Women In Media - Blog Posts

Presenting you the New and my favourite member of Team 55, Dominique Heyer-Wright 😻

OMG YES. IF YOU HATE LAVENDER BROWN, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE SHE DATED RON, PLEASEEEEEEEEE GTFO.

Cho and Lavender were villainized by the narative in favor of Ginny and Hermione

Rowling despises teenage girls with traditionally feminine interests. She only treats those who don’t want to be like “other girls” or the pick-me girls well in the narrative. It’s clear she projects a deeply personal issue onto certain female archetypes, which makes me think she must have a lot of unresolved resentment, probably dating back to her childhood. She portrays Lavender as foolish for being desperate over Ron, when in reality, that’s not foolish at all—it’s completely normal for a teenage girl experiencing her first relationship and not knowing how to handle her emotions. She also mocks Lavender and the Patil twins’ interests, like Divination, girls’ magazines, or gossip, as if those things were inherently frivolous and shallow. It’s as if being a girl and enjoying “girly” things automatically makes you stupid or as if femininity itself is incompatible with having depth and other, more “serious” interests.

Likewise, through Harry’s praise of Ginny for not crying—contrasted with Cho, who does—she implies that sentimentality, emotional expression, or a lack of self-control are negative traits, while repressing emotions (which is traditionally associated with masculinity) is a positive thing that makes you “tougher” or “stronger.” Narratively, Rowling always favors Hermione for “not being like other girls” and turns Ginny into the ultimate pick-me girl. She’s a character who barely matters or has any relevance throughout the series until she suddenly transforms into the perfect cishet teenage boy fantasy: the girl who is super hot and sexually desirable but at the same time doesn’t waste time with “girly stuff” because she’s too busy acting just as aggressive as any macho guy, being hyper-focused on sports, and being “one of the boys,” cracking jokes, being rough, and acting cool. She’s a girl bro, the embodiment of the perfect woman according to male fantasy, not female. It’s as if she were designed by a hormone-driven teenage boy rather than a woman in her thirties.

Ginny is a disaster of a character from a gender analysis perspective—truly atrocious. And then there’s Luna, who doesn’t bother anyone because she’s too weird, yet she’s accepted by the “not-like-other-girls” girls precisely because of that weirdness. She’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, completing the trifecta of contemporary misogynistic female stereotypes embodied by Hermione, Ginny, and Luna—the only teenage female characters who are curiously treated positively and praised by the narrative. The rest are torn down at some point, specifically for reasons directly related to their gender.