Emma Watson is everything wrong with woke, luxury feminism
Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating
JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I were the Harry Potter actress, 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.
Once upon a time, Watson was known merely for playing Hermione in the film adaptation of Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn for the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles. She fell in with the Black Lives Matter contagion, ostentatiously confessing 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 black people? 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 in the Israel-bashing of the chattering classes. 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 in biological fact. Over the years, Watson and her fellow Potter alumni made sly swipes at the author. Rowling, being classier, 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 a podcast 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’, Rowling retorted. Oof.
The author 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’, Rowling says. Watson had ‘publicly poured more petrol on the flames’ of this hatred – not least in a speech she had recently given in which she expressed support for ‘all of the witches’ – 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 paltry sympathy, Rowling exposes the failures of feminism more broadly. Many high-status women have sacrificed solidarity with their own sex at the altar of transgender rights. 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 say ‘trans women are women’ because they will never have to face the social consequences.
A virtue-hoarder like Ms Watson can afford to be blasé because ‘she’ll never need a homeless shelter’, Rowling points out. ‘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’. It is only – whisper it – women poorer than Ms Watson who will find themselves in a cramped ward next a huge bloke or in a dingy WC alongside a strange man doing his make-up.
Rowling has nailed it. The purveyors of luxury beliefs rarely have to live with the fallout of their ideologies. Rich celebs bow to Black Lives Matter with nary a thought for the impact that BLM’s cry of ‘Defund the police’ has had on poor black communities in the United States. Britain’s bourgeois leftists rail against ‘islamophobia’ and seem not to care that it was officialdom’s very fear of being called ‘islamophobic’ that left so many white working-class girls at the mercy of grooming gangs. And celebs can cavalierly declare ‘Trans women are women’ because they will never be that poor victim in a rape crisis centre, scared of the biological male under the same roof.
Luxury beliefs benefit the rich but they are lethal for everyone else. Preach, Joanne.