Mick Hartley

After Stephen Fry's pompous diatribe against JK Rowling, Victoria Smith at UnHerd wonders just who's been radicalised:

My youngest son has audio versions of all of the Harry Potter books. Given the public pronouncements of a certain artist, I’ve started to find this problematic. True, one can separate the art from the creator, but sometimes the latter’s hateful beliefs infect the former. This is the case when actor Stephen Fry reads the works of brilliant, principled writer J.K. Rowling.

There’s something in the way he voices each female character, from Hermoine Grainger to Dolores Umbridge, which reeks of misogyny. The way to sound like a woman, in Fry’s view, is to make yourself high-pitched, whiny and annoying, no matter what you have to say. I haven’t banned my son from listening because the books are still wonderful. Nonetheless, every time I hear Fry holding forth, I’m reminded of Liz Lochhead’s poem “Men Talk”: “Women prattle / Women waffle and wiffle / Men talk.”

And if women are going to keep talking, it seems that the least they can do is shut up about serious issues such as their own existence in law. Fry has become the latest self-appointed man of reason to express dismay at Rowling’s involvement in current debates around sex and gender. Speaking to The Show People podcast, Fry, a man who once told sexual abuse victims to “grow up” and stop being so “self-pitying”, believes that Rowling, a woman who uses her own money to help such victims, has become “cruel” and “mocking”. Then again, he suggests, perhaps she can’t help it.

“She has been radicalised, I fear,” he told the podcast. “Perhaps by Terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her.” He added: “I’m afraid she seems to be a lost cause for us.”

Oh no! Not another weak lady brain destroyed by “radicalisation”!

Strong echoes of the familiar old vitriol thrown at the suffragettes. And who's this "us" for whom Rowling seems a lost cause? Presumably he's talking about virtually the entire entertainment industry, who've been united in their support of the gender cult, and who throw the most delightful dinner parties.

The ultimate irony of the “radicalisation” slur is that no one needs to be radicalised into believing the same things everyone on the planet believed 10 years ago. It is darkly hilarious to think that feminists popping champagne corks are held up as examples of damaged, brainwashed bigots, while men who take to the streets calling for their deaths are merely considered to have taken things a bit far in the name of a just cause.

I doubt that the Stephen Fry who recorded the Harry Potter books could have predicted that one day, he’d be on the side of those men. Still, that Fry’s low-level misogyny always made him vulnerable to radicalisation. Perhaps there’s a way back, but my feeling is he’s too far gone.