In the field of sports, Quidditch may be the first sport to achieve "equal rights for men and women".
Text | Liu Xueting
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In the Muggle world, there are Olympic Games and World Cups, as well as various professional leagues, making sports a heroic dream in the lives of ordinary people. In the wizarding world, wizards also have a wealth of leisure activities.
Quidditch, Wizard Chess, High Stone, Ten Pillars Of Rolling Ball... These sports have also become a part of the "Harry Potter" series that readers and friends talk about.
Starting with the nine-and-three-quarters platform, these sports also permeate the magic story, including the golden snitch in the trailer for the new game Fantastic Beasts: The Mystery of Dumbledore.
On April 8, Fantastic Beasts: The Mystery of Dumbledore was released
Taking advantage of the release of the new work, we revisited the setting of the Harry Potter series and found that unlike muggle women's long history of sports equality, the magical world may have been the first to achieve equal rights for men and women in sports.
Sports in the Wizarding World:
Equality
Sports in the wizarding world have a very old history, in the case of Quidditch, according to the witch Gertie Kiddell wrote in her life diary, in the 11th century AD, near Quiddi marsh, a group of wizards played ball over the swamp, and the ball often hit her family's vegetable field, which was later considered to be the origin of Quidditch.
In the magical world book The Magical Quidditch Ball, according to Zacharys Mömps, by the 14th century, Quidditch matches had Muggle protections. The Quidditch Stadium at the time was a 500-foot-long, 180-foot-wide oval court, and the goal of that era was a basket at the top of a pillar.
It was not until 1883 that the Quidditch style of the course was finally confirmed, and the rules were very similar to today. As we all know, a Quidditch team now has three chasers, two batters, a seeker and a goalkeeper.
The chaser's job is to throw the ball into one of three goals for 10 points each, while the batter needs to shoot away the ghost flying ball to protect teammates or interfere with opponents. Catch him to end the game and get a 150-point bonus. As such, it is undoubtedly a central part of the sport and an important story development tool in the Harry Potter novel.
But in the ancient history of Quidditch, there was no definition of the criteria for male and female athletes to compete. Whether it is a witch or a witch, riding a broom is a Quidditch player, and can participate in the happiness of Quidditch, while female players can play their potential no matter where they are.
In fact, in Harry Potter's worldview, J.K. Rowling constructed a very complete Quidditch system. There are academy teams in the wizarding school, and wizards have corresponding Quidditch professional leagues and national teams after graduation, and in these three parts, Rowling has never skipped writing and ink to describe the women in Quidditch.
For example, in the academy team we know, gryffindor Quidditch teams have maintained a 3/7 ratio of female players.
Gryffindor 'Dream Team', women account for 3/7
During Harry's time at Hogwarts, all three Gryffindor chasers were women, Angelina Johnson, Arya Snepinte, Katie Bell, and Angelina captained for a year. Later there were girls like Demirza Robbins and Ginny Weasley. In addition, Cho Chang's setting is also a skilled seeker in the Ravenclaw Academy team.
In the limited Quidditch chapter, Rowling did not let the female golfer play a supporting role.
Angelina Johnson is basically the most inky chaser player, and each game is Angelina's first record.
Ginny Weasley is a universal "screw", the chaser and the seeker have all achieved the top level of Hogwarts, the male and female players in the entire seven books add up, and only such a player can do such a good job in both positions, so Ginny did go to The Holyhead Hubby after graduation as a professional player.
In the description of the Quidditch World Cup, the World Cup is the top quidditch game in Quidditch, and Harry's fourth-year Quidditch championship is the Irish team - the chaser 3-man Troy-Mallet-Moran combination, Marlett and Moran are both female players.
As a club mentioned in the main chapter, Holyhead Harpy is not only the second oldest team in the league, but also composed entirely of witches. According to rowling's subsequent setting in The Prophet Daily: World Cup 2014 Report, the witch Gwenog Jones of the Slug Club mentioned several times in the book became a batsman for The Holyhead Hubby and a team manager for the Welsh national team after graduation.
The British and Irish Quidditch Team is portrayed as a robust witch by The Holyhead Harpy
According to Gwenog Jones' theory, witches are better suited to fight Quidditch than witches, and no one seems to dare to disagree with this view. Although this is because "those who disagree with her are very prone to becoming tide bugs".
In other sports (including intelligence), Severus Snape's mother, Irene Prince, has also captained the Hogwarts High Walkers, which shows that in the wizarding world, female athletes have a very strong performance.
Depart from Quidditch
Look at the women in the wizarding world
The sport of Quidditch is actually a game that Rowling came up with when she quarreled with her boyfriend at the time in a small hotel in Manchester, and in the setting of rules, it is substituted for Rowling's feminism.
In many of the existing discussions about the harry potter plot and setting, some people think that Rowling's feminism is very narrow, because Quidditch "let women compete with men, women may be attacked by men, it is not fair", this view seems to have some truth, but it also seems to deviate from the setting of the wizarding world.
In the real world, most sports do require extreme physique, if men and women are completely on the same field, over time, female athletes whose strength and explosiveness are relatively inferior may become more and more difficult to be competitive, and they will lose the right to exercise.
For this reason, men's and women's events have gradually been subdivided, which is why some people have come out against the emergence of "transgender athletes" (such as the weightlifter Hubbard).
But the wizarding world is like a "utopia" in the final analysis, quidditch is also a sport played on a flying broom in "utopia", the magic attribute is much higher than the physical attribute, and the living space of the Quidditch female players will not be occupied in this "utopia" set by Rowling.
Beyond Quidditch, we can also argue that in fact in the entire wizarding world, women's status is much higher than in the Muggle world.
In real life, there have only been two female prime ministers in British history so far, and in the world of sports, FIFA is still doing its best to push for a quota of 1/3 of female leaders by 2026.
But in the original Harry Potter novel, one-third of the ministers of magic in British history were women, two of the four founders of Hogwarts were women, and a large number of famous witches occupied the well-known wizarding pictures in the chocolate frog, which actually reflected this. In the wizarding world, everyone works on a magic wand, that is, on the output of brain power, and the physical labor is close to zero. In this case, women will also be able to create a greater proportion of the means of production, and therefore a higher social status.
The four founders of Hogwarts
However, in recent years, equal rights equal rights ideas such as Quidditch, which are not restricted to gender participation, have gradually been reflected in some projects of the "three dimensions". Equestrian, for example, at the 2018 International Horse Federation (FEI) World Equestrian Games, there were 19 male and 17 female medal winners respectively, and the medal distribution was close to gender balance. There is also the extreme frisbee, which is now very popular in the city, and the format without gender ratio is popular with young people.
Beyond the wizarding world
J.K. Rowling's view of feminism
Under the pen of J.K. Rowling, full and attractive female characters such as Hermione and Luna were created, the female appearance in the wizarding world is very beautiful and comfortable. The reason why she can create so many classic female figures may also be related to her feminist ideas.
Rowling, a single mother and a young woman who had experienced sexual assault and domestic violence, needed to rely on relief payments before the Harry Potter series was published and became a global hit.
Therefore, from her personal experience, she is a very loyal (and even somewhat fanatical) feminist, for which she often writes articles on social media, exporting her feminist views and fighting for women's rights.
In 2018, the UK plans to adjust a transgender bill to simplify the identification process for transgender groups, one of which is: "Even if people who have not undergone gender reassignment surgery, as long as they identify themselves as the opposite sex, they can still be identified as transgender."
This means that as long as you are a transgender person, you don't need to make any physical changes, as long as you declare your gender through the law, you can enter the toilet, bathroom, and locker room of the other gender. At that time, Rowling publicly expressed her support on social media with Maya Foster, who was expelled for opposing the bill.
Perhaps in Rowling's view, declaring that she is a woman can go to the women's toilet and enter the women's locker room, which is actually a squeeze on the living space of ordinary women.
In 2020, she shared an article on Twitter called "Creating a More Equal Post-PANDEMIC World for Menstruating People," which she was puzzled about and talked about gender: "If gender is not real, there is no such thing as 'same-sex attraction.'" If gender is not real, then the real situation of women around the world will be erased."
A stone stirs up thousands of waves, and her view is now equivalent to discrimination and exclusion of transgender people in the eyes of some Europeans and Americans. Many Fans believe that Rowling's human design has collapsed, advocating equality and fraternity in the novel, but in reality supporting the opposite of the vulnerable (transgender group).
To this end, Rowling also encountered a round of Internet violence, and even received sleeping pills. Including the main actors of the Harry Potter series, they have also stood against her. At the beginning of this year, rowling was not invited to the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary Party, and two of Harry Potter's biggest fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron Bar and Muggle Network, also announced that they were "cutting off" with Rowling.
But Rowling herself doesn't seem to care, and she is active in the social media, continuing to export her opinions.
In the past, she has inspired students in a lecture at Harvard University that we don't need world-changing magic because we have that power in us.
And this IP, which was born in the 1990s, in which the advocacy of equal rights for men and women, the contempt for racism, and the resistance to power against power are still bringing power to generations of readers today.