JKR and the boys

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 161435

Miles wrote:
> > <snip>
> > JKR does not understand boys well and has great difficulties
describing them and their full emotional and social capacities. On the
other hand, her description of girls is much more realistic and
comprehensive. <snip>
> 
> > On the other side - Hermione Granger. She is extremely intelligent
and the academic star of Hogwarts. Additionally, she seems to be very
good at understanding people. She is the person who explains
everything to Harry when he is clueless again. She seems to have very
close friendships with several girls including Ginny, she is very
clever at sorting out emotional and romantic relationships between
girls and boys.
> 
> Magpie:
> Yipes! Rowling's description of girls is realistic and
comprehensive?  As a woman I'm a little offneded.  I'm sure Rowling
knows plenty about girls, having been one, but I find her portrayal of
girls in general in her books to be mostly putting across a
stereotype.  Hermione does not, as you said, have very close
friendships with several girls including Ginny.  She has friendships
with no girls besides Ginny--in fact seems to hold most of the 
> ones she meets in contempt.  And of course, she's become friends
with Ginny through Ron--they're practically already the sisters in law
they are fated to be--and their friendship is mostly shown in terms of
bonding over their romantic conquests.  In OotP I found myself
thinking the reason Hermione sat up late knitting was to avoid
spending time with dorm mates who were all closer with each other than
her. Once in a while she'll put on a girl act to make Ron jealous, but
usually she's just with the boys. <snip>

Carol responds:

While I'm not offended by JKR's portraits of girls (and women), I
agree with Magpie that they're stereotyped. Hermione is the smart girl
with few friends (if it weren't for the troll incident, it would be no
friends); Pansy Parkinson is the name-calling bad girl, who
nevertheless is as much a "girly girl" as the only two female friends
we see, Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil. (We're *told* that Cho Chang
and Marietta [last name escapes me] are friends, but we hardly see
them interacting at all, except for Marietta trying to hurry Cho out
of the meeting in the Hog's Head.) The girls seem to run around in
gangs (Harry and Ron can't find one alone to ask her out) and do
little except giggle. Now, I do think that Hermione did a good job of
explaining Cho's complex feelings, but I'm not sure it was in
character for her to do so. She shows very little empathy most of the
time (e.g., her reaction to the death of Lavender's pet rabbit). The
only feelings we see her express are hurt when Ron's words or actions
offend her and anger and the desire for revenge on numerous occasions.
I wish I could like her better, having been an "insufferable
know-it-all" myself in my teenage years, but I only really like her in
a few scenes, for example, the spat with Ron after the Yule Ball when
she understands that they like each other and he still hasn't got a
clue why he's so jealous of Viktor Krum.

I will say, though that there are reasons why Hermione would have a
better grasp on some social situations than Ron and Harry despite
being an only child. For one thing, she's a girl and girls mature
earlier than boys, not to mention that she's almost a full year older
than Harry. For another, she's probably been exposed to a wider social
circle than either boy even though I'd guess that she's never been
popular. Her parents are dentists, presumably well off if not exactly
rich. She's probably gone to good Muggle schools and she certainly
read a great deal (and presumably watched television and movies)
before she attended Hogwarts. Harry, in contrast, never associated
with anyone except the Dursleys, who regarded him as "abnormal," and
never had any friends at school, whereas Ron, though he has a lot of
big brothers who tease and/or dominate him and a slightly younger
sister (whose influence on his emotional and social development is
probably negligible), really doesn't seem to have any friends of his
own, either, never having gone to school. (JKR says on her website
that the Weasley children were homeschooled.)

I don't think it's odd that these two lonely boys bond with each other
more than with their dormmates (Dean and Seamus also pair off, leaving
Neville as the odd man out). Maybe there are fewer fistfights and less
swearing and sex talk than we'd expect among teenage boys, but after
all, these are kids' books and JKR is trying to limit the sexual
relationships to "snogging" and to leave any curse words worse than
"damn" unspecified. (Well, we do have Vernon's "no more effing owls!"
but that's a rare outburst and a Muggle one at that.) The WW may be
rough in its way, with dangerous classes and a single dangerous sport,
but it doesn't expose its kids to sex, bad language, and video games
(I mean violence) through the media the way the RW does. No computers,
no X-Boxes or Game Boys, no TV, no movies, no rap or heavy metal music
with vicious, violent lyrics (so far as we know). Granted, the
Muggleborns are exposed to these influences till they're eleven and
again over the holidays, but Wizarding culture, with its own concerns
and everyday dangers, seems to win out.

I think we need to look not only at the particular characters and
their circumstances, but at the WW itself, and at JKR's intended
audience. If she were writing a realistic book about teenagers in a
late-twentieth-century boarding school, I'd say she didn't have a
clear grasp of teenage emotions or values or relationships (the
importance of being "cool"; the social death that results from being
seen reading; the inability to put two sentences together without some
sort of swear word). But, then, I'd have no interest whatever in
reading such a book, nor would I encourage kids who see too much of
that sort of thing in real life to read it.

Granted, most teenage boys don't ascribe their jealousy and sexual
attraction to monsters in their insides, JKR's rather unfortunate and
overused metaphor in HBP. But teenage romance is not her forte. What
she does understand, IMO, is the very human tendency to push
uncomfortable emotions, such as guilt or grief, to one side, and to
project them in the form of anger onto a convenient target, in this
case, Snape. I think she's right, too, that many boys (and men) prefer
to take action to solve problems rather than talking about their
emotions. Harry and Cho are oil and water (or yin and yang?) in that
respect and will never understand each other--or not until they're at
least ten years older, at which time it will be too late.

Carol, who thinks that most of the time JKR gets Harry's psychology
right, even though his inability to grasp subtle distinctions can be
as frustrating for the reader as it is for Snape