[HPforGrownups] Re: Gender in the WW

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 143614

I felt like I had to add my thoughts on this matter.:-)  I don't think it's 
necessary to look at each female individually.  To me the books look a lot 
like our world, no more, no less.  It's great that the founders were split 
down the middle when it came to gender.  It's great Madam Maxime is a 
headmistress at a co-ed school.  Yes, Hermione and Ginny can use men they 
don't have crushes on.

I'm just not seeing the WW as coming across as all that different than our 
own world, which also has independent women, women who work in the 
government or other powerful positions, and also women who are abused.  The 
Weasleys I would definitely say have very old-fashioned ideas about gender 
roles--it's not just Ron, but the twins too, who feel protective about Ginny 
dating, and plenty of girls in our world in that situation would also enjoy 
making big feminist speeches or turning around and humiliating them for 
feeling that way.  Nobody seems to find their ideas bizarre the way they 
probably would if Ginny was worried about one of her brothers dating. 
Slughorn has girls in the Slug Club now, but wasn't the Club in the Pensieve 
all boys?  To me that seemed like it was a reflection of our world again: 
when Tom Riddle was at school, this sort of thing was a guy thing.  Now it's 
co-ed.

Anyway, the main point here was that women witches could not let themselves 
be abused by men and I'm just not seeing why they couldn't, considering 
plenty of independent women are abused in our own world.  In fact, if it's 
Tobias in that scene, where is he abusing her, if by abuse we mean physical 
abuse?  He's yelling at her.  Perhaps Eileen does not automatically respond 
to an argument by whipping out her wand on her Muggle husband--if I were 
married to a wizard I wouldn't stand for that, I would hope--bit scary to 
think of a wizard shutting his Muggle wife up with Magic.

It didn't seem odd to me at all to learn that the man who was yelling at 
Eileen might have been a Muggle, since Muggles can yell and hurt that way as 
much as wizards can.  Perhaps one day Eileen snapped and murdered Tobias. 
In fact, perhaps Snape sat there the whole time *wishing* she would zap the 
guy, imagining how he would never let a Muggle talk like that to him and 
that was a popular sentiment with the DEs.  Although we've heard about 
Magic/Muggle unions, we've really only seen one Witch/Muggle relationship in 
all of canon, and that's the one where the witch wound up dying of a broken 
heart.  We've also only seen close-up one Muggle/Wizard family situation and 
that's the one where the Muggles continue to yell at the Wizard despite 
being hexed in the past.  Making it a generalization that if you've got one 
person cowering and one yelling that the one yelling has to be the Witch 
seems to simplify human nature too much.

-m