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From chapter 3 of The Will to Change (join the book club!) while she's discussing how mass media reinforces partriarchal norms onto boys and young men
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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menby
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A space for masculine folks to talk about living under patriarchy.
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Agreed except with the last paragraph part. Every child/person I know who likes Harry Potter has identified as a girl or woman. I've never met a guy who likes it at all. I think the patriarchal vision is therefore targeted primaraly at a girl audience. I don't have a coherent thought about this, so would like to hear other opinions on this.
The guys I know who like Harry Potter are all the types who are willing to embrace being a nerd as part of their personality. The more bro-ish guys always hated it, even if they eventually came around to other nerdy media like Star Wars or various other fantasy franchises.
yes for sure. i guess it is connected to gendered reading patterns in some way
tbh I think it has to do with the perception of British people among yanks, where for some reason they’re seen as posh, which is further implied to be effete or “gay”
The part about Harry being some super genius aryan ubermensch or whatever is also bogus. He was always portrayed as a dumb fuck who couldn't get anything but lucky and constantly failed upward. If anything it was an uncritical representation of the journey of most men in the ruling class as presented by an uncreative author with shitty politics.
true, although griffindor is definitely considered to be the aryan ubermensch house in the books. so he is both that and a dumb fuck - dialectics
my cohort was in grade school while the films were coming out so it had pretty universal popularity, before/after the high water mark of releases and advertising blitzes could be a bit different though.
I remember a few masc fans of Harry Potter, but when I was on tumblr during 2012 in sci-fi/fantasy circles I felt like it was mostly women and the guys who voraciously consumed the books had moved on to other things.
yeah i feel like after the popularity wave there is a very gendered division in which media stays in the cultural psyche
I’m a cis man and as a child I liked the books. They were still new though but my experience was everybody my age engaging with them, boys included
to me it seems like there was a generational or cultural shift at some point. i guess part of it is that boys barely engage with books nowadays, if at all
True, and that makes it even more fucked up
it was totally promoted as a book that was finally getting boys into reading and was considered a boy book, i literally had other little girls say "ew that's a boy book" our teacher promoted it and Percy Jackson as boy books. i remember because I resented it. girls didnt get into it until i was in middle school. the book is for elementary school kids though. also i didnt like how shitty harry became in the fith book and i was told that was becuase thats how boys were and that the book was FOR boys. this was a different teacher.
very interesting. ive also mostly seen Percy Jackson talked about in girl spaces. i wonder if there is a generational or a cultural shift at some point
i mean what ages are we talking about? i think thats the thing. it was pushed on boys in elementary school and then the ones where are into fandom spaces were in middle and high school and those were mostly girls because boys aren't into fandom. what do you mean by "girl spaces" genuinely confused? also im under 25. so i don't think this is a generational thing. like most elementary schoolers are not on Tumblr or fan forums. is that what you mean by "girl spaces". where are these girls under ten years old hanging out?
sorry for the questions this convo is deeply deeply baffling to me. are you guys all talking about middle and highschoolers and adults. to be clear i read harry potter in middle school and being "into" it was not normal i got many of my books destroyed over it but there were some other nerd girls i found solace with. listen i did go to an extremely ghetto ass middle school so maybe my experiences are diffrent.
i don't know I'm just interested in different people's experiences with popular media. by girl spaces I do mean fandom but also middle/high school cliques.
ok well bell hooks is talking about children here, the harry potter books were made to mature as the books go on sure, but if you look at what bell hooks is saying and recall the discussion around boys falling behind in reading we are talking about younger children here. and yes it was pushed on younger boys. there was a whole media narrative about it.