Harry Potter and Women as Sexual Objects

The feminist analysis of Narnia will have to wait until Christmas Eve, because I took advantage of $9.50 movies to go see Harry Potter instead. I have the usual observations: Daniel Radcliffe is awful, Emma Watson gets worse each year, and the dress Hermionie wore to the ball was hideously ugly. Despite this I thought it was quite a good adaptation, the Goblet of Fire is my least favourite books, and this might be the best movie (which is probably damning it with faint praise).

But there was one thing I wanted to write about and that was the portrayal of the two visiting schools (which I'm too lazy to look up). I don't know if the fact that the French school was all female, and the Russian school was all male was mentioned in the books, but I certainly didn't pick up on it. But in the movie the contrast between the schools became a contrast between Masculinity and Femininity, which wasn't there at all in the books, and didn't work for me at all.

But what I found most scary, was that feminity was represented basically through sexuality. When the girls come in and do their weird little dance thing, it's basically a seduction dance (when the boys come in it's a war dance).

This really disturbed me, because it plays into the idea that sexuality is something women have, and men want. In fact it took it further, until women are defined by this sexuality, not their own sexuality, but a sexuality performed for men.