In disclosing her abuse within a debate which asks women to centre the needs and emotions of others, Rowling committed the sin of demanding that which she was supposed to be giving: compassion, empathy, space.
On some level, we all know the statistics: when it comes to assault, rape and murder, women have far more to fear from men than vice versa. The fact of this is so familiar, so mundane, that it ceases to be an outrage. The outrage only comes when you draw attention to it.
There is much more that could be said on the way in which men have been taking a particular delight in telling a victim of male violence that she needs to remain silent. Above all, though, it is just tremendously, unspeakably cruel to respond to a woman’s disclosure of trauma in the way so many have in the case of Rowling. For all the protestations of “yes, it is terrible, but…”, it demonstrates a complete absence of compassion, while sending a message to any other woman who might want to tell her story: do not expect kindness. Do not assume the right to place your suffering in any wider context. Know that for every standard bigot who tells you you’re a liar, there’ll be a progressive nice guy who’ll start telling you just how spoilt and privileged you are. Abuse never ends; there’s always someone to replicate it in the telling.
She's spot on. Absolutely spot on.
One of the most depressing things about the whole mess around women's rights and single-sex provision has been an awareness of how deeply rooted misogyny really is. Another poster pointed out that fears of racism accusations didn't deter any counter-terrorism legislation, surveillance, or police and security services intervention. Nobody worried about offence to the Muslim community, or stoking existing Islamophobia, either in state action or in media discussion, there. Yet when it came to thousands of vulnerable young girls being systematically and repeatedly raped and harmed, over decades, nobody - even those paid to protect the interests of those girls - wanted to acknowledge or breathe a word about it. Too afraid of being called racist. I'd never, ever drawn that comparison before, but as soon as someone else did, it was obvious. Risk, to the public generally, mattered. Proven sexual harm to girls didn't. And that takes us back to the reality that rape has effectively been decriminalised.
Two of the three main political parties openly commit to the erasure of women as a legally definable entity, and those of us protesting the suggested legal (and present stealthy) removal of all our rights as a sex class are demonised for it. When women survivors try to voice how, and why, they know that single-sex provision is essential, they're attacked for sharing their own lived experience. Statistics are denied, stories are seen as culpable, any demur at all is recast as hate. No other group speaking for their own liberation from proven, provable abuse and disadvantage are hated for refusing to centre members of the oppressing group in their activism, but us? Rape and death threats are justified. Even when they are made because a woman has shared her experience of male violence, and what the implications of that are for eroding women's spaces.
As Rowling said, woman-hate is eternal.