The dating game (long)

[Kirstini]

No: HPFGUIDX 68643


Steven wrote, in response to my post questioning him: 
> I am suggesting that Hermione is a rather normal teenage girl. 
Girl 
and Boys at this age are new to liking each other. In your preteen 
 years, you spend alot of energy hating the opposite sex. Suddenly, 
the opposite sex is very attractive to you. Now, what do you do?>

I am suggesting exactly the same thing. I recognise aspects of the 
H/R relationship from my own teenage years. From your previous posts 
I thought you were upset because Hermione's actions no longer 
reflected those of a "normal teenage girl".

> It seems to me that you aren't around teenagers much. I have 5 of 
my 
 own, plus I teach. I can tell you from experience that teenage 
girls 
are ruthless>.

I am twenty-three years old. I remember vividly what it was like to 
be a teenage girl. I wasn't ruthless, I never plotted to get myself 
a boyfriend, and nor did any of my friends. Yet we still managed to 
do rather well in the boyfriend stakes. I think what you forget in 
this post, as you accuse teenage girls of materialistic scheming, is 
that many of them are still inured in the conventions of the romance 
novel. They still do rather want to be swept off their feet, and 
they think that this is how relationships happen. That boys tend to 
be unaware of this fact and rather clueless about it often leads to 
a great deal of frustration from the girls, something which I found 
accurately represented in OoP:

`Harry, you're worse than Ron
well, no, you're not' she sighed.
(OoP, Bloomsbury, p505)

That little sigh. Don't worry. He might grow up sometime soon. 

> I can tell you, I spend alot of time in my Math classes sorting 
out 
> boy/girl troubles. I have had more than one intellectually 
superior 
> girl coming to me crying because a boy has been mean to her by not 
> noticing her. Actually, it is my experience that the smarter the 
girl 
> the more creative she can be in her pursuit.
 
Alright. However, when we are talking about the character Hermione 
as an intellectually superior girl, you have been disappointed 
because she doesn't do this, right? That she isn't "creatively 
pursuing"? Hermione *knows* Ron is interested – to wit Yule Ball 
conversation. However, I would contest that neither of them have 
grown up enough to progress beyond the  "friends who fight all the 
time" phase. She *is* becoming more physical with him, and 
increasingly taking the lead in their physical connections. Not very 
many of the teenage girls at Hogwarts do indulge in "creative 
pursuit". Look at Lavender and Parvati in GoF. I imagine these two 
characters would be a lot closer to your idea of traditional teenage 
behaviour. What do they do – they wait and giggle until someone asks 
them to the Ball. When they are asked, they blush furiously. A 
problem for many teenage girls is confidence. They need their self 
image backed up, confirmed by the attentions of a boy. They may well 
go out of their way to bump into this boy, and they may try and 
attract attention towards themselves by using clothes and makeup; 
but many of them won't. Many of them will sit there and wait for 
some sort of validation, which they don't often get.

> What is the most important event to a senior in High School? It is 
 not graduation; it is the PROM. Getting the optimum date for the 
PROM 
 takes up at least a month before the event.>

Well, yes, and you can see something of this reflected in the 
behaviour of the girls who ask Harry to the Yule Ball after he has 
become the school champion. Part of what you are trying to express 
is reflected at Hogwarts. It seems you are just a little upset 
because the central female character doesn't conform to your 
expectations.
Please remember that in Britain we do not have proms. *If *the 
school holds an end of year/leaving dance, it tends to be far less 
bound by convention. Certainly, at my leaver's dance, only the 
people who were already in couples went together, although there was 
still loads of snogging in the rosebushes afterwards. I'm not 
entirely sure what this has do with your original argument. As I 
understand it, you are arguing that Hermione is not a normal teenage 
girl because she doesn't scheme and plot and go after Ron. I would 
offer you Rita Skeeter's article in GoF, which was so outrageously 
funny because it made Hermione out to be doing exactly that. The 
humour came from the fact that it was very far from the truth. Cho 
Chang's actions in the coffee shop, on the other hand, could be said 
to fit in with what you appear to expect from all teenage girls. 
However, what is rather fascinating about Hermione is that she 
offers a completely different model of female behaviour from those 
displayed in just about all other books aimed at that age group. 
Yes, she has her Cinderella moment in GoF, but the next day her hair 
is bushy again because the application of cosmetics is "too much 
effort for every day". There was a wonderful article highlighted on 
OT Chat a couple of days ago, "Queer as Harry Potter" which 
suggested that much of the appeal of the series was that it 
encourages children not to conform to any particularly 
pressing "normalcy" – the deviation being firstly represented in the 
split from Muggle-ness that becoming a wizard represents. I would 
suggest to you that the Trio are so wonderful because they are 
misfits, and not necessarily within archetypes which one could 
easily ascribe to "all" teenagers.

> Before you call something rubbish maybe you should think on 
reality. 
> I love Harry Potter. It has been a boon to education. It has 
gotten 
> children of all ages to read again. However, one of its strongest 
> qualities has been that children see themselves in it. I don't 
want 
>that gone.

Absolutely. However, I counter that many teenage girls *will* be 
able to see themselves in it. What I called rubbish was your 
stereotyping of teenage girls, precisely because I *was* thinking on 
a particular teenage reality. Not all people have the same 
experiences.  I'm not trying to say that your earlier post's 
portrayal of teenage behaviour wasn't accurate or based on fact. 
However, I responded to the fact that you were angry with the books 
because they didn't live up to your own particular experience, and 
because you felt that this was the only experience available for any 
teenage girl.

Kirstini