By Sharanya Gopinathan

J.K. Rowling’s Twitter is always abuzz. Whether you agree with her (like today) or you don’t (like the time she said Jeremy Corbyn was not Dumbledore), you’ve got to admit that her Twitter’s a fun place to be. So much fun, in fact, that just last month, novelist Joanna Trollope felt the need to crib about it, like someone always must, saying that Rowling incessant tweeting is the sign of a massive ego. I mean, whatever. We’re all for women speaking out as much and as often and as publicly as they want to.

Anyway, this morning, we all woke up to a spectacular Twitter thread on sexism from J.K. Rowling, and she was speaking some hard truths that really needed to be said about sexism and hypocrisy from “liberal” men.

Just unfollowed a man whom I thought was smart and funny, because he called Theresa May a whore. 1/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

The fourteen tweet long thread had lots of much-needed gems.

I’m sick of ‘liberal’ men whose mask slips every time a woman displeases them, who reach immediately for crude and humiliating words 3/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

associated with femaleness, act like old-school misogynists and then preen themselves as though they’ve been brave. 4/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

When you do this, Mr Liberal Cool Guy, you ally yourself, wittingly or not, with the men who send women violent pornographic images 5/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

and rape threats, who try by every means possible to intimidate women out of politics and public spaces, both real and digital. 6/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

Every woman I know who has dared express an opinion publically has endured this kind of abuse at least once, 8/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

rooted in an apparent determination to humiliate or intimidate her on the basis that she is female. 9/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

femaleness is not a design flaw. If your immediate response to a woman who displeases you 12/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

is to call her a synonym for her vulva, or compare her to a prostitute, then drop the pretence and own it: you’re not a liberal. 13/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

You’re a few short steps away from some guy hiding behind a cartoon frog. 14/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

It’s so good. A lot of people tend to fall into the trap of believing that men who call themselves “liberal” in public can do no harm, and get unreasonably shocked and horrified when it’s proven, again and again, that so-called liberal men can be just as sexist, violent and misogynistic as the next person. I remember reading a piece late this May in OpIndia on the abuse right wing women face from “liberal” men, and it includes rape threats, death threats and references to their sex lives. Clearly, sexist abuse is not the particular domain of one kind of politics, or one kind of man, and we’re glad J.K. Rowling said it better than anyone could.