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Question About JKR's Male Characters...

Some comments I've seen about JKR's writing have led me to the thought that possibly, one reason why certain characters in the story have to keep insisting on their manliness and not doing anything "girly" like crying, etc. might have to do with the fact that Rowling just isn't good with writing men, and so resorts to stereotypes to do the job, except when writing "evil" feminine men like Snape. You know, kind-of like how Rowling wants Harry to be not-gay, but probably can't imagine being attracted to a woman, and so he ends up seeming gay by discussing the beauty of various men.

Any men in this community care to weigh in here? Part of the reason why I ask is because I sometimes doubt my own abilities to portray men convincingly in the stories I write :P

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I'm not a man, but I'm weighing in anyway. I hope that's alright.

I think the best thing you can do is think about writing a person first and everything else afterwards. Don't think about how someone would react to something primarily according to their gender, race, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. Just think about the character as a person with a diverse subset of traits that all influence their behavior. Rowling's problem, I think, is that she's a gender essentialist who thinks of behavior along gender binaries, with a worrying inclination to treat "female coded" behaviors negatively.

I was trying to take this post seriously, but then I hit the part where you say ""evil" feminine men like Snape" and I had to stop and laugh out loud, because Snape? Feminine?!

::wipes away tears of laughter::

I know lots of americans have a tin ear and/or a weird fetish-thing when it comes to British accents, but I cannot understand how you can get feminine from Alan Rickman's portrayal of Snape, and even less from the books. I find myself fascinated by your thought processes. Can you explain, please?

I am not speaking of Alan Rickman's portrayal. There are essays which discuss how Snape is portrayed as being more feminine than some characters (see "Taming the Prince" on DeviantArt for one such example), and you can read them for yourself.

Also not male-gendered, but still weighing in:

Besides seconding the general advice to focus on character personality first and everything else second, I think this particular issue is an extension of Rowling's general over-identification with her lead characters. Rowling relies heavily on stereotypes for all her characters, and in particular on the 'beauty-equals-goodness' trope. So, to a mindset like that, having the most vile person in the world be also one of the most attractive would be incredibly disturbing, if not outright uncanny. When she goes on in detail about how wicked Riddle was even as a child, while also stressing how handsome he was, I really think she's trying to impart her sense of uncanniness about the juxtaposition to her readers. She just doesn't understand that not everyone makes a connection between looks and morals, and that having a teenage boy (whose other main plotline is focused on his hormones) constantly underline that discrepancy isn't a neutral description, but intrinsic to the boy's characterization.

And then of course she shoots herself in the foot by making Voldemort turn out to be hideously ugly in the story itself! So it goes....

Incidentally, I've seen an anime in which the villain is this ridiculously-gorgeous, golden-haired man, who is also the evilest person in the world. And no, that's not hyperbole; he is literally supposed to be the evilest person in the world (whether or not he wants to be is more complicated, however)! That actually works because it symbolizes how seductive evil can be, but Rowling squanders it as she does every other opportunity to make Voldemort anything other than a pathetic stereotype!

Out of curiosity, what anime would this be?

It's called 'Monster.' It's awesome :D

What's that? A Sword of Truth anime?

Harry acts very weird around girls. We never get any idea of him being attracted to them, and he and Ron don't talk about girls the way teenage boys would. And he acts in such a 'girly' way around Cho - constantly wondering if she's noticing him, or if she's thinking about him, rather than a more masculine way (e.g. showing off when he knows she's watching). She seems to initiate their kiss as well. And when he asks out Parvati you get that other people think she's good-looking but he's actually quite indifferent. He's also indifferent to Hermione, Ginny (until the Chest Monster), Lavender, the girls on the Quidditch team - the more you think about it, the more weirdly asexual he seems. Has he latched onto Cho to use as a 'beard' - maybe "married a Muggle" is a euphemism for being a lesbian!

And the narrative voice is from Harry's POV but not necessarily his opinion, so it can be confusing when we hear how attractive Cedric/Tom Riddle are - is this Harry's view?

Also, after the first time he is no longer influenced by Veela. Maybe that's related to his Imperius-imperviousness, but still, adds to the impression of him not being attracted to females much.

... might have to do with the fact that Rowling just isn't good with writing ~~men~~ ...

Fixed that for you. :-)

(Well, I guess that is being too harsh. When she's mired in the straight 'childrens books' genre, wherein which she isn't held to account for things like actual plot or logic or stories making sense, I guess she's okay.)

Like zellieh I don't have a clue how one can discern Snape as 'feminine'. Certainly that wasn't my impression/interpretation on reading the books.

I never got any homosexual vibes from Harry, nor did he ever act 'feminine' as far as I could pick up. I think the main problem is a simple lack of the typical male antics that would normally be the case for an adolescent heterosexual boy, this deficit causing one to over-compensate and consider him as homosexual? Missing boy stuff like talking about the girls, their bodies, ranking them in the Hogwarts top ten list, and so forth. And Rowling did touch on that at least once - "they make them okay at Hogwarts". For a childrens series where Rowling didn't dare to offend the adults or alienate the kids I think things were written okay. It was clear that Harry had a heterosexual attraction to Cho - with all the attendant mysterious urges of an adolescent - and the 'chest monster' was probably a good way to write his lust for the suddenly awesome Ginny Sue. Rowling just didn't bother turning on Harry's girl radar for any other girls.

Reading mmmarcusz's comment ... I quite agree with what is said there about Harry's indifference to ALL OTHER GIRLS other than the ones Rowling uses to bolster her plot, Cho and Ginny. It's along the lines of what I said is missing - talking about girls in general. Harry should/would have been 'noticing' other girls as well, all their shapes and sizes, as part of the narrative in addition to 'boy talk'. Since that's missing you're thinking he's going the other way. But it's just a gap/void in Rowling's writing.

Which just shifts the series away from 'gritty male stuff' to 'safe and sanitised story with a male narrator'. Given as how the Cho/Ginny attraction was written acceptably - and over 4 books! - I think Harry was portrayed as a normal straight boy. Rowling just (a) turned off the testosterone (by design or because she's a woman, as you say) when she wasn't focused on the Cho/Ginny romances and having Harry's burgeoning hormones in mind. And (b) chose not to go all the way on depicting a growing lad in a co-educational facility (such as the regular manoeuvring of textbooks for strategic camouflage on leaving class, etc. Ah, those school days ... :-))

I think Slytherins in general are perceived as feminized - with the association with water/emotion/guile. As far as I remember Severus and Draco are the only male characters who cry in canon. Also the emphasis on the cauldron and dislike of wand-waving.

Oh, okay, I can see some of that. I think you're getting down to the 'personal interpretation' setting on the microscope though. Maybe I'm new-fashioned, but I didn't think it was thought unmanly these days for blokes to cry (if under sufficient stress). And the phallic wand imagery has never factored into how I see the HP books (I personally think readers have to go looking for it, with that imagery in mind).

Still, I see now how readers could hang the 'feminine' thing on various hooks that are in HP, so thanks for helping me out!

I remember a fan - a pro-Rowling guy with much love for literary analysis - summarizing Severus' first year speech as 'size doesn't matter'.

While early on it isn't immediately obvious how much Rowling *intended* wands to be phallic symbols and cauldrons as womb symbols we have the very Freudian 'Weighing of the Wands' in GOF, the Celestina Warbeck song about how she wants her cauldron of hot love stirred in HBP and the endless wand jokes in DH (with Hermione's commentary about wizards boasting about having bigger wands).

You may be 'new fashioned' but Rowling's world is somewhere between Dickens and Agatha Christie.

Don't forget LV stripping Lucius of his wand, or Umbridge's "unusually small" wand.

Or Ron's wand being broken for most of Book 2. Or Harry feeling all impotent and emasculated after Hermione (a girl, no less!) accidentally broke his wand. (Though given that he was on the run from Voldemort and his wand was his only means of defence, I suppose he can be forgiven for this.)

If you need help writing men, don't be afraid to ask a man who you have confidence in about any difficult points. I am never afraid to ask women for help in writing women although I have got conflicting advice before.

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Question About JKR's Male Characters...

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