Mick Hartley

Nick Hilton's hit-job on JK Rowling in the New Statesman this week, arguing that her work has become increasingly characterised by “sickening violence” while her views on gender have made her a “liberal pariah”, has caused something of an uproar. The article’s headline has been changed from “JK Rowling, Britain’s nastiest novelist” to  “Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist”, in an attempt to somehow lessen the offence. He's mostly writing about the Robert Galbraith Strike thrillers – though, as the Times says this morning, aren't thrillers meant to be nasty?

Victoria Smith – JK Rowling is honest not "nasty":

Hilton describes Rowling as “obsessive” in her “gender-critical feminism” (otherwise known as “feminism”). One of the impacts of trans activism, with its insistence on vilifying women who fear male bodies and want spaces of their own, has been to force feminists to say things out loud which, rightly or wrongly, many of us hoped could remain implicit. Things about who does what to whom, about how widespread rape and sexual assault really are, about how much female trauma there really is, about just how many men have truly dark desires. Now we have been pushed into a corner, we are treated as though our truths are outlandish fictions. This is what so many find “nasty” — not the stories, but the truth. 

For most women, male violence isn’t constant drama. It isn’t falling from balconies in Mayfair, or being stabbed to death in graveyards. It’s a low background noise, always there. If you are able to read the Strike series and miss it, this says something about the way you have educated yourself to understand the world — not as one packed with villains (which of course it isn’t), but one in which female pain can only ever be entertainment or hate, never a story, let alone a truth, in its own right.