JKR prone to old preconceptions about females?

[random_monkey0_0]

No: HPFGUIDX 41180

Geez, you leave for two days and the list comes up with something 
juicy. Never fails. ;-)

Well, pretty much everything I wanted to say has bee said, so I'll 
throw this hunk of meat in and see what the dogs think. This is a 
large paragraph from Gerard Jones' excellent book on why some media 
violence might actually be good for kids, _Killing_Monsters_, page 83:




"...In my storytelling workshops I've encountered many Harry Potter 
fantasies, from kids ranging in age from kindergarten to high school, 
but nearly always from girls. The Potter books have sold astonishingly 
well among boys, too, but it's the girls who engage more passionately 
with the fantasy, and they identify more strongly with Harry himself. 
Most of them express some sort of fond annoyance for Harry's female 
friend, Hermione; With her excessive studying and rule-following, and 
somewhat impaired sense of humor and adventure, she represents 
everything that the girls find restrictive about traditional girlhood, 
a set of traits that Harry consistently has to rebel against in order 
to slip free into the realms of battle and power. The girls also 
enjoy, with amused condescension, the character of Ginny Weasley, the 
younger and sillier girl struck mute by her infatuation with Harry, 
whereas young male readers tell me they find her annoying. Ginny 
speaks to girls' fascination with emotions and relationships. I 
suspect that Ginny... enables girls to feel a little safer in 
identifying with Harry by allowing them also to view him as an object 
of romantic love. The author of the Potter books, J.K. Rowling, is a 
woman, and I wonder if any male fantasist could have intuited the 
emotional needs of young female readers half as well." 

That's food for thought, eh?

And a little OT: I have a friend who is _obsessed_ with stereotypes. 
She writes stories constantly, and almost all of her characters are 
specifically designed to break stereotypes. I asked her once, "What if 
a girl _wanted_ to be a housewife, or a person with red hair really 
_did_ have a short temper?" She had no answer.

Stereotypes are applying a set of traits to _everyone_ with a certain 
unrelated characteristic. Saying that a person with red hair has a 
short temper, saying that an Irish person is an alcoholic, and saying 
that a girl in a story is obsessed with her appearance are far cries 
form saying all people like them are the same. Irish alcoholics _do_ 
exist, some red-haired people _do_ get mad easily, and some girls _do_ 
obsess over their looks; not portraying these people in writing would 
make the situation unrealistic. The problem only comes in when this is 
the only way these people are shown.

The Random Monkey who is _this close_ to throwing her blasted 
malfunctioning keyboard out the window!