Yeah, I agree, the realization of their tolerance being exactly the same is pretty much fridge horror when you take into account all the nasty things magic is capable of. (The lack of queer characters especially takes on a darker tone—maybe there aren’t many because most of them are “cured” one way or another.)
I was thinking about my question—whether they could have effectively altered sexual orientation (or at least, sexual attraction, I imagine romantic attraction/orientation as a whole would be nigh impossible to mess with)—going by Word of God I don’t think they could have, logically. During the early days of the gay rights movement, the main argument in favor of gay rights was along the lines of “This is an immutable characteristic about us, it’s impossible to change, and we couldn’t possibly ever go for the opposite gender even a little bit. It’s just by who we are. Please stop jailing us.” Which also contributed to the evolution of the queer identity—there being “gay people” as opposed to say, Ancient Greece where everyone was normal and some people just had preferences of varying strength (I’m oversimplifying, but).
If the WW ever had that element of choice, some type of spell that could alter sexual orientation (or at least allow queer people to be sexually attracted to the opposite gender), they probably wouldn’t ever have developed a sense of queer identity because that element of “this is us and we can’t be changed” would never have been there. And that’s what won gays the beginnings of widespread acceptance in the first place, so odds are the Wizarding world wouldn’t have become tolerant at nearly the same pace, if at all.
(Though, to be honest, most of the Muggle anti-gay worldview stems from a strict adherence to a religion, and Wizards by default already take the Judeo-Christian tradition liberally enough to ignore all the bits in the Bible/Torah condemning witchcraft without any kind of cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t make sense for them to have ever been as intolerant as Muggles because they would have no reason to be.)
Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t think of a situation where JKR’s word is logically probable all the time, through all of history. Maybe the WW is just as tolerant as the Muggle one now, but it probably took a different path to get there.
Yeah, I was trying to reconcile the JKR interview with history and I don’t think it scans. (Of course, I think this was really an off-the-cuff, reflexive response as opposed to something she’d considered extensively pre-that-interview, and I don’t know what her background level of knowledge with the history of sexuality in general is.)
I think it’s like love in general: you could probably do some really nasty Dark Magic to forcibly alter a person, but it wouldn’t be a genuine shift in that person’s orientation, it would be actually forcing the person into another pattern of behavior - basically violating free will or doing the equivalent of magical drugging/lobotomy/other horrific stuff. You might be able to forcibly compel someone into an imitation of desired behavior (as with love potions or the Imperius Curse) but not actually produce the desired change in that person’s character because it’s such a fundamental part of who they are.
Most families probably wouldn’t resort to it in any case - most would likely go on familial and social pressure instead of magic to keep their family members closeted. (Wizarding society would probably still be influenced by Muggle - but in that case, pure-blooded families would be most insulated from the intolerance and most likely to hold pro-LGBTQ* attitudes. Interesting thought and one that I doubt JKR has thought about exploring.)
As for the Bible and its influence on anti-magic (Ex 18:22, IIRC), I’ve always thought that wizards probably retained a better copy of the Bible - if you look at the original language, the sort of “magic” or witchcraft that the Bible prohibits is better translated as something like “magic that is meant to cause harm.” That would indicate no incompatibility with being a HP wizard and being Christian as long as they didn’t pursue the Dark Arts. (I’m not at all conversant with the Hebrew, but in Greek terms, pharmakon was originally used to denote magic - but that “magic” encompassed everything from spells to prayers to herbs, hence modern-day pharmacy. And Roman practice definitely drew a line between maleficium, harmful magic, and other types of invocations - as did some lines of early Christian thought.)
This might be one Word of God that only applies to the modern-day - that Wizarding society right here and now is about as tolerant as modern-day society, with emphasis on the about so that we could assume they might be a little bit more tolerant. But this is one case where I think the two societies would’ve taken wildly divergent paths (and, hopefully, the Wizarding society would probably have come to tolerance a lot earlier - maybe after a period of really bad stuff, as previously described, but I would imagine that increasing persecution from the outside would also inspire them to say “Hey, all witches/wizards withdraw from the world and stick together, let’s be more inclusive when it comes to our in-group as opposed to Muggle society.”)
Yeah, I agree with all that, makes a lot of sense. If they retained better translations of the Bible, they’d probably lean more tolerant too—the word Paul condemns that English versions tend to translate as “homosexuals” (arsenokoitēs) is actually not necessarily talking about gays as a whole in the first place. It could just as easily refer to male prostitutes and/or abusive pedasters and/or rapists as opposed to gays. Later Christians used the word to refer to heterosexual rapists.
Fandom: Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
“All the cocks of various sizes pointed at her like she was staring down a really large SWAT team. With penises.”
Yes, we live in a sexist culture, in which women have no good choices when it comes to our bodies. We live in a sexist culture in which women are valued primarily as sexual objects, and at the same time are shamed for our sexuality. It seems to me that we have two choices as to how to respond to this. We can try to navigate the narrow, essentially impossible shoals of these contradictory expectations, and try to find that perfect, socially acceptable line between slut and prude.
Or we can say, “Fuck it. There is no way I can win — so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. I’m going to wear overalls, or I’m going to wear high heels. I’m going to have sex with twenty strangers in a night, or I’m not going to have sex with anyone. I’m going to dress conservatively and professionally in public at all times, or I’m going to sell naked pictures of myself on the Internet if I bloody well feel like it.”
And in saying, “I can’t win, so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do,” we can create the beginnings of a victory. We can create the beginnings of a world where we really can win. We can create the beginnings of a world where we’re a little more free than the women who came before us… and where the women who come after us are a little more free than we are. We probably can’t create a perfect world, where women’s bodies aren’t commodified in the slightest (not in this generation, anyway). But we can create a better world: a world where women’s bodies and minds belong less to the patriarchy, and more to ourselves.
Or we can say, “Fuck it. There is no way I can win — so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. I’m going to wear overalls, or I’m going to wear high heels. I’m going to have sex with twenty strangers in a night, or I’m not going to have sex with anyone. I’m going to dress conservatively and professionally in public at all times, or I’m going to sell naked pictures of myself on the Internet if I bloody well feel like it.”
And in saying, “I can’t win, so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do,” we can create the beginnings of a victory. We can create the beginnings of a world where we really can win. We can create the beginnings of a world where we’re a little more free than the women who came before us… and where the women who come after us are a little more free than we are. We probably can’t create a perfect world, where women’s bodies aren’t commodified in the slightest (not in this generation, anyway). But we can create a better world: a world where women’s bodies and minds belong less to the patriarchy, and more to ourselves.
“
| — | Greta Christina (What I May Do With My Naked Body: A Reply to Azar Majedi About the #NudePhotoRevolutionaries Calendar) |
