Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out that the abuse of JK Rowling is classic sexism. One way we can tell is that men don’t get targeted the way she is.
“I think that she’s been treated abominably. And, I think a lot of that treatment is because she’s a woman,” she said. “I think that a man who aired his views, reasonable views, would not be treated in that way.”
Is Graham Linehan perhaps a counter-example? He’s certainly been a target, but JKR gets a lot of specifically sexual/sexist abuse. I don’t think that happens to men the same way.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Adichie told journalist Emma Barnett she thought it was “very dangerous” that people were “refusing to engage with what she (Rowling) said”, but were instead “hurling insults”.
…
Adichie said some young people in Lagos, Nigeria, viewed Rowling as “transphobic” and even thought that “she wants to kill trans people”.
But when challenged about where in Rowling’s writing that had been stated or implied, “none of them could point it out to me”, she said.
Similarly, speaking with students on a US university campus, the author said she “felt as though they were repeating party lines”.
Part of the problem, she said, is that the strident opinions of young people are going unchallenged by adults.
Also that strident opinions of people old enough to know better are going unchallenged by people old enough to know better. There’s an orthodoxy-policing thing going on even among people over 19.
The 45-year-old said: “I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young. I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.”
Same. I’m very confident I didn’t know everything when I was young. Very confident indeed.
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18 responses to “Insults in place of engagement”
I’m 62, and I’m still very confident I don’t know everything.
When i was young, the adults were very ready to correct us. Did that mean they were always wrong and we were always right? No, of course not. We saw things through different eyes, and some of the things we saw contradicted what they saw, but they were quick enough to point out where we were wrong that it forced us to learn things so we could counter their arguments.
And when we couldn’t counter their arguments, because the evidence pointed that way, it forced us (at least those of us interested in learning) to revise our own views.
When we were younger, I’m sure there were a lot of times we believed our parents’ generation didn’t have anywhere near the experience we did. Youngsters are like that. Rolling eyes, scornful tones, whatever…yes, that’s youth. The main difference is, our parents didn’t assume we knew everything just because we assumed that.
OB, your link at “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out that the abuse of JK Rowling is classic sexism” is paywalled.
As for: “The 45-year-old said: ‘I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young. I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.’
Same. I’m very confident I didn’t know everything when I was young. Very confident indeed.”
Is that what the 45-year-old is actually saying? Just asking.
I’m quite embarrassed by now naive I was about things at 45, to be honest, and i was quite confident of what I thought. At 17, I thought “Put us in charge.” I think that some of the things I thought I knew last year were hopeless. I’ll be lucky to be wise before I die.
I agree with what she is saying. We’re not doing well with our children. But I think that in large part it has to do with how we segment our society by age. I can’t speak for Kenya, but our kids have so little contact with older adults as models in their lives compared to where we were in the early 1900’s. We went from a society with multigenerational households to one in which the older adults retire into 55+ mobile home parks and apartment buildings. Kids don’t have mentors, so they don’t experience the sort of wisdom that our generation has picked up.
You can’t teach kids to be mature if they don’t have good models, and as adults, we haven’t been good models.
I don’t know though. Men may be able to express gender critical views with relative impunity up to a point, but. The harassment of Michael Bailey went way over the line: not only did Andrea James try to get him fired, she posted pictures of his children and implied he’d sexually abused them. She also accused him of sexual harassment of one (?) of his trans-identified subjects. (His university investigated and Bailey kept his job.)
Ken Zucker was accused of various wrongdoings, which turned out to be
liesmistakes. He was later vindicated, but he lost his clinic.Don’t see anyone fantasizing raping or murdering the men, but then I don’t suppose Graham Linehan shares everything he gets.
Omar, lots of things I link to are paywalled. I link to available stuff when possible but it’s not always possible. I link primarily to cite the source.
OK.
Some people who wish to view articles behind a paywall, and who don’t wish to subscribe or sign up, perhaps because they feel they are already subscribed to sufficient news outlets, or perhaps for other reasons known only to themselves, occasionally resort to a paywall workaround like 12ft Ladder or a similar service.
Sackbut,
Thanks for that link. Works a treat. And Rowling, as usual, is right.
(Disclaimer: I am not into fantasy literature or Harry Pottrer. But she wrote a book called I believe Harry Potter and the Deadly Gallows, in which I assume her hero gets hung. Then lo and behold, he rises like Lazarus or Jesus Christ himself, ready for the next adventure in the next book.
A bit of a stretch there, I thought. (Pardon the pun.) ;-)
Dear Omar, her pubescent hero getting hung would not be entirely unexpected; although, given the intended audience for the series, it went unremarked.
Getting hanged, however, would have been something of a tragedy.
Emma Barnett is also presenter of BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour, which has a patchy record of support for actual women. I hope she found her meeting with the wonderful CNA both educative and bracing.
Spoiler Alert: No, Harry is’t hung in The Deathly Hallows. There is indeed a sort of death and resurrection at the end in which Harry willingly takes
Vladimir’s,Volodymir’s,Valdemar’s, Voldemort’s Death Curse which is significant for two reasons:1. There’s an obvious “evil destroying itself” theme going on. Voldmort has been trying to make himself immortal by splitting his soul into 7 pieces and storing the pieces in external objects called “Horcruxes” (The Deathly Hallows is largely about Harry’s struggles to track down and destroy these Horcruxes*). But without intending to do so, he turned Harry into his 8th Horcrux when attempting to kill him as a child. When trying to kill Harry again, Voldemort unwittingly destroys the last piece of his own soul outside his own body, thus making himself mortal once again.
2. Voldemort failed to kill Harry as a child because his (Harry’s) mother’s self-sacrifice provided him with a powerful magical protection. Through his readiness to sacrifice himself for his friends Harry gives the same protection to them in the final battle.
The Deathly Hallows is the last book of the series, so there no “next adventure” or “next book” (unless you count The Cursed Child which I have not read)
* Not entirely unlike Frodo Baggins and a certain ring…
In my defence I cite the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. To wit:
I stand here corrected for having done something that is not wrong. On this blog, like Martin Luther, here I stand. As swarms of butterflies fly past and all those wheels go rolling by. Crazy world.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/hung-or-hanged
…and now I have no idea what I was commenting on in #11. Feel free to ignore.
tigger @ 9 surely? That’s what I assumed you were commenting on.
So, can I go back to saying “The stockings were hanged by the chimney with care?”
I’m still chuckling at “Harry Potter and the Deadly Gallows”, and I feel pretty confident that, if that were the actual title, someone in the story would definitely have been hanged.
Linehan is notably less, er, moderate and conciliatory than Rowling, so there are other factors perhaps.
Maybe it’s better to treat them both as outliers.
Apologies for going even more off-topic, but the hanged/hung discussion reminded me of another of my favorite distinctions, this one from the world of baseball. To wit:
Johnson flied out to center vs. Johnson flew out to center.
Both of which, I suppose, could be appropriate, at least if Johnson is wearing a jet pack.