[HPforGrownups] Sexuality in HP/Wizard longevity and Harry's pubescence

[Pen Robinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 40186

>jenny_ravenclaw wrote:

>> 1)From the "easily ignored" category, we have the thing that Harry
>> would "sorely miss" [p.463] which, of course, turned out to be Ron
>> [p.498] Granted, this is innocent enough; Harry IS ron's closest
>> friend.  But especially when given the fact that two of the other
>> three competitors had to rescue their girlfriends/dance dates (Krum
>> had to save Hermione; Cedric had to save Cho), the homoerotic subtext
>> here isn't that hard to find.

We-e-e-ll, you can find it, if you want to.  That being the crucial point.
It does definitely belong in that 'easily ignored' category.

After all, the two who had to rescue their girls were both quite a bit
older than Harry, and might reasonably be expected to be making good
progress along the path to sexual maturity.  Harry, at fourteen,  was just
getting to the point of Noticing A Girl, but hadn't managed to do anything
about it.   Just how important could Cho have been to him, when the only
conversation he seems to have had with her was the abortive attempt to ask
her to go to the ball with him?   Ron, by contrast, is the first friend he
ever made, and Harry has already learned how important Ron is,  through the
experience of missing him while they were estranged.

Different flavour of love.

I think this connects with Ginny's point about Harry and the gang seeming
to reach adolescence at a slower pace than we might expect.

Is it really possible to define the age at which teenagers become
interested in sex?  Or, hmm, at which they resolve their general prurience
and liking for Rude Jokes into a specific interest in an individual of the
appreciated gender?    I have seen in my 15-year-old daughter some general
giggling over boys, plus distinct appreciation of the "Phwoar!" kind
applied to such notables as, say, 'Connor', from 'Angel'.   No one-to-one
dates, though.  But one of the girls in her class in engaged, and some of
her year have undoubtedly had sex by now.  My son, just thirteen, is aware
of girls only as a tiresome nuisance.   He and his best friend are
infinitely more interested in computer games.  In a year and a half... who
can say?  But I doubt that a crush-object would be more important than the
best friend.

On the above basis, Harry and Ron and Hermione seem pretty normal to me.

Pen