Rant on Stephen King’s Palpable Misogyny Toward Sex Crime Survivors

I have ranted here before about the misogyny and overall filth in Stephen King’s books. I was just beginning to come around – beginning to feel a little better about King, again, because frankly it’s hard to ignore his work and his success. The fact is he is really good at establishing characters and credibility in his books. I was more than half way through his big hit, “The Shining,” which is surprisingly not especially misogynistic, especially compared to Kubric’s movie version, although I found some racism toward the end, which I consider gratuitous use of racist epithets to be.

Gratuitous racism (or sexism/misogyny) is unnecessary and unpleasant. It takes away from the enjoyment of the story and horror should be filled with fun horror (vampires, zombies, etc.) and not real life horrors like racism and misogyny. That’s my position on this kind of thing. If the racism or misogyny doesn’t further the plot, doesn’t develop an important character, etc., then it doesn’t belong there.

But, I didn’t see much in the way of misogyny in the book, “The Shining,” in fact, King is very much into the mind of Wendy, who is intelligent, although trapped in a bad situation with her son.

So, here I am, beginning to forgive King, beginning to think I had literally read him a little wrong when, I ran across an article somewhere online talking about Stephen King’s misogynistic tweeting.

See the Tweet here: https://twitter.com/StephenKing/statuses/430468906243735552

In case the tweet ends up getting deleted, here’s some more information:

Related headlines

Stephen King’s Negative Tweets About Dylan Farrow Spark Outrage

TIME.com @TIME

Stephen King Apologizes For Offensive Dylan Farrow Tweet

HuffPost Celebrity @HuffPostCeleb

Stephen King Apologizes to Dylan and Mia Farrow for ‘Bitchery’ Comment

Mashable @mashable

‘Palpable bitchery’: What exactly is Stephen King saying about Dylan Farrow?

The Daily Dot @dailydot

You Can Believe Dylan Farrow And Still Like Annie Hall

Cosmopolitan @Cosmopolitan

Stephen King Apologizes for Palpable Bitchery Tweet About Dylan and Mia Farrow: I Used the Wrong Word

E! Online @eonline

Stephen King desata la furia en Twitter por defender a Woody Allen

lainformacion.com @la_informacion

King later apologized saying he probably used the “wrong word.”

What is the right word, I wonder, for accusing a young woman who has come forward with allegations of sex abuse by her wealthy, influential step-father, who has a less than stellar reputation when it comes to keeping it in his pants around minors, of being malicious, spiteful and perhaps outright lying?

I don’t know and Stephen King has never clarified what he meant, exactly, but we can use a dictionary and find out that “bitchery” is a reference to the bitchy, spiteful malicious behavior of women.

So, I’ll say it, again – I think this man is a terrible misogynist. I think a lot of his work, not all, but certainly some of it is misogynistic and racist. I am not surprised, of course…  This is the world we live in and if King’s work didn’t exemplify it so well, he wouldn’t be so popular.

As a side note:  He,  also, at one point, blamed Twitter for his “bitchery” comment. This reminded me that he’s a big gun control guy … I ranted about him and his gun control book in a previous rant here… Gun control advocates like to blame inanimate objects whenever something goes wrong. Yeah, his Twitter account just jumped off his laptop and “went off” all by itself. Typical!