…you really are selling J.K Rowling short here. If the Gender Critical movement were an army, J.K Rowling would be one of the generals. She takes an active part in the fight against transgender people, regularly targeting and harrassing trans people and their allies, threatening them with lawsuits and often forcing them to retract and apologise, she uses her out-sized influence to make the world a more miserable place for trans people. It isn’t a mere dispute. She is a bigot. And she is on the frontlines of the battles to take away transgender rights.
So this isn’t akin to merely not agreeing with her political views. And yeah, Clapton is a racist, and Louis CK is a misogynist, and I no longer listen or watch either of their work any more because of that, but neither of them are on the frontlines directing hate-mobs at people or actively campaigning for repeals of people’s rights (as far as I’m aware) .
And the game itself is problematic on multiple fronts. Many point out its full of what many consider to be antisemitic tropes. The former lead designer was a goobergater. And one of the voice actors is a piece of shit with a history that lines up the way you pretty much would expect.
See, the thing is, I have paid very little attention to what J.K. Rowling says or does w.r.t trans people (or just about anything else, for that matter). In order for me to “avoid consuming art” by people who say or do obnoxious things, I would have to pay attention to the things that the creators of the art I consume say and do. Which is not something I necessarily want to do.
Not sure exactly how this was intended, but there is a difference between:
“Times were different then, we can’t judge how people behaved”, vs
“He grew up in a different time, we can’t judge him.”
It’s not as if the harm from (for example) SA was different in the past. It’s just that people were more indifferent to the harm, less likely to judge him as a predator.
It’s said that the past is a foreign country, but if someone is alive in the present, they’re in our country now, and our norms hold sway. We absolutely don’t tolerate “back in our day it was OK to prey on little girls.” Anyone who wants to exist as a member of society in good standing, in the present, needs to unambiguously state that they understand this, without attempting to excuse what they did in the past.
…see, the thing is, the people that J.K. Rowling is targeting, the people that she doesn’t consider deserve the same human rights as everyone else, the people that she wants to no longer exist, don’t have a choice in the matter.
Well the thing is…now you know.
And again: what Rowling is doing is so much more than just “saying obnoxious things.”
Not really sure you’re getting the fact that I understand the difference between understanding and excusing. I don’t excuse his behavior, but I do understand it. There are a lot of people out there who conflate the two and it’s a bad habit and a very poor way of parsing the world and the behavior of people in it.
Another thing I understand is that when people go through huge trauma it fucks them up and sometimes it fucks them up in really abhorrent ways. I don’t even talk about some of the thoughts I’ve entertained that are a result of my own traumas, except to a therapist, because there is some very dark shit in there. If I had been given and accepted license to actually DO some of the things I’ve thought about I might be an expat in France too. The mind is an odd place, weird shit happens there and the big struggle in life is to keep mind stuff firmly contained in its place. There are a lot of factors, though, that tend to lower the guard rails and sometimes you don’t even notice it’s happened until you’re sailing off the edge.
Sterling is talking about a video game which involves quite a few people besides her in its production. Actually, it really doesn’t involve Rowling much at all other being the owner of the intellectual property the game is based on. So this isn’t all that dissimilar from Cosby in my opinion save for him being a lot more heinous in my opinion. There are a lot of people who make their livlihood off of Harry Potter in some way.
Should they avoid? No. But that’s my opinion and other people are still free to think differently.
I still listen to Michael Jackson. I won’t turn off the channel if someone who committed a crime is on the movie or the show. I’ll still read things like the Declaration of Independence.
If I find something to be of utility or interest I’m not depriving myself of it. I think that’s true in the general sense for most people. Do we really want to know the history of every person who has had a hand in the creation of the stuff we need or enjoy?
It’s a problem. I wouldn’t want to never watch a Charlie Chaplin film due to the fact that he had sex with underage girls. Patrick O’Brian abandoned his wife and kids. John Ford socked Maureen O’Hara in the jaw and knocked her down, and also sucker-punched Henry Fonda. John Wayne was virulently anti-semitic and anti-Catholic. Chuck Berry was a peeping-tom perv.
Yet Chinatown is a work of genius and is, IMO one of the top ten movies ever made.
So it’s a quandary. A lot of my favorite artists are also colossal dicks!
I’m well aware of the difference between understanding and excusing. If we’re talking about SA, then it might be understanding (without excusing) to say “he was traumatized and knew no other way” or “he was mentally ill and didn’t know right from wrong.” But this is rather different:
Without getting into the semantics of “excusing”, the above statement does seem to suggest that since he wouldn’t have been judged so harshly in the past, we shouldn’t judge him so harshly in the present. And I can only say… this was 1977, she was 13, he fed her drugs and alcohol. Things were not THAT much more lenient back then.
And both parties are still alive, not a historical abstraction. If she were standing in front of you, would you suggest she shouldn’t judge him so harshly because society was more lenient about such things in the distant past of 1977?
When I was 14, that would be in '73, I dated a guy in his twenties. He had a car and a good job and could get alcohol–but yeah, he wanted to go further but I didn’t find him all that attractive (not to mention I questioned his sanity when we were out in a park and we both got pretty drunk and he handed ME the keys to his car to drive home) so I passed him on to another friend, also 14, who did end up having sex with him. A year later I chose a guy to lose my virginity with, he was 18 and we had a very nice summer together. These are activities that would 100% cause an absolute furor if they happened now, but back then no, it wasn’t all that remarkable. We did WAY more drugs than either of my grandkids have run into (one is 26, the other is 13) and the level of sexual experimentation was off the hook, including open experimentation with same sex relationships and some multiples as well. We weren’t even “bad” kids, we were all from well to do suburban families and a whole lot of the drugs we took came from parental medicine chests. We drank on our high school campus, we had teachers who had sex with students and we all knew about it and some of our teachers smoked weed with us. It was absolutely a different time with different attitudes and all of these are things that would get most anyone tossed into prison or at the very least lose their job. It was a different time, that’s simply the truth. Shit was different then and people thought differently about a lot of things–good or bad, that’s up to history to decide.
Point of order: Sterling isn’t a trans woman. They’re a transfemme non-binary and they use they/them pronouns, and while Jim Sterling is still their brand name, they prefer to go by the name “James Stephanie Sterling” or just “Stephanie” if you’re on a first name basis with them.
FWIW: I tried to be careful about this. I triple checked the name on the channel (Jim Sterling) so figured that was ok. As for pronouns, in the video they referred to themself as a “girl.” (link queued to a few seconds before it is said) So…?
Again though, thanks for the update. I’ll try to be better about it and certainly meant no offense.
The difference is that Cosby’s activities weren’t known until well after the show finished its run. Rowling is actively pursuing both her anti-trans agenda and more licensed products and works, so the developers of the game have some level of complicity that those involved in the Cosby Show don’t.
I agree. Yeah, JKR has some old fashioned ideas that arent good today. Fine.
What the hell is wrong with Twain? One of the most vociferous ANTI-racists of his… and our- time.
Yeah, same with mine. One is a Librarian and loudly thanks JKR for her contributions to get kids to actually READ… and read long fat books, with some difficult words.
Whatever harm her views may cause, they are out weighted by her contributions to child/tween/teen reading. And that is very important. I mean sure she made some cringey tweets, but she supports Gay rights, she is hardly a MAGA or anything. In fact if those tweets had not been YELLED about by a few members of the trans community, few would know. No one is reading her books because of her views- if you are that anti with trans, you very likely are homophobic also. Does that not outweigh her views? *which are not in her books, btw)
That’s the trans-femme part. Early on in their transition they decided their identity was “trash girl from the gender dumpster” as sort of a self-deprecating joke, but they don’t fully identify as female. They do enjoy responding to Twitter trolls who make remarks along the lines of “you’ll never be a real woman” by saying “you’re right, I won’t.”
There is another thread that raises the question of “anti-wokeness” vs “racism”. What the OP describes is the sort of anti-wokeness I can support. I don’t feel people should have to perform a thorough due diligence of all the products they buy, all the music they listen to, the food they eat, so on and so forth, just to make sure that everyone associated with its production has political beliefs and practices that neatly lines up with theirs.
Everyone is free to like who they like. There are no laws against it.
But if I run into someone who’s favorite composer is Wagner, constantly lauds the works of TS Eliot and Roald Dahl I’m going to make some assumptions, which is also legal.
What level of complicity does a programmer, someone in marketing, or a recruiter in HR have? When I visited Universal Studios in 2019, what level of complicity did the clerk on one the Harry Potter gift shops have? Should a trans person look at the janitor of Universal Studios with suspicion because of Potter land?
