Mick Hartley

Even the Guardian – or rather, the Observer – can't ignore the root cause of the hatred directed at JK Rowling after the publication of her latest Robert Galbraith book….good old misogyny, pure and simple. Catherine Bennett:

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.

A recent news story about unwanted parrots raised a rehoming difficulty: some of the birds are irredeemably, violently and, in their parrot way, comically woman-hating. Something to do with imprinting after hatching. But what’s Twitter’s excuse? Does that endlessly devious Rowling make them do it? 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.

No mention of the absurd gender trans ideology behind all this – perhaps wisely or the poor woman, like Suzanne Moore, will be subject to censure from her fellow journos – but at least it's an acknowledgement of the blindingly obvious motivation for Rowling hatred.