Oh, dear. Jean Bentley and the commenters over at Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog seem to have gotten themselves in quite a snit over a post I wrote at Ta-Nehisi Coates' place a few days ago about sex and romantic relationships in the Harry Potter books.
I take Jean's point, of course, that these are books that are read and loved by children as well as adults: I worked a Harry Potter release party lo these many years ago as a Barnes and Noble store clerk, so I know who the target audience is. And as I mentioned in my post, I have a much-younger brother who loves Harry Potter, and I would have been very sad if we'd thought he'd have to stop reading the books at some point because of content issues (and I called my mother to warn her about the scene Molly Weasley calls Bellatrix a bitch and kills her). I don't think sex scenes would be appropriate in the novels or the movies, and I didn't say anything to that effect.
But these are books where multiple people, some of them young are murdered and others are tortured. The cutting punishment used by Umbridge really set off my sensors for something that is not necessarily appropriate for younger readers. Characters who would be considered underaged in the United States drink hard alcohol. There are implications of sexual assault--and of pedophilia--in Fenrir Greyback's demands for Hermione after she's tortured, and for children in general. Harry is abused as a child. If readers young and old can take those things, I think they can take better-written descriptions of romantic relationships, don't you? Rowling trusts her readers to manage an awful lot of difficult things; it's odd to me that she seizes up when writing about love.