Here we go again.
In a blog post via Bustle, Emma Lord complains about the supposedly under-discussed perpetuation of rape culture by the wildly successful book series Harry Potter. Lord’s main beef: magical love potions.
Immediately after lamenting the “aggressively persistent un-body positive tropes” and the “glaring lack of diversity” in the series, Lord hones in on rape culture. “I’m surprised, though, that in light of all of the important topics that we have shed light on, the fandom hasn’t touched on one of the most glaringly problematic things in the series: the existence and free use of love potions,” states Lord, seemingly mystified.
The “existence of love potions is so akin to rape that it is almost entirely undebatable,” she says. “Just like in rape, the victim’s autonomy is taken from them.”
Lord then points to three problem areas in the series: the two “iconic moments” when love potions are used, and the notion that “love potions are allowed to exist” in this fictional world.
The first moment, she explains, is when “Ron innocently eats some of Harry’s chocolates, without knowing that Romilda Vane had laced them with a love potion she intended Harry to have.” The second, a bit more dramatic, was when “Tom Riddle was raped”:
Merope, the mother of Voldemort, is desperately in love with Tom Riddle, Sr., the vain, handsome, and generally cruel Muggle man who occasionally passes her cottage. Desperate to escape her circumstances and for her affection to be returned, she drugs Tom with love potions perpetually, forcing him into marriage and eventually into having a child with her. The moment she takes him off of the love potion, he is disgusted with her and flees. It is very clear that given the choice, he would never have involved himself with Merope, let alone married or reproduced with her. And yet the narrative is so wrapped up in the tragedy of the heartbroken Merope and the tragedy of an abandoned Voldemort that it neglects to make a very real and harrowing point — Tom Riddle was raped.
And last but not least, the craziest accusation of perpetuating rape culture: the Hogwarts curriculum. Lord complains that love potions are even allowed to exist at all. Moreover, that “[t]he ingredients to create them are not regulated. And, horrifyingly enough, their creation is taught in the very Hogwarts curriculum.”
Uh, not to state the obvious or anything, but Harry Potter is fiction. As are love potions. As is the “Hogwarts curriculum.”
“The ingredients to create them are not regulated. And, horrifyingly enough, their creation is taught in the very Hogwarts curriculum.”
-Emma Lord, on love potions in Harry Potter
As Katherine Timpf National Review kindly puts it: “Now call me crazy, but I’m actually not surprised that a ‘fandom’ hasn’t been fuming over the fact that a series about magic contains magic in its storylines. Harry Potter is about witches and wizards, and what makes witches and wizards witches and wizards is that they cast spells and use potions – which, by the way, are not real.”
Expressing utter optimism, Lord doesn’t “condemn” Harry Potter, but looks forward to the days when millennials, clearly more responsible than previous generations, read the novels to their children while simultaneously explaining the horrors of rape culture to their 7-year-old kid.
Here’s Ron falling in love (er, being mind “raped”):
H/T National Review