Blame it on Karen
There are eleven thousand comments on Amy Hamm’s public Facebook post about the Rowling billboard. One particularly deep thinker says it’s about white women (wot no Karen?):
Imagine having this amount of money to actually help people in need and instead using it on a billboard to promote a hateful person. White women findings ways to make feminism exclusive to them and theirs is a tale as old as time though.
Yup yup yup that’s it, it’s nothing to do with men trying to take over being women from women, it’s all about white women taking over everything from everyone, the way we always have.
Yes, a feminism which explains women’s oppression in terms of their sex — which therefore includes the crimes of female infanticide, female genital mutilation, and female honor killings — just screams “privileged white women.” Whereas a feminism which explains women’s oppression in terms of their gender may miss those peccadilloes, but includes the crimes of misgendering and lesbians refusing to date other lesbians with penises — finally bringing women of color in third world nations into feminism.
Leaving aside the fact that Rowling isn’t hateful, or the fact that nothing Rowling said was exclusive to white women…
(Mainly because everything wrong with that is pretty fucking obvious to anyone who is capable of any critical thought. Okay, that’s a surprisingly small subset of people, but enough of you frequent this blog that I feel no need to go into these issues further.)
Someone had to be paid to put together the poster, someone had to be paid for the space. Each step of the way for that poster, had to be paid for.
Which means in a depressed economy, even if one disagrees with the message, the poster was in fact helping people, and probably a lot more than most “charity” would as it supports natural business cycles.
A lot of “charity” doesn’t support natural business cycles. For example, coming to Africa and building houses, does the local building industry out of their jobs and allows negligent governments to do nothing about their housing crisis. A lot of the charity that is offered to the developing world is just thinly veiled stock dumping that ensures local manufacturing cannot develop to the point of being competitive, thus maintaining the problems it claims to fight while posing for a photo op.
The issue with income inequality is not that the rich live extravagant lives, it is that they don’t, thus their assets accumulate and their money is effectively removed from the economy, thus rendering the economic cycle stagnant. If half of Bill Gates’ money vanished tomorrow, there would be no economic impact because that money isn’t doing anything.
So I read the comment, and what goes through my head is that the concern isn’t about the fact that some people have the money to put up billboards while others don’t, but an attempt to guilt trip people into silence. It is one thing to simply disagree with Rowling or the poster, but to pull the resentment at people having the money to put up the poster in the first place, is just pure social justice fakery.
Funny how “Karen” is still the bad guy in a story where the “heroes” complained to the manager about a billboard they didn’t like and had it removed by the authorities. Its almost as if the word is just a misogynistic slur instead of a neutral behavioural descriptor!