Meanwhile back in the menstrual hut...
Sorry, again apologies for absence, nonsensical drunken posts, self obsessed whinging, lack of Quendi etc. I was going to do a lovey post explaining all about the fun me and the elves had on our holidays. I still will do that, but tonight I am a woman wronged. Allow me to rant incoherently.


The beard has just announced he is packing up to go travel the world. *Sigh*. I knew that was always his long term plan, but his timing is spectacular. He's leaving a month from today, which means me and the Quendi are going to be homeless for Christmas. Apparently, his spectacularly good timing cannot be altered because it ensures him the optimum financial resources to leave while maximising the amount of Southern Hemisphere summer he can still enjoy.

Git.



Lipstick: *Settles down into menstrual hut, flicks through dog eared copies of Andrea Dworkin, helps herself to chocolate.*

Tonks: Wotcher Comrade in the Struggle against Patriarchal Oppression.

Lipstick: Hi Tonks. Men suck.

Tonks: *Putting down Gilbert and Gubar.* This morning Mundungus Fletcher commented on how nicely I'd put back on the weight I'd lost while moping over the extended menstrual metaphor gay werewolf.

Lipstick: Bastard.

Tonks: So I transfigured him into a bar of dairy milk and ate him.

Lipstick: Nice. Just us in the shack tonight?

Tonks: Us and that. *Gestures with arm to dark robed figure hunched over a cauldron*

Lipstick: What they doing?

Tonks: Synthesizing codeine.

Lipstick: Of course. Before Nurofen plus menstruating women ran wild in packs ranting about the personal being political, randomly attacking men with their teeth and claws and setting fire to villages with their burning bras. Now we can just take six and sleep until we're rational again.

Tonks: Wish they made it in chocolate flavour though.

Lipstick: True.

There is silence for a while. Tonks snuggles down into what looks suspiciously like one of Lupin's old cardigans engrossed in her book.

Lipstick: Moon up yet?

Tonks: No, still a few hours.

Lipstick: I might get a start on the red wine. What are we howling to tonight?

Tonks: I brought PJ Harvey's first album and Babes in Toyland.

Lipstick: I got Hole.

Tonks: Good. Keeps the villagers away. I hear they're setting up a petition to get Remus back. Apparently his agonised wailing is infinitely preferable to a riot grrrl reunion.

Lipstick: Still, it seems strange finding one of your kind in here.

Tonks: What a metamorphmagus? Trust me, I have tried avoiding my monthly discomfort by adopting a male physique. *Shudders* Never again. Bleeding penises are just very off-putting and I do hope to have sex again at some point in my life. When you know, my hormones choose to direct me in the way of someone remotely appropriate. Like Lord Voldemort.

Lipstick: *Nods sympathetically* Hormones are a fucking joke.

Tonks: *Pithily* I know. Bastards.

Lipstick: No, I meant one of the wizarding community. Forgive me, but it's often remarked upon by muggles, even muggles quite fond of Potterverse wizards, that in your world the women seem to fall into idealised stereotypes. You know, the brilliant girlie swot, the adoring mother Weasley, the strict but fair academic bluestocking and of course the whole theme uniting the book of the protection offered Harry by the perfect sacrifice of Lily Potter.

Tonks: *Snorts* What am I?

Lipstick: Um, I think you're the big hearted rough and tumble tomboy.

Tonks: *Looks like she's sucking a lemon* Ouch. *Flicks through the pages of the book she's holding and starts reading from the front.* Indeed, when we studied women's achievements in radically different genres, we found what began to seem a distinctively female literary tradition, ... Images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors."

Lipstick: How 1977. But what does that mean for the Poterverse?

Tonks: It probably explains why as a tomboy I have a ridiculous inner yearning to be united with my animalistic moon-governed, bleeding wild female self. However gay that self might be.

Cloaked figure: *Throwing back hood and walking into the firelight* It means I am Professor Severus Snape and I am a Feminist Issue.

Lipstick: What's he doing here? It's not safe for him to be here. He has a y chromosome and we might destroy him in a fit of moontime induced frenzy.

Snape: *Mimicking* What's he doing here? You mean apart from as a marginalised outsider figure who in a fit of righteous feminist rage destroyed the books main symbol of benevolent patriarchal authority and who was also, out of interest, a dead ringer for the patriarchal God, as I myself am a dead ringer for the witch followers of the destroying crone Goddess Hecate?

Lipstick: You what?

Snape: Miss Lipstick, if your face assumes that expression one more time in my presence I shall be forced to give you detention. Now if you will four lines of Times New Roman on how I, out of all characters in the Potterverse, most resemble the cultural cliche of a witch.

Lipstick: Ummm you wear black billowing robes, and errr you are not umm, conventionally attractive.

Snape: Go on.

Lipstick: You are always boiling up dodgy stuff in cauldrons as if you were just waiting for the Thane of Glamis to ride past on a windy moor.

Snape: Boiling up what in my cauldrons?

Lipstick: Err poisons, mostly. Or at least substances that have more educative or transformative powers than nutritive ones.

Snape: Therefore you could say, had not your marks in English Literary criticism been so poor I am surprised you can read, that I am a perversion of the traditional nurturing mother figure, embodied in characters such as Molly Weasley.

Lipstick: *Nervously* You could make that observation - yes.

Snape: Continue with the list.

Lipstick: You have a big nose and bad teeth. You're allied to the devil, or at least a wicked spirit, or at least you once were. And that alliance was created when the wicked spirit gave you a mark.

Tonks: Also he has a third nipple.

Snape: *Eyes flashing* Nymphadora, how could you possibly be privy to that information?

Tonks: *Mutters something about Remus and bottle of old Ogdens*

Snape: *Ignoring her with great dignity* So you could say, I out of all the denizens of Hogwarts am most like the cultural stereotype of wicked witch, y chromosome not withstanding. You may also notice that as a wicked witch, I fill the narrative role most commonly associated with wicked witches in fairy tales, that of wicked stepmother.

Lipstick: You do?

Snape: Of course. I am a man of thirty seven. Do you think I might have better things to do with my considerable intellect and verbal dexterity than bully a child of sixteen for no apparent reason? Do you think a person of my keen powers of observation would have failed to have noticed that Draco Malfoy is a talentless arrogant little prick? I am in fact fulfilling my allotted place in a mythical narrative, the wicked step-mother forever championing my own morally inferior "offspring" over Potters suffering Cinderella.

Tonks: Draco's awful pretty for an ugly sister, Snape.

Snape: * Continuing to ignore her* So you see, I have more than earned my place in this menstrual hut, every bit as much as that bizarre interpretation of Lycanthropy that you mooch after.

Tonks: Remus is not bizarre!

Snape: Of course not. I'm perfectly sure that the fact other literary depictions of werewolves do not include that they resemble nothing so much as invalid victorian gentlewomen was a mere oversight on other writers part. If they mentioned the species was as fragile as Lupin I doubt it would be so widely feared.

Tonks: Lupin is not fragile!

Snape. No, he just needs to sleep a lot. And seems to have permanent influenza.

Tonks: I hear you put colour in his cheeks.

Snape: However stimulating you may find discussing the finer points of your current teenage crush Nymphadora, I believe this conversation was about me. Now, if you will, going back to your point about asocial doubles, you will find with close examination of the text that as the wicked stepmother functions as double and foil for the perfect dead mother while in fact being two sides of the same thing, I function as double and foil for Saint Lily the Divine. Lily exhibits all the laudable qualities of perfect, loving, passive mother, I possess all the negative qualities of motherhood, frequently threatening to kill those in my charge, sullen, resentful and cruel.

Tonks: Also those bloody slimy things in glass jars that you are so fond of is a clangingly obvious metaphor for unnatural wombs with deformed fetuses. It's virtually Mpreg.

Snape: And you will notice that Lily - as we are always being reminded to the point of nausea - stood in front of her child and died to protect Harry from death. I stood in front of my almost-child and killed to prevent Draco from becoming a murderer. An act of much greater heroism in my opinon.

Lipstick: Hmm, and for all we get told how much braver Lily was than Merope, she didn't seem to put up much of a fight. I mean we're told she was a talented witch and I assume she was holding a wand...

Snape: The Dark Lord is an very powerful wizard that raising a wand to can be deadly.

Tonks: What did she have too loose? She was screwed anyway. And if magic wasn't going to work, she could at least have kneed him in the nuts.

Lipstick: And you - you're hysterical. With Sirius in the shrieking shack, you were the incoherent rage of a woman wronged incarnate.

Snape: Sirius Black tried to kill me, a fact that everyone neatly glosses over. He had every reason to be in Azkaban, he nearly killed me, but he was the bright popular boy with a good future that a little mistake with the school ugly should not marr.

Tonks: But mate, you did yourself no favours coming on like you had a screw loose in front of the Minister for magic.

Lipstick: But isn't that a classic oh so seventies example of the effects of masculine opression? That women are so used to having violence against them ignored, smoothed over and normalised that when they speak up they often sound like the unreasonable ones, just because half of them fully expects not to be listened to.

Snape: I think it is a curious development of the wicked witch character by JK Rowling to suddenly have it also include the textbook experiences of sexist opression. Please also note my professional life is marred by the glass ceiling effect that women of the eighties complained so loudly about.

Lipstick: So the stereotype of evil woman now also includes a stereotype of feminist woman?

Tonks: Bollocks. I knew the wizarding world was fucked.

Snape: I think not. After all we do not know yet that I'm going to be denounced. I might get Order of Morgan First Class for my services to woman kind by the end of book seven.

Tonks: *snort* I think that's unlikely. I think the best you can hope for is a quick death and a glorious re-appraisal in fifty years time.

Snape: Fifty points from Griffyndor for being defeatist, Nymphadora.