and became more sympathetic to them from there. Needless to say, she’s lost the plot and only really cares about transphobia anymore.
I dont want to believe its that easy, but then shes advocated taking pictures and video of people in womens bathrooms to catch the trans women. So maybe it is.
This is an interesting perspective. In the case of JK it contradicts my understanding of the timeline but I’m only remembering some account I heard ages ago…
I think there is a synthesis though, because I think your social entrenchment could quite happily take place offline or online or “parasocially” if you prefer. Someone with offline friends who are reinforcing their beliefs is unlikely to be deprogrammed by the internet, but someone who doesn’t have many of those offline friends can be influenced. (Or they could work in concert)
That’s true. In Rowlings case, she is documented as having hung out with notorious transphobes for a while before she went full mask off. That’s why I say that she was beyond the internet’s reach by the time she became vocal
Thanks, that’s not something I’d heard, I’ll see if I can find out more
If all it took to turn a terf into a bigot was to give the author some moderate criticisms about the systemic failings of their world building to turn them into a Nazi, I think the only solution is to prevent terfs from becoming authors.
Either that or we need to accept that this was always going to be the outcome of some privileged rich white idiot who can’t handle the slightest bit of pushback who’d rather cozy up to Nazis than admit that maybe her writing isn’t perfect.
I really disagree that twitter arguments are the same as “moderate criticism”. Even if every single person who criticises someone does so moderately and reasonably, which is already very unlikely, simply being moderately criticised by hundreds of thousands of people is not something the human mind is equipped to deal with in a healthy way.
I disagree with the idea that she needed to be on Twitter and engage in twitter arguments. There was moderate criticisms of her across the net, the fact she WILLINGLY chose to engage in an opinion cesspool that let her drown in shit is her own goddamned fault.
Plenty of other people hired someone to deal with their social media accounts because they didn’t want to subject themselves to socially-acceptable-4chan, she chose to chug sewage straight from the pipe despite having plenty of money and the connections to have it. Honestly, her not engaging with criticism with hostility would have done wonders for the whole situation.
I think you’re focusing on what she could have done differently, and I’m focusing on what I believe will inevitably happen to some people, even if individuals can choose differently. So I’m not saying that “she needed to be on Twitter and engage”. I’m not disagreeing that you can attribute blame to her for engaging in that way, besides blame for her initial opinions.
I’m saying that, from a practical perspective, you can think all of that, but still acknowledge that many people just are not good at disengaging from criticism, and that services like Twitter will inevitably attract people because they’re designed to attract people. So it would be a good idea to try and move away from ways of acting which tend to cause that.
Basically I think we can break down JK’s personality into three initial relevant features:
Of these, I think only the first is a true flaw and worthy of blame. The second would carry some blame nowadays but back then it wasn’t owned by a Nazi. The second and third both describe a huge portion of humanity. I use Mastodon and other social media, so I don’t feel like I can judge someone negatively for being the same, and I too can be stubborn in the face of criticism, as can many people I know, so same. But bigotry is clearly wrong.
All this means I really only feel like it’s valid to judge JK as if she were the somewhat bigoted person she originally was, rather than today’s turbo-Nazi version of her.
I don’t disagree with a lot of what you wrote, other than the end:
I disagree, we can judge her on the choices she made that brought her to this point. She chose to engage with negative criticism with hostility and surrounded herself with people who validated the beliefs and behaviors that culminated in where we are today.
She could have chosen to remove herself from those situations instead of jumping in with both feet, but there would have been a social/ego cost to it, so she continued letting herself be radicalized into the hateful thing she has become.
And I judge her as someone having almost walked a similar path. I was on the alt-right pipeline over a decade ago when they were getting their feet underneath themselves, and I had a combination of self-awareness/shame that helped me come to my senses.
She also paints a nasty picture of older women. Intolerant, hateful and unwavering in both. Shes a bad view from every angle.
Because every one who read it was a kid?
I mean, I was an aspie kid who was fascinated by much of the mold’s writings but even I could notice some incredibly strange things:
This is portrayed as a bad thing in the books, though. The discriminatory side went full Nazi and the main characters fought against them.
I disagree on 3 out of the 4 being particularly clear signs back then.
#1 and #3 always seemed like critiques of slavery and discrimination to me as a teen when reading those. I recall Hermione being the voice of reason that wizards ignored because slavery was convenient and the people who wanted “mudbloods” gone were shown as bad, with Voldemort in particular having no redeeming qualities.
#2 was pretty inexcusable back then but surprisingly enough is going to be found increasingly acceptable now that Israel has shown its true colours
#4 I don’t know the context but maybe she just didn’t want a bunch of Americans? Because the guy who played Krum is Bulgarian and Fleur’s actress was French. There was an actress from Bangladesh. To me that would make sense because the film industry is very America-centric.
Also before the entire TERFdom and now literal nazism saga, she said shit like “nowhere does it say Hermione has to be white” (which her own book disagreed with but this is an example of how she used to be more tolerant). She’s changed a lot and it can only be the money and the company people with money tend to keep (other people with money). Wealth cap starting to seem better by the day.
#1 certainly looked like that was the setup, but the way it eventually played out sure looks like the author thought Hermione was just being stupid and annoying.
I think this is an example of the author trying to gain “woke” clout without actually writing woke themes. Same with the “Dumbledore is gay” revelation, AFAIK it never appeared in any of the material she has written, certainly not in the HP books. That’s certainly better than going full nazi, but it always came off as insincere.
Probably part of the problem is that kids are not very principled.
The older I get, the more I realize I think I can pick up on things about a writer’s worldview, even if the work isn’t trying to make a point of the worldview details I might pick up on.
I’m pretty sure Ari Aster is ableist, Christopher Nolan and S Craig Zahler are republicans, and Todd Field did something heinous, but diligently oversees his own Wikipedia article and Google Alerts to a degree that ensures it’s hard to find/I’ve been too lazy to really dig into it.
Same, when I read through the Bobiverse series it was quite evident the author believes in biological determinism, great man theory, is at least somewhat sexist and feels squeamish around queer people. He doesn’t outright say those things but it comes out in which characters are focused on, their actions, and the consequences of them. It’s an entertaining series but for me it was hard to ignore the red flags.
Waitll you get to Star Wars Episode 1