The real reason J.K. Rowling's critics hate her

It's weird to think there was a time when I disliked J.K. Rowling; it seems as odd to me now as disliking words, or fun – she's so obviously A Good Thing. (Never to be confused with a ghastly National Treasure – see Dawn French, the anti-Rowling.) Irony of ironies, I disliked this woman who shrugs that she has 'received so many death threats I could paper the house with them' because I thought she was a wimp – a 'softy' even, to use the childish parlance.
If asked for evidence, I would probably have pointed to her rabid Remainerism ('I'm the mongrel product of this European continent and I'm an internationalist' – who isn't, dearie? Doesn't mean you need to suck up to an unelected coterie of waddling Strasbourg geese) and the fact that adults read her books to such a wide extent that editions were specially produced with 'grown-up' looking covers so as not to embarrass the addle-pates if they indulged their woeful habit in public. That's not her fault, of course – any sensible writer is going to grab all the readers they can get – but it did add to my general mulish suspicion that she was helping to infantilise the nation.
In the case of J.K. Rowling, (many) women want to be with her – and (many) men want to be her
Two things changed my mind and made me a super-fan; I read a Robert Galbraith novel and I read that Rowling had given away so much money that she is believed to be the only billionaire to have become a mere multi-millionaire through her own personal generosity. Considering what greedy, grasping rotters the vast majority of people in the arts and entertainment are, that's such a unique and eye-catching fact. So she wasn't soft at all, it transpired, but a tough broad who could write excellent adult novels and was confident enough to chuck her money around like a sailor on shore leave.
Then Rowling entered her hardcore talking-back era, growing wittier by the week as she sharpened her teeth on her detractors, and my admiration went off the scale. Every time she delivers the best comeback ('Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account – and if the book's signed, one of my teeth falls out') I think she can't get any better – and then she does.
You certainly couldn't call her a softy any longer. Though he meant it as a slam, the ghastly Stephen Fry summed it up well when he said of her last week:
She has been radicalised, I fear, and it may be she has been radicalised by Terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her. It is unhelpful and only hardens her and will only continue to harden her…she started to make these peculiar statements and had very strong, difficult views…she has crowed at the success of legislation in Scotland and elsewhere…I am sorry because I always liked her company. I found her charming, funny and interesting – and then this thing happened and it completely altered the way she talks and engages with the world now.
It's interesting that Fry talks as though Rowling has experienced some sort of mind-warping trauma for simply adopting the practice of not caring what others – especially strangers – think of one, which is a by-product of being secure in one's own sense of self. This has, of course, been recognised as a reliable way of achieving serenity, from the ancient Stoics to the recent Let Them Theory – but if a woman can achieve this kind of emotional security, it panics a certain sort of insecure man immensely. Thus, 'a hard man' is a term of admiration, whereas 'a hard woman' is lacking something, that certain softness, that sugar and spice and all things nice, that makes a woman a woman. Or rather, that renders a woman a castrated #BeKind Transmaid.
I think there's more to this than meets the eye; come on, if Stephen Fry can play pop psychology Top Trumps, so can I. You know that old saying, 'Women want to be her, men want to be with her' often used of desirable and successful women? I think I've spotted a variation. In the case of J.K. Rowling, (many) women want to be with her – and (many) men want to be her. Specifically, many men in the arts and entertainment world who have perhaps conducted themselves in what many people might consider a grasping, greedy way might hate the way Rowling's extreme philanthropy makes them look/feel. She's a survivor of domestic violence, too, which might have factored in a bit of envy from 'Boy' George, 64, who famously imprisoned a much younger man, handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain. It's telling that he chose to call her a 'bully' – as well as rich and bored – leading one to recall the ineffably vulgar schooldays line about flatulence, 'He who smelt it dealt it.'
Who else probably envies J.K.R.? We can't pass over that trio of toe-rags Radcliffe, Watson and Grint (sounds like a firm of bent lawyers) who will forever be consumed by the fact that it could have been literally any half-decent child actors in those roles and the films would have done every bit as well – talk about surplus to requirements. Another actor called Pedro Pascal called her 'a heinous loser' – nurse, the screens and the straitjacket!
I'd wager that all of J.K.R.'s famous critics envy her money – no one is as greedy as the rich – but even more than that, as they crouch atop their relatively modest fortunes like resentful dung beetles, they envy her the ease, the generosity and yes, the nobility which has seen her go from billionaire to a mere multi-millionaire, like them. One gets the impression that whereas J.K.R. has the psychological bandwidth – which probably comes from real confidence in her own creativity – to dispense with vast amounts of cash, there is a bottomless pit of neediness inside her critics which leads them to grab at, say, advertising campaigns the way they do.
They certainly don't need the money. But when, like Radcliffe (thought to have around £100 million) and co., you know that you really are nothing special and were just tremendously lucky, it's bound to make you feel insecure, no matter how much you've got in the bank. Look at the vast amount of voiceover work (like his female equivalent, Dawn French) Fry has done – that can only be greed. Surely there's only so many video games his lovely young husband can play with?
Cross-dressing men in general want to be Rowling, as they tend to look like navvies done up as prossies, whereas J.K.R. is wonderfully elegant with her wand-like body and Modigliani face and clever way with a big hat and a lovely bit of scarlet lippy – the brazen hussy! But we inevitably come back to Fry as the bellwether (not to mention the bell-end) of J.K.R.-envy. I once, some time ago, labelled him 'a stupid person's idea of a clever person' – but the degradation of his intellectual ability in the years which have passed since then has been a remarkable, Biden-level catastrophe for this thought processes. So more than anything else, he envies Rowling because she is that rare thing in a po-faced world; she is a wit. And it's been a damn long time since Fry – his once-glittering brain eaten alive by becoming the genital equivalent of a Flat Earther – was one of those. The poor poppet!

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Then Rowling entered her hardcore talking-back era, growing wittier by the week as she sharpened her teeth on her detractors, and my admiration went off the scale. Every time she delivers the best comeback ('Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account – and if the book's signed, one of my teeth falls out') I think she can't get any better – and then she does. You certainly couldn't call her a softy any longer. Though he meant it as a slam, the ghastly Stephen Fry summed it up well when he said of her last week: She has been radicalised, I fear, and it may be she has been radicalised by Terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her. It is unhelpful and only hardens her and will only continue to harden her…she started to make these peculiar statements and had very strong, difficult views…she has crowed at the success of legislation in Scotland and elsewhere…I am sorry because I always liked her company. 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