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TobyBartels comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (495)
Reactions to Chapter 70:
What exactly is she talking about here? From the reactions, it appears to be rape (forcible rape of women by men), but unfortunately there's no reason to go back centuries for that. Even if Sinistra ignorantly assumes that votes for women put an end to rape, she still doesn't have to go back any farther in her history than she's already gone.
A good line made great by the follow-up.
She finally gets it!
Well, naturally!
I would expect Hermione to know that the correct PC thing to do is to use "hero" as a gender-neutral term. (This is probably because "hero" can also be used as a synonym for "protagonist", so that "heroine" simply means the leading female character, who is usually not a hero[ine] in the sense that Hermione wants to be. Example: The heroine of Super Mario is Princess Peach.)
Overt slavery. Prof. Sinestra also has dark skin.
Thanks. That fits the timeline, but I don't think that it fits the students' reaction:
Of course, slavery ties in to rape (my reading of their reactions), but it doesn't make sense for Penelope to say "us" here. (Penelope has white skin.)
There's also the sense of slavery in which men were (or are) owners of their wives and unmarried daughters, but that doesn't seem to be what you mean.
If I see George being treated badly by Bill, I might conclude that Bill would treat me badly in the same circumstance, even if I know that George has green eyes and I have hazel eyes and Bill has some weird prejudice I don't entirely understand having to do with eye color.
Someone raised in a culture that considers skin color of no more significance than eye color would presumably react similarly even if they know that George has brown skin and they have pink skin and Bill has a prejudice having to do with skin color.
Yes, but bringing in eye or skin colour distracts from the matter of sex, which is the focus of every other remark in the conversation.
So it's an interesting hypothesis, and I don't have a better one, but it still leaves me confused. I'll provisionally accept it, but I still hope that somebody can think of a better one.
Professor Sinistra was talking about the unequal role of women in Muggle society, and brought up her mother as an example. "And that wasn't the worst of it," she continues. "Why, just a few centuries earlier -"
The writer cuts off at this point, but it seems entirely plausible that Sinestra went on to talk about how women like her mother were treated a few centuries earlier, and slavery is a pretty major component of that narrative.
If they were discussing "the matter of sex," then I agree it's a distraction from the discussion.
OTOH, if they were discussing how Muggle society treats its low-status members, with sex simply being an example of that, then it's a continuation of the discussion.
This sort of situation arises all the time in real-world conversations, where what one person considers a reasonable continuation of the conversation strikes another person as a confusing change of subject. All I can say is, it seems like a reasonable continuation to me.
I agree that discussing slavery would make perfect sense, given the conversation that preceded it. However, this ignores the conversation that followed it, whose participants seemed to be entirely unaware that they had been discussing any examples of discrimination other than on the basis of sex.
Based on Quirrell's remarks in particular, I'm pretty sure that they'd been discussing rape, in one context or another. As I said in my last comment, I'll provisionally accept that they were discussing it in the context of slavery, since I can't think of any better fit. But it's still not a very good fit.
Another point that I just thought of: Sinistra's "several centuries earlier" should have been simply "a century earlier", for this hypothesis to fit. Several centuries earlier than the early 20th century almost predates modern race-based slavery. (By the way, can we assume that Sinistra's ancestors were enslaved? Her ancestors may well have come from slave-holding British colonies, but are there any likely alternatives?)