LogFAQs > #979682926

UnsteadyOwl posted...

I can't understand why Rowling feels the need to act like this.

I've thought about this and I feel it is a matter of three parts. Mind you I have no professional basis for any of this:

1) Her past trauma with her abusive husband. That kind of thing can absolutely wreck a person emotionally and spiritually and result in the need to reassemble one's sense of self. Also I feel that gave her a strict internal division on gendered society (she would call it "sexed" but we never accuse GCs of being deeper thinkers, or to put it another way, culture and history is not stored in the balls).

2) Her disdain for ugliness, which may stem from #1. This shows up very readily in both HP and Cormorant Strike where she gets needlessly descriptive with how ugly her ugly characters are. She doesn't worship beauty, mind. She's quite focused around her characters being average or only with some "normal" flaws, but if she makes a character ugly, she gets downright sadistic with it. I feel that this led to her initial distaste of trans people in general, as a transitioning person doesn't always match a cleanly gendered line of what "average" looks like for men or (INSERT HARD DIVIDING LINE HERE) women.

Now take those two together and in any other person she'd probably just be kinda wary of trans people and would avoid them and grumble about them and might be rude at times, but it wouldn't really be a thing, but tack on the fact that she's not just rich, but a celebrity, and influential. In late 2019, she saw Maya Forstater lose her job (her contract was not renewed) due to Maya's more open transphobia. She saw that and saw "trans ugliness" moving in on normal "averagely pretty" society and she decided to speak.

She spoke out on behalf of Maya and the worst thing happened: people responded positively to her and flocked to her. Not quite in the millions that adored her for her books, but this was active support at a time when she was well past the final HP book and most people hadn't given her much thought anymore.

Which brings us to:

3) The attention. She's on the front stage. She's the talk of the town. She's in the papers. She remembers what this felt like back when she was hot with HP and she missed it. She had people lapping at her feet, and to her, it didn't matter that this was quite a different crowd than she's used to. I mean, it was mostly the same, right? There were women, women like her, who saw ugliness in the world and thought it wasn't right.

And initially there was a rush of support not just from anti-trans people but her usual fans who were interested to see her back in the limelight, but over time the tumult of the attention started to settle out. Some fans left. More fans left. Some people filled in those gaps that she wouldn't have otherwise accepted. These people weren't just ardent feminists fighting for the female sex. Some of them were men, some of them were deeper conservatives than she might be used to. Some of them, well, let's just say you can go into any replies to her tweets and find some choice words that a non-Elon Twitter probably wouldn't have put up with.

So that brings us to now and her largely trying to keep a "proper" facade as a "voice of reasoned feminism" (while her friends get far more direct) but it's been cracking slowly over the last few years and in recent months.

Because the problem with these new fans giving her attention is that these kind of people hold theirs to a very strict standard, and especially nowadays any crack in that towards the realm of compassion, kindness, or "woke" can result the entire swath of them turning on you. Every conservative pundit faces the same, and they NEED to keep it up, otherwise they lose that attention just as quickly as it came.

So there will come a time where she will need to go all in, or fold.

And to fold would be to fade back into obscurity, and I don't know if she'd be able to take that.