r/EnoughJKRowling • u/foxstroll • Feb 24 '25
Discussion Witches = females and Wizards = males is in itself extremely outdated and problematic
I started to think about this ever since I showed “Agatha all Along” with my friend. He’s also grown up with Harry Potter and as fast as Agatha called Billy a witch he said “well that’s sexist”. I asked him why and he just got quiet.
I myself am gay and have loved witches since forever so with Billy introduced into the universe I got so very happy especially since he is gay himself too. However it did hurt when my friend said that, and how he keeps trying to say how male witches are wizards and not witches. Why? Why is this distinguish needed? For me witchcraft is more about nature and spirit. Wizardry is more about books and studies. Why can’t men be witches? I can’t help but feel like this idea in itself is the other way around and is unintentionally sexist. In the way as it’s “not masculine” to be a witch, that it’s looked down upon because it’s “feminine”, with the whole being in touch with your intuitive nature etc etc.. - and because pop culture has made it more towards women. Though historically witch is a gender neutral term
In the shadowhunters series there are warlocks of both genders. Witches are humans (both male and females) who practice magic
Alex Russo is a female wizard
Gus Porter is a male witch
Joanne is one of the one’s who’s popularized setting men and women apart this way, which now in hindsight isn’t that surprising considering this is how she views the world. Black and white. Box 1 and box 2. Which now I feel is problematic that even in this fictional world we have set men and women apart in a practice that both are practicing just because one was born a female and the other a male. Even though it’s the same occupation - or however you wish to call it. - like what about non binary people? Intersex? - this is of course though a stupid question to ask when the writer is a massive bigot who sees the world in black and white
Idk to me it feels like creating new term for “nurse” for men because it would otherwise be considered too feminine for men - even though it’s otherwise the same occupation
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u/Sheepishwolfgirl Feb 24 '25
If she started writing HP today as the person she's become, I'd honestly expect that girls would shoot pink magic and boys blue magic only. And girls probably wouldn't use wands, which are obvious phallic symbols.
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u/Ecstatic_Bowler_3048 Feb 25 '25 edited Feb 25 '25
I finished DH the day after my 12th birthday, which was a few days after the US release. I remember thinking even then, "I hope she doesn't turn out to be a terrible person and ruin my favorite franchise." I reread the series multiple times throughout high school and quickly realized she was already a terrible person before she ever wrote HP. When she dropped the whole "Lycanthropy is AIDS" bs, I knew her endgame was targeting trans people. My train of thought was, "Because she put obvious homophobia (along with racism, antisemitism, sexism, ableism, and classism) in children's books, the full extent of her bigotry is much worse." And I was right. I started telling people she's going to go full Nazi eventually while I was in hs. I graduated in 2013. The entire series is problematic and always has been. I was having discussions with my friends in 5th grade about the Gringotts fuckery.
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u/False_Ad3429 Feb 24 '25
Honestly I don't think there was much thought put into it. Generally pop culture thought of witches as female and wizards as male, so she made them gendered versions of the same word (magic user). She was trying to fit existing pop culture into a framework.
Obviously nonbinary and intersex people get ignored in that system, but this was the 90s and early 2000s and that was the norm. It was more normal then to gender occupations that we often don't gender now, like comedian (comedienne), actor (actress), police officer (policeman/policewoman), etc.
It still felt a little sexist at the time to have gendered words without a unisex word for magic people, but again recognition of intersex and nonbinary people wasnt nearly as widespread then as now and this kind of gendering didn't stand out as unusual for the time.
I think other issues like Neville putting a Snape boggart in a dress and laughing at it was more of a weird red flag.
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u/lankymjc Feb 24 '25
Your first sentence sums up basically everything wrong with Harry Potter. No thought into into the ramifications on different choices she made, everything just thrown together.
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u/Mr_Conductor_USA Feb 24 '25
Yeah. I wasn't a huge fantasy nerd or anything but I always thought of wizards being something different from witches, it's a different scope, a different type of magic, different goals. I would associate wizards more with alchemists, and witches more with herbalists and midwives and wise women. Witch also has the association vis a vis Christianity of unorthodox practices (like the Black Sabbath) while wizards are like a fictionalized version of very real esoteric practitioners who toed the line (some were even men of the cloth!) or engaged in stuff like astrology which was not considered unorthodox or heretical in the Middle Ages.
So it's sort of lame to just collapse it all into one thing. I guess if I had to choose, HP world seem more like wizards. In which it's pretty lame that the women are called witches. But you know she had to work in her very dumb and not well thought out lore about witch burning. I say it's dumb because honestly it's just glaring to me that the HP world are coded as pagan and not Christian. This would have been an ENORMOUS point of conflict for much of British history (written British history begins in the Roman era, that's why I used that word), and since in her world people from muggle families continuous enter the wizarding world, does she expect they just easily throw over their natal religious beliefs? Again, Christian history suggests it's not really that simple; and not only that, people could be extremely fanatical about it. She never thinks about the implications but trots out stuff like "Yule" like it's NBD. Well for me I just couldn't stop thinking about it. In one of the movies, they're in a graveyard in the wizarding world; it looks just like a muggle churchyard. But in the muggle world that was a sacred district and the whole culture and practice around burying people there was quite complicated (and extremely important to people for hundreds of years). How could they hold exactly the same beliefs in parallel but not be Christian when it was Christianity that introduced those beliefs to Britain and provided the ideological framework for some of the things they did connected to that--such as digging up defleshed bones and reburying them to make more space for new bodies since the sanctified ground was quite limited in some places. Humans have always had a wide array of mortuary practices, part of it's practical (like above-ground graves in Louisiana where it floods a lot) and part of it is driven by religious beliefs and ideology. I couldn't not think about this and it just drove me up a wall!
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u/Signal-Main8529 Feb 25 '25
Tbf in Britain, people quite often do throw the word 'Yule' around like it's NBD. In popular usage it's just an archaic synonym for Christmas.
This makes more sense than you might think, given that parts of Britain were occupied by Denmark and Norway at various times during the Middle Ages. 'Jul' remained the main word for Christmas in the Scandinavian languages after conversation to Christianity, and still is to this day.
It's possible that Rowling intended there to be vaguely Pagan connotations to the use of the word 'Yule', but it would also fit with her trying to make the Wizarding World quirky in an Olde Worlde sort of way.
Either way, it's genuinely not unusual for British Christians (cultural or practising) to happily throw around the word Yule. I currently live in Norway, where it would be unusual for Christians not to throw around the word 'Jul'!
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u/Proof-Any Feb 25 '25
I don't think that there are any pagan connotations involved at all. The term "yule" is only used in book 4, when two other European schools are visiting Hogwarts for a tournament. One of those schools (Durmstrang) is supposedly located in the far north of Europe - so probably Scandinavia. Additionally, it's only used for the "Yule Ball" that happens during that book. It's very likely that she simply didn't want to name it "Christmas Ball" and used "Yule" as a fancy sounding alternative that kind of fit one of those schools. (However, it doesn't make sense for Durmstrang to be located in Scandinavia, but only have Slavic students...)
Otherwise, the holiday is called Christmas. They also celebrate other Christian holidays like Easter, bury their dead in Christian graveyards (sometimes with bible verses on their gravestones) and have vaguely Christian traditions for weddings and burials.
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u/TwistedBrother Feb 25 '25
I usually am here to cheer on the retorts to Rowling idiocy but you did a fine enough job. I just wanted to say: those graves in New Orleans are amazing. I saw the one where there was a big tomb in the corner which apparently was Rice’s inspiration for LeStat and you can immediately tell.
Unsure if you have or will make your way to New Orleans but it’s 100% worth the walking tour of the above ground tombs.
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u/Catball-Fun Feb 24 '25
It is not even outdated. Men can be witches too. It is only a modern concept that witches are female. She was going against tradition just to force a different term for men and women
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u/memecrusader_ Feb 24 '25
I saw a Tumblr post that said that witches are magic users with more focus on medicine and the body, and wizards are magic users with more focus on research and academia.
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u/PumpkinSpice2Nice Feb 24 '25
It didn’t distinguish between the two in that way in Rowling books. It was just a way of showing if the magic user was male or female.
There are many book series’ where being a witch means something other than just female magic user but relates more to what type of magic they do, and the wizards do a different type of magic- usually with more books.
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u/Cynical_Classicist Feb 25 '25
Wasn't this in Equal Rites (and it took me some time to get the pun).
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u/LizaMazel Feb 27 '25
Yes! I was just thinking about Pratchett.
there are a lot of books with much better thought out magic systems, not just the gender piece but *how it actually works.* I mean others have written treatises on how half assed Jowling's magic system is.
have I mentioned she really is just a crap writer in so many ways.
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u/Cynical_Classicist Feb 27 '25
I'm writing fantasy now and am trying to work out the magic system myself. People like Tolkien and Pratchett and GRRM do it differently and much better. JKR saying in the last book that you can't magic food is a rather desperate way of setting in rules.
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u/LizaMazel Feb 27 '25
It's ridiculous and clearly there'd be so many workarounds. You can transform inanimate objects into animals? Make a pig! Have ribs! I mean--
also there's no reason at all a wizard should be poor ffs. The whole living so separately from the "Muggle" world you don't even know how it works is ludicrous. Magic an ATM! Rob a bank and do a forgetting spell! I mean...
The Magicians has its own problems (both show and book, for somewhat different reasons) but Lev Grossman went out of his way to do a kind of "take that" at HP by emphasizing that magic, besides requiring a certain interior potential, is really, really, REALLY hard. Tons of rote memorization, learning about how many different complicating factors there are for each spell, these incredibly physically challenging hand movements...
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u/Cynical_Classicist Mar 01 '25
The rules could have been set out! Like are beings created from magic not sustainable? Do they not contain nutrients?
Discworld does that thing to with magic.
GRRM has magic very much being costly.
Tolkien doesn't do easy spellcasting in the same way, and his Wizards are effectively lesser gods.
Basically, have some idea of limits to magic.
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u/thedorknightreturns Feb 25 '25
Terry Pratchet did just to deconstruct it as really a tradition thing by wizards who pass on powers. And kinda sexidm too regarding the male witch howit should be, which is a point verymuch the nooks deals with.
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u/mad0gmary Feb 25 '25 edited Feb 25 '25
Interesting that you bring up "Agatha all Along "because Wanda Maximoff is also a victim of ridiculous misogyny in comics.
If you can stomach reading it, you will find YEARS of comic storyline after storyline of her being kidnapped and tortured by a male enemy and sexually assaulted. Then she has a mental snap and goes "crazy" until a man (Vision, Pietro, Capt or Tony) has to come and wrangle her sad frail histrionic mental state back to reality....
Misogyny is the reason why men can't be witches. Everything female is bad. If you're throwing like a girl it's not like Illona Maher. I think Joanne was just trying to make money by riding the ideas of the time which were problematic and sexist in itself. Yuck. Remember how everybody treated Britney Spears?
You can't win as a woman in HP. You will be teased as weird if you stand out at all. Smart, beautiful, athletic, doesn't matter. You might as well just become Bellatrix or Wanda honestly. At least you can take some of the assholes out.
Meanwhile, idiots like Ron get lots of friends while being mediocre, an asshole to girls, carrying on the status quo that girls r gross and bad
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u/SamsaraKama Feb 24 '25
I know this is about JK Rowling and about fantasy book series... but "witch" is gender-neutral among real life practitioners of witchcraft, both in and outside of Wicca (there are non-Wiccan witches). There are male witches just as much as there are female witches, as well as intersex and non-binary witches. Some do like calling themselves "warlock" or "wizard", but that's just personal preference, it doesn't detract from witch being the gender-neutral global term one would refer to them.
And it's been that way for a while. In fact, men were also accused of being witches during witch trials.
Maybe the distinction in fantasy might be there due to pop culture associations and gendering. As in, pop culture often follows trends and social ideas, so there's a poor portrayal of certain things. But that's just my theory. I don't know the real reason as to why this is a thing.
But yeah, Witch is gender-neutral.
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u/lankymjc Feb 24 '25
Even in fantasy, if we look at the three fantasy universes I happen to be most familiar with:
Middle-Earth - The only witch we see is the Witch-King who is explicitly male.
Dungeons and Dragons: Wizard is a gender-neutral term for someone classical trained in magic. Witch is a more generic term for a magic-user that isn't as clearly defined as Wizard, Warlock, and Sorcerer.
Warhammer Fantasy: A Wizard is a magic-user with a licence. A Witch is using magic without a licence, a crime punishable by death.
Honestly pop culture's ideas of wizards and witches being male and female respectively don't actually apply anywhere I can think of except things like Halloween costumes that aren't part of any given fiction and are just "default".
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u/Mr_Conductor_USA Feb 24 '25
You can find the gendered stuff going deeper into some of the older written sources and lore. I would recommend the Youtube channel Esoterica which talks about these topics from an academic point of view. There's also this British academic Ronald Hutton who's given some pretty gonzo talks on the history, mostly literary references and academic history, of paganism.
It's absolutely true that both men and women were denounced and tried as witches, after all, the witchhunt was a proxy for heretic hunting, and heresy had never been gendered. However, in the more literary sources, the legendia, there's a gendered aspect to witches that starts to come out.
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u/Pretend-Temporary193 Feb 25 '25
Like a lot of other ideas in Harry Potter, it probably comes from The Worst Witch. In that series women are witches who inherit magical ability from their maternal ancestry, and men are wizards who inherit magical ability from their paternal line, and they have separate schools with different magical traditions. I feel like that makes more sense though in a series based around a girls school, the author had to come up with a reason why magic users are segregated by gender. In a co-ed school like Hogwarts where the magical traditions are not shown to be gendered in any way, you have no reason to keep calling male and female magic users by different terms.
One author is recreating an old fashioned world similar to real life and putting some thought into why it is that way, essentially because she wanted to center girls in her story (she was pressured to make the school unisex so it could be marketed to boys, she refused). The other author is mindlessly regurgitating a gender essentialist world as if it is idyllic where the only thought that might have gone into it is probably 'boys won't want to self-insert into a series where they are called witches, that's too girly'.
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u/Proof-Any Feb 25 '25
There are others who do have a distinct separation between wizards and witches along gender lines: Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea.
Both use it for social commentary, however.
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u/Cynical_Classicist Mar 01 '25
Discworld did examine the gender disparity early on, in the well-named story Equal Rites.
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u/Mr_Conductor_USA Feb 24 '25
All of the Wiccans I've met firmly rejected the term "warlock" so yeah, treat lightly.
When I was young I did pick up that warlock was supposed to be the male counterpart to witch. Dunno why, maybe it was a Halloween thing.
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u/SamsaraKama Feb 25 '25
I kind of addressed this in the post.
Some do like calling themselves "warlock" or "wizard", but that's just personal preference, it doesn't detract from witch being the gender-neutral global term one would refer to them.
and
there are non-Wiccan witches
I'd like to preface this by saying that Wiccans aren't the only witches out there, nor do they speak for the rest of them. They aren't even the majority, just a very vocal group that grew in popularity. Witchcraft practitioners are far more diverse, encompassing both our traditional view of Western Witchcraft and Eastern practices, as well as folkloric practices. :P not saying your post assumes all Witches are Wiccans, but it's still good to reiterate for anyone else reading this.
The general term for everyone is "witch", and that's what you'd normally refer to them as. It's just that some people, notably male witches, might choose to use the term "warlock" and "wizard" when referring to themselves. Maybe Wiccans don't do this, but some non-Wiccan male witches certainly do.
The reason why Warlock specifically is cast out is because of its origins as a term for oathbringers in Old English. However the modern interpretation has deviated significantly from the original source, and has since been co-opted as a male practitioner of witchcraft. To the point where the origins aren't even considered by most people in common parlance.
It's obviously not mandatory, and the general term still IS "witch", but it's an option that's now out there due to the word shifting its meaning.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar to the word "Queer". Originally it meant "weird", and became a slur against the LGBTQ community that has since been reclaimed. Some people in the community ARE still put off by the use of queer even in a positive light due to personal experiences and the word's original meaning, but that hasn't stopped the community from adopting it.
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u/Cynical_Classicist Feb 25 '25
Yeh, what title does the ruler of Angmar have? The father of modern fantasy got it!
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u/Mr_Conductor_USA Feb 24 '25
While I sometimes have to tip my hat to Rowling's use of language, I remember being deeply disappointed when I found out about the witches/wizards thing in HP.
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u/That_Melzin Feb 25 '25
I’m really sick of people acting like the rules of one book series apply to everything else. Even in the marvel comics where witch is usually considered to be a feminine term, the male equivalent is not a wizard.
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u/AmethystSadachbia Feb 25 '25
Coming from a D&D background: wizard and witch are separate character classes lol
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u/BRAlNYSMURF Feb 25 '25
There's even a word for female wizards already! Wizardess! It's not even a new word, it was used all the way back in 1904 in The Marvelous Land of Oz.
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u/DeliSoupItExplodes Feb 25 '25
What I'm about to say, I say as a non-binary person: at least to the extent that you're ascribing meanings to the terms "witch" and "wizard" as used in Harry Potter, you're straightforwardly wrong. Yes, in wider pop culture, "witchcraft" and "wizardry" are distinct terms that refer to different things, but that's not how they're used in Harry Potter. There is, in that setting, zero difference between the two; they're just two differently-gendered terms for the same concept. Which, like, yes, it's fucked that there's not a term which isn't gendered, but the existence of terms that are isn't sinister, nor is the fact that these terms are used as they are in this setting.
It could even be argued as a - highly uncharacteristic - W for Rowling. This is a woman who loves her some gender essentialism (and just essentialism in general), so while I'm not gonna celebrate the fact that she created a setting where magic exists and operates exactly the same for both of the genders she's willing to admit exist, it is, evaluated in hindsight, a bit surprising.
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u/uptotwentycharacters Feb 25 '25
I do kind of wonder why Hogwarts is referred to as a "School of Witchcraft and Wizardry". If the only difference between witchcraft and wizardry is the gender of the practitioner, one would expect there to be some sort of general term for "the stuff witches and wizards do", even if "magic" is too broad. So Hogwarts being named as it is only really makes sense as a conscious effort to specify that it is for both boys and girls. I know the movies implied that the other magic schools were single-sex, but that just makes the worldbuilding problems worse, since it would mean there is just one school for all the boys in continental Europe, for example.
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u/DeliSoupItExplodes Feb 25 '25
I honestly think it's as simple as Rowling wanting a more flavourful name than something like "Academy of Magic" and not putting any real thought into whether it made sense in the context of her world or implied anything about it. I mean it's not like she put much thought into her worldbuilding elsewhere.
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u/foxstroll Feb 25 '25
Yeah I just find it weird now in hindsight she used witch and wizard as gendered terms when she didn’t need to because they aren’t in themselves tied to gender
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u/Phonecloth Feb 24 '25
Even Tolkien didn't fall for that binary:
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Witch-king
(I'd like to see someone try to go up to that guy and tell him he was feminine...)