Boy ain’t that the truth.
Two of the core three have turned on her. That one took me by surprise a bit. I’m not surprised by Emma, she went hardcore woke a while back, but I was genuinely surprised that Daniel Radcliffe essentially told her off.
Whether it’s deliberate, just sloppy speech and thinking habits, or a bit of both (and I suspect the latter), modern speakers of English are losing the ability to distinguish between genders. We discussed this just the other day in another thread:
It is ironic, though, that Joanne Rowling herself sought to obscure the fact that she is a woman (the “K” was adopted from a relative) when she wrote under a gender-neutral pen name. I once worked for a woman who signed her name “J.B. Smith” (only it was not “Smith”) for what I suspect were similar reasons — a woman in a male-dominated field who did not want to be seen as a woman when she submitted her documents.
Rowling didn’t try to obscure it - it’s widely avaliable that Rowling’s publishers told her to add the “Kathleen”, because they thought the book wouldn’t sell as well if people knew she was female.
I’m not following you here. How does "adding ‘Kathleen’ " make her name any less feminine? I was of the understanding that her publishers (and possibly she herself) thought the books wouldn’t sell as well if it were obvious that she were a female — that’s really selling readers short, if you ask me, Agatha Christie (and many other female authors) didn’t have that problem — so she used initials. My wife was a big Harry Potter fan — the British fantasy genre just leaves me cold, that’s why I can’t read CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien, de gustibus — and my first thought, when I heard the author’s name, was “what’s the matter, is she trying to keep people from knowing she’s a woman or something?”.HomeschoolDad:
Rowling didn’t try to obscure it - it’s widely avaliable that Rowling’s publishers told her to add the “Kathleen”, because they thought the book wouldn’t sell as well if people knew she was female.
That’s what I meant - she added Kathleen to make her name “J.K” so readers didn’t know she was female. Because her publishers thought it wouldn’t sell otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it had it not been suggested to her.
I completely agree! And within a couple of months everyone knew anyway and it made no difference.
Oh, OK, I see now. “J.K. Rowling” sounds less awkward than simply “J. Rowling”.HomeschoolDad:
That’s what I meant - she added Kathleen to make her name “J.K” so readers didn’t know she was female. Because her publishers thought it wouldn’t sell otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it had it not been suggested to her.
Leaving aside the question of whether people who menstruate are by definition women, I think the story just illustrates why people find the militant SJW types so irritating. JK Rowling was mildly snarky on Twitter, and the response is this crazy histrionic meltdown about how she’s a moral monster and her tweet is essentially violence. It’s like these people take a position (usually one held by only a small and vocal minority), create an almost religious taboo around it, and then lead an internet mob if someone violates it. The reaction to this stuff is just so overly dramatic.
I keep seeing this over and over—that first JKR was moral and now she is not.
For several things, basically anything Curse Child related, I don’t believe are canon, to me, she is only credited as a writer because it’s based from her series. It’s essentially just a disclaimer.
Cursed Child is the only bit of Rowling I’ve never read. I own it and my wife read it. She didn’t care for it and that, mixed with all the negative stuff I’d heard about it, made me not care to ever read it.
I honestly didn’t even realize she’d released a new book. It is pretty bad though, how much hate she’s getting. I also feel bad for anyone wanting to just engage with her on friendly terms.