I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

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'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison?

I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.

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, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.

I bought a very cool old book of Anderson's Fairy Tales, and the very first one "The Garden of Paradise" is pretty much about how sexual immorality causes a man to fall.

Gee I wonder why that's one of the fairy tales which didn't get adapted for pop culture?

Your post helped me understand why anime took the world by storm. Other creators weren't even really trying to appeal to men.

Honestly, simply their own failures have done a lot of heavy lifting in turning this trend back.

Most people are, I suppose.

But why?

If the creators care little enough to vandalize their own works with woke slop, why on Earth would you expect it to be enjoyable otherwise?

Wonder how long until AI is good enough to warn MBAs about doing business with China.

Dada

it's the only way to make sure you make sense

You're either brilliant, or retarded.

Okay. Now define sarcasm in legally enforceable terms.

You, truly, are a Dadaist master.

Pretty sure I heard one of them yell "This is MAGA country!" before pounding back a 24 pack of Bud Light and firing machine guns straight up.

Don't even have to watch to know they were obviously rednecks.

Origins was created by a family business, which was then sold off to a corporation which gutted and replaced all the parts. How badly do corporations have to fuck the world up before people start turning away from them?

I've been noticing that the whole debate on pedophiles never seems to actually touch the reason it's generally not accepted, even when there's a significant age gap between consenting adults. The whole thing is about power imbalances, and how easy it is for older individuals to manipulate younger and more naive people. Of course, public concern over THAT issue might threaten our willingness to expose our children to strangers through the Internet.

For a long time I didn't know what NTR actually stood for, but just from context I assumed it was "emotional abuse" or something like that.

Close enough.

As a tall, dark and handsome man, the number of times I got asked to fulfill a woman's rape fantasies was a big part of why I gave up on casual sex.

So Israel just gets a free pass on genocide?

They replaced thinking with math.

There is something stereotypical around these three things that Governments want to deal with.

Men aren't growing up. It's not rocket science, it's just not something that's easy to solve for other people. Especially while they refuse to accept that they've actively made society hostile to men.

I'm less concerned with radicalization specifically, and more concerned that every online "space" seems to invariably devolve to a single personality which everyone involved shares, which rarely makes any coherent sense. Bad actors are the least of our problems when the basic technology has such huge flaws.

I still don't actually understand what division of the political right the 'woke right' is supposed to be, and I frankly just don't care. That's very emblematic of artificial memes, that they make so little sense you can't understand them without reading an essay first.

Left/right bitchfest was masking all the other discontent.

The only mystery is why some people can't understand this?

Their own personal situation is so shit that "culture" looks the same, from their perspective, as any random fiction. Nothing but a story people tell to pacify the discontent.

I liked how Copernicus described them:

...those who are reluctant to exert themselves vigorously in any literary pursuit unless it is lucrative; or if they are stimulated to the nonacquisitive study of philosophy by the exhortation and example of others, yet because of their dullness of mind they play the same part among philosophers as drones among bees.

Well, those of us who do understand want the rest of them to actually see for themselves what the end result is, when you invite all of the absolute dumbest mother fuckers on the entire planet in to your spaces.

I'll always remember returning to college as an adult, and riding the bus home one day while I overheard two younger women talking. One says:

The first question is easy, you just put it into google and the answer is the first thing there. I couldn't understand the second question though."