Women’s Voices: Prejudice
Women’s Voices: J K Rowling Destroys Trolls
Why can’t men handle a strong woman?
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- Men hate women
- The billion-dollar author
- A successful woman
- Speaking of hatred…
- Let’s read that again
- What made the difference?
- Let me stress this
- The one thing I look for in a work of fiction
- You can do it
- Thank you for reading this far
There is a moment in the 2008 film The History Boys* where a Jewish student is asked about the Holocaust. He responds,
…to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away. — Posner, via Alan Bennett
We live, like it or not, in a world full of hatred. Republicans hate Democrats, Straights hate Gays, Muslims hate Christians and everyone hates the Jews.
Go on. Admit it. Of course you don’t hate anyone to the point that you’d herd them into the gas chamber. But you know someone who would.
Men hate women
It must be true. We women have had the shitty end of the stick for all of history. Men quote the Bible at us, talking of the curse of Eve to deny us rights and keep us powerless.
The UN compiles comprehensive reports on progress and they make for grim reading. The latest (PDF download) shows that the pandemic has set progress back in nearly every measure.
Women make up a quarter of parliamentary representatives worldwide, hold just a sixth of national leader roles, and everywhere come in behind men in paid work. The pay gap is 1% in Belgium, in the USA 11%. And they are some of the good ones. In human rights, health outcomes, land ownership, education, wealth and on and on, women are disadvantaged.
The billion-dollar author
J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike books, was listed as a dollar billionaire in 2004, according to Wikipedia, though she has since slipped due to her philanthropy and the UK tax regime. She has been named the world’s highest-paid author multiple times.
This is astonishing, given that she had described her lot ten years previously as
…being as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless — Mugglemarch, 2012
In the early 1990s she was a single parent living in a “mouse-ridden” flat in Edinburgh, accepting government benefits, working part-time and poorly-paid jobs, studying to become a teacher and — famously — completing the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in various cafes around Edinburgh.
She had just left a marriage she described as “short and catastrophic” where a manipulative and abusive husband had attempted to hold her, her baby, and her partial manuscript hostage in Portugal.
She had earlier suffered sexual abuse and in every way she was not in a good place.
It is one of the wonders of modern literature that she was able to commence a new life in Edinburgh in dire circumstances and continue work on the beginning of a seven-volume series that captivated children — and adults — all over the world.
Over the next ten years she became a billionaire, a fabulously successful bestselling author, a much-loved figure in fantasy and education, and the beneficiary of yet more wealth from a string of Harry Potter movies.
She has continued to write, first the mainstream novel The Casual Vacancy, and more recently a series of chunky detective stories set in London, published under a pseudonym to cover the wide gap between her children's stories and the gritty, violent, and occasionally sexual world of private investigations.
Taken as a whole, her work could never be said to be high literature but certainly well-written, intricately plotted, full of distinct characters relating in interesting ways. Casual Vacancy aside, her novels are set in worlds that are more or less out of the ordinary experience of her readers.
One thing that sets her apart from so many other writers is a gift for names. So many of her characters are given names that are quirky and tend to stick in the memory. The names of places, traditions, spells, and magical objects are cast about in the continuing global fandom addicted to Harry Potter.
A successful woman
In Australia we have a saying deriving from our more egalitarian days.
Cut down the tall poppies.
Someone doing better than the common herd and “skiting” about it needs to be taken down a peg or two.
J K Rowling has attracted the same sort of attention.
First from the Christian fundamentalists who, with no discernible sense of irony were afraid of children being corrupted by tales of a world where magical things happened.
Naturally, the loudest voices came from male preachers in America. Book burnings took place.
…the Potter books open a doorway that will put untold millions of kids into hell! — Jack T Chick
No surprise that religions tend to give women a raw deal, beginning with Eve. It is a rare faith that allows women to hold high office and generally, there are any number of prohibitions and restrictions on the female faithful, as opposed to their fellow male sinners.
Perhaps more to the point, religion condones violence and torture on a grand scale — let me just direct you to the Crusades and the Inquisition, not to mention the 9/11 attacks and subsequent retaliation visited upon Muslim lands, I mentioned anti-semitism right at the start of this story — and I won’t get started on child sex abuse, racism, and the Westboro Baptist mob.
Jesus would not be in favour of any of this.
I see it as the leaders of a strongly pro-male culture attacking a successful woman who dares tread on their toes.
Other — male — British writers such as Tolkien, C S Lewis, and Terry Pratchett, who all wrote wildly popular tales of magic for children — Pratchett even had a series of novels about a magical school — have not attracted anything like the same hatred.
Speaking of hatred…
The second, and more insidious, attempt to “tall poppy” J K Rowling was based on gender.
Rowling, whose entire body of work rests upon support for the oppressed, and has never expressed anything but support for any authentic transgender individual, called out the notion that all one needs to do to be a woman is to identify as one.
Her position is based on two legs:
- It is patently ridiculous to use awkward circumlocutions such as “people who menstruate” to describe women.
- If men who wish to abuse women can gain entry to women-only spaces such as crisis centres or refuges merely by claiming that they are women, they will do so.
Her position is expressed here:
I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. — J K Rowling
It is worth noting that no author in the entire history of literature has ever included a trans woman character in their work without drawing attention to the fact in some way.
Media stories introducing transgender women inevitably flag the distinction:
- Eddie Izzard, who announced in December 2020 she’s gender-fluid and identifies with she/her pronouns…
- Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans…
- Natalie Wynn, a popular trans YouTuber… — (all from Glamour.com)
It seems a little excessive for J K Rowling to be the target of death threats and hate speech for highlighting what is common practice in contemporary English usage.
Trans people — and trans women especially — are at greater risk of violence, abuse, and discrimination than the general female population. Study after study shows this.
In a world full of hatred, why whip up more?
And yet — remember that quote I used to open this story? — those most strident in their hatred of a successful woman author are forever explaining their hatred. They see hate as a positive force.
How sad.
To my mind, and in my own experience, women — cis, trans, bi, gay, whatever — are the target of discrimination and violence. We are exploited, over-worked, underpaid. That’s not fair.
This take on the J K Rowling storm resonated with me. It comes from a woman who, like me, fled a cult that assigned women subservient roles.
Why does J K Rowling take her stance in the face of intense criticism?
She claims — in the interview included in the referenced podcast — that her success makes her obligated to speak for those that share her views but are not buoyed by notoriety. Wealth and power have placed her above cancellation.
Let’s read that again
A woman has to be rich and powerful to speak her mind without consequences?
I’ll agree on this point. There are always strident critics of any woman. All too often they are within one’s intimate circle. Domestic violence is a pandemic that takes more lives and causes more harm than Covid.
What does a woman do to escape this? Her options are limited without ready access to enough money and support to begin afresh. It is commonplace for women, especially mothers, to remain with their abusive partners rather than leave and be effectively homeless, and almost certainly without the support of a familiar community and environment.
Rowling herself faced this choice, fleeing with an infant daughter from Portugal to Edinburgh to the dire conditions outlined above.
What made the difference?
J K Rowling achieved her current position of wealth and influence through one thing.
Storytelling. She told some unbelievably popular stories.
And, I think it is plain:
- Reading
- Discipline
- Resilience and humility
- Courage
- Independence
These are the factors she lists on her own site. Go read it, especially if you have the slightest intention of becoming a best-selling author.
Read some books, adopt some virtues of mind if you do not already have them and you can set out on the same path.
Let me stress this
J K Rowling does not have a great prose writing style. She gets regularly picked apart by experts (often, I suspect, chewing on a bunch of sour grapes).
She did not achieve her success in a professional field requiring a university degree or doctorate.
She did not have the backing of fame or fortune. She was writing — by hand — in an Edinburgh cafe, her sleeping daughter by her side or at home in a dingy flat or anywhere, any time she could, really.
It took her seven years to write and publish her first novel.
She basically did it alone. No husband to pay the bills and help with the child. Just one woman, writing down a story.
What she had were things anyone reading this — including any cash-strapped single mother of a young child — could acquire with very little effort or expense.
The one thing I look for in a work of fiction
There is one thing I look for in a novel or short story, a movie or TV series.
Unless the story is astoundingly good, I’m unlikely to press on if it is lacking.
Quite simply, I need a strong female character.
If the princess is sitting back waiting for the prince to come rescue her, that’s a sign that I may need to change the channel, walk out of the cinema, fling the book into the bin.
J K Rowling always has strong female characters in her books. They are examples for women, especially girls, to follow. You can make it in a man’s world, she is telling us.
She is perhaps the ultimate strong female character. She got to where she was by herself, through study and discipline, without a man propping her up.
I think that in a man’s world, what we need are more J K Rowlings.
Forget the hate, forget the sour grapes, forget the self-appointed critics. They aren’t producing anything of merit; their job is to tear others down.
You can do it
Be honest with yourself. If you want to be as successful as J K Rowling, you will surely need the qualities of mind she lists.
If you want to do it through writing fiction, you will need to be able to read and write well. And by that I mean reading with an eye on what works and doesn’t work, how a story is told to effect, how your audience will feel as they read it.
Storytelling can be learned. The same plots and situations and storyteller tactics that worked for Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Rowling are timeless. They work.
If you have a story, a message, a plan, a vision, your voice can be heard.
Thank you for reading this far
My message, I think, is clear. No matter how dismal you think your life is, if a single mother living on welfare can make a plan and find extraordinary success, then any one of us can set out on the same path.
My boldface links above are affiliates. Amazon will throw me a few cents if you buy from them. If you don’t like Amazon, find an independent bookseller, find a library, but do look up the books, the film, the sources I recommend. They are far more important than a few bucks in this straight white woman’s pocket.
Britni
*The History Boys: an excellent film and I heartily recommend it; thoughtful, perceptive, and a repository of great quotes.
History is one fucking thing after another.
History is women following behind with the bucket.
It deals with some fascinating themes. Class in the UK. Education. Privilege. Homosexuality.
I saw the stage production of The History Boys in the West End in 2008, and I am lucky enough to have met one of the actual history boys. Not just met him but stayed in his house, shared drinks in a Shropshire pub or two, and look on him and his sweet wife as friends.
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