[HPforGrownups] Witchcraft and Wizardry: What do they teach at Hogwarts????

[Torsten]

No: HPFGUIDX 50037

SophineClaire:
>  Or maybe there are forms of magic that can really only be 
>performed by one sex or the other, if you remove what their society 
>might say. What was so special about Lily's so-called-save-my-baby 
>charm that only she could do?? Why not James or Sirius or Remus or 
>Peter?. Is it because she is his mother? she's a female? 

Why shouldn't have something similar happened if James had been in Lilys place? 
James tried to hold Voldemort off, he was willing to die to give them time, but Lily 
explicitely offered her life in exchange for Harry's, without fighting, it was more 
outright a sacrifice than James', but that doesn't mean only a woman or mother could 
call upon this ancient magic (not that I think she actually was aware of doing it 
anyway).

>this points to something. Maybe you can call it Sex Ed, but maybe 
>Witches have the upper hand to men when it comes to magic. 

You could just as easily say the men are more powerful since most of the top mages are 
male - Voldemort and Dumbledore for example.

>that's going on a tangent. But why call a refer to a school as 
>teaching Witchcraft and Wizardry if there isn't some sort of 
>difference between males and females that require that sort of 
>classifaction.

Maybe the founders were ahead of their time ... In countries whose languages more 
often make a difference between male and female, there has been that (rather silly) 
tendency in recent years to talk about, for example, "female teachers and male 
teachers" instead of the plain term which usually is the male one.
If Hogwarts were a "School for Wizardry", feminist witches might have started 
complaining about the "discriminating" name by now. ^_~

Torsten