Working mothers, was Did the Slytherins come back

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 182085


> Magpie:
> Of course I got that the staircase is supposed to be funny because 
> it's the type of thing a school would do. But it's not just modern 
> kids faced with something built for a time when there were different 
> expectations for nice girls. It's sitting there conflicting with an 
> often equally exaggerated portrayal female sexuality--which also 
> contains plenty of ideas that are pretty old. In another book it 
> would *just* be a funny joke on the idea that when the stairs were 
> built girls were assumed to not have those kinds of thoughts so boys 
> would only chase them. But it comes across a little differently when 
> the book itself portrays the sexes as being very unequal on these 
> terms, only it's the poor boys who are sought after by the girls. It 
> doesn't seem like social change either. I would more guess that the 
> boy-crazy has always been a female problem. Though Slytherins mix it 
> up a bit--I'd forgotten the Bloody Baron. There's an example of a 
> girl-chaser.

Pippin:
It's the old expectations for nice girls, which modern kids still
encounter in favorites like the Narnia books, which JKR is countering.
 Grownup Queen Susan of Narnia was allowed her suitors as long as she
wore long skirts and was safely subject to male authority, but back in
the real world when Susan Pevensey was more  interested in nylons,
lipstick and invitations than in her lost life as a Queen (which she
had been told was over forever),  she was not only dubbed no longer a
friend of Narnia, she was punished with the loss of her entire family. 

So Ginny and Hermione get to giggle over the idea of love potions (but
not use them) and it's okay for Ginny to wear a low cut gown, for
Hermione to use hair products and for Fleur to be "extremely busy"
with nice boy Roger Davies. They aren't punished as Susan was for
showing an interest in sex, nor is it implied that sexual innocence is
a higher state than sexual knowledge. Fleur's beauty as she goes to be
wed gains the power to make her surroundings as beautiful as she is.

But JKR is not making the wizarding world a utopia, so along with 
acceptance of female sexual interest as natural, there's a satiric
inversion -- "boys will be boys" has become "girls will be girls."
Love potions are introduced as a giggly sort of joke, but we find out
eventually that if the WW thinks that its girls are too innocent or
too harmless to abuse anyone, it's mistaken. 

> Magpie:
> The books just tend to mirror the Muggle world on that, even when 
> the WW should probably have its own history. They have social change 
> because they're a riff on us and our history. 

Pippin:
Yes, but not everyone sees the real world as making social progress.
There is a conservative point of view, you know, which assumes that
people were more moral and more civilized in the past. 


Pippin