JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I was Ms Watson I would lie low for a few months. In fact I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read.
Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating
Watson is the actress who gained fame and riches from playing Hermione in the Harry Potter films. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn of the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles. She fell in with the Black Lives Matter contagion, ostentatiously confessing that she had ‘benefited’ from ‘white supremacy’. (Hilariously, she got flak for putting a white border around the black square she posted on Instagram for BLM’s Blackout Tuesday in June 2020. The colour white? On a day for blacks? Demon!)
She thinks Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Of course she does – the invites to cultural soirées dry up quicksmart for those who refuse to partake of the Israel-bashing that has become the moral glue of the chattering classes. And she is a faithful servant of the most lunatic luxury belief of all: that ‘trans women are women’. Translation: men are women. Hearty supping from the Kool-Aid of gender insanity is a must for anyone wishing to maintain their position in the starry firmament of high-status ideology.
It was this latter wacky belief that brought Ms Watson and the other overgrown brats of the Harry Potter franchise into conflict with the author of their fame. Because, of course, Rowling is a witch to correct-thinkers for her quaint belief that people with knobs are men. Over the years, Watson and her fellow Potter alumni made sly swipes at Rowling and her heretical belief in biological fact. Rowling, being more classy, said nothing. Until now.
Her 600-word X post about Watson is a masterwork of critical demolition. It is cool, restrained and cataclysmic. She dismisses the conciliatory remarks Watson made in an interview last week, when she said she still ‘treasured’ her relationship with Rowling. ‘Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love’, she said. Oof.
She reveals that in 2022 Watson asked someone to pass her a handwritten note that said: ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’. This was when ‘the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak’, says Rowling. Watson had ‘publicly poured more petrol on the flames’ of this hatred, Rowling writes – not least in a speech she had recently given – and yet she thought a ‘one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness’.
This is as brutal a calling out of unsisterly behaviour as I have seen. In shining a light on the moral chasm between Watson’s public ‘petrol pouring’ and her private utterance of a fleeting, paltry sympathy, Rowling exposes the failures of feminism more broadly in the post-truth era of trans. Many high-status women have giddily sacrificed solidarity with their own sex at the altar of validating the delusional identities of men in frocks. They betrayed womankind so that they might gain access to the rarefied realm of elite opinion – moral treachery masquerading as progressivism.
But it is Rowling’s calm assault on Watson’s class privilege that hits hardest. ‘Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is’, she writes. It’s easy, she says, for the affluent to parrot such luxury lunacy as ‘trans women are women’ because they will never have to face the social consequences of this unhinged dismantling of the truth of sex and the rights of women.
A virtue-hoarder like Ms Watson can afford to be blasé about the linguistic destruction of the reality of womanhood because ‘she’ll never need a homeless shelter’, says Rowling. ‘She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward.’ Watson’s ‘public bathroom’ is ‘single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door’, Rowling writes. It is only – whisper it – women poorer than Ms Watson who will find themselves on a crammed ward alongside a huge bloke or in a WC that’s seen better days in which a strange man is doing his make-up.
Rowling has nailed it. The purveyors of luxury beliefs rarely have to live with the fallout of their cranky ideologies. Rich celebs bow to Black Lives Matter with nary a thought for the impact that BLM’s psycho cry of ‘Defund the police’ has had on poor black communities in the United States. Britain’s bourgeois leftists luxuriously rail against ‘Islamophobia’ and seem not to care that it was officialdom’s very fear of being called Islamophobic that abandoned so many white working-class girls to the scarce mercy of those ‘grooming gangs. And pious celebs can cavalierly say ‘Trans women are women’ because they will never be that poor girl who just wants to go swimming without being flashed at by a man putting on a bikini.
Luxury beliefs benefit the rich but they are lethal for everyone else. Preach, Joanne.
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