It's a pretty common theme to write fanfic with the magical world having a Victorian view on sex. They dress Victoria after all, what are you expecting?

It's obviously dumb.

I have a few assumptions. Firstly is that both genders are treated very equally due to the long-running power equalisation caused by magic. Secondly is that contraception and treatment for STDs is widely available and has been for a long time.

The first assumption I think rules out any gender imbalances. Things like believing men that sleep with lots of women are okay but women who sleep with lots of men are sluts won't fly. Women are in many places of power and are able to cut off such attitudes at the knees.

Contraception rules out any issues caused by accidentally getting pregnant and social stigmas attached to it. This I think would feed back into the whole slut thing. In the muggle world access to contraception has been empowering and I have no reason to believe it's not the same in the magical world, just much earlier.

Thoughts?

 

Per Pottermore, women are among those chosen as Ministers for Magic from end of XVII onwards. I think this is a very good example of greater gender equality in the wizarding world.

Abd what do I think? Hogwarts is coeducational boarding school with a ton of unsupervised space and seeming tacit understanding that you can break certain rules as long as you aren't stupid enough to get caught. Students probably fuck like rabbits and teachers pretend to know nothing and only give house elves a contraceptive potions to lace the pumpkin juice with because they don't trust students that much.

Also shared Quiddith changing rooms.
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This also made me remember a fic where there was a magical abortion but seemingly not magical contraception as Narcissa was sent to Azkaban for constantly aborting her kids.

 

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Some people.

 

It's hard to say for sure, since JKR avoided any explicit mention of sex like the plague, while in reality it clearly happened at Hogwarts - you think snogging was all that happened in those broom closets?

I imagine sex is socially treated much like in the muggle world. Maybe a touch more liberally, since you know, magic and love potions.

 

Isn't Hermione kind of criticized for having two boyfriends? If we know anything about this universe, it's that there's no journalism, people just sort of fabricate her into being Krum's latest fling, while also liking Harry. Krum is probably the closest thing to a playboy that Rowling would allow to exist, otherwise the wizards just sort of pretend not to have sex drive or initiative. I don't remember Krum being criticized for dating a girl who was 15 at the time, or one who 'had a boyfriend'.
I don't think sex not being mentioned is a good reason to believe it's not going on, but we also don't have a good reason to believe that people don't have different views on people having sex. The Krum example is pretty weak, but that's as close as you're going to get to an insight from canon.

 

IIRC only Skeeter ran with "Hermione is a slut", and Skeeter's pretty obviously the kind of contemptible gossip rag hag you're supposed to ignore (even though you secretely might want to know the latest celebrity gossip).

Sex not being mentioned might just be tied to 1) HP started as children's literature 2) sex wasn't relevant to the story (just like Dumbledore's homosexuality) so it wasn't included 3) some people have no interest in writing about sex.

 

I’m going to take the extreme view. If it wasn’t mentioned in the books, it didn’t happen. So...

Wizards and witches don’t have sex. They get dragons in their chests that cause them to snog. Said dragons copulate in the snogging and thus the female dragon turns witch into a host body as it creates a magical being to host its own child.

A baby is born as a shield to host the children of these dragons. After death of the wizard, it takes a few decades but their corpse spontaneously become a dragon.

It’s why dark magic is so evil and categorized that way. Dark magic harms the dragon within.

...

I’m not sober right now.

 

If kids of two trabsformed werewolves were wolves with unusually high intelligence I would suspect that we would get slightly more intelligent puppies.

 

She is the worst kind of tabloid writer, but is believed enough that people send hate mail to Hermione (with Bubotuber pus and threats of sending curses).

But I think it's more about jealousy and/or protectiveness of the national hero (and a bit of anti-Muggleborn sentiment) than the view of sex in the Wizarding World.

Exception being maybe Molly: I don't remember if she directly said something about her being a "scarlet woman" or only Ron commenting on it, but it might the closest we see in canon of a reaction to sex. That and the very same Molly bragging to her 12-year-old daughter about brewing love potions.

 

Rofl. I fully support this canon-supported interpretation. Pretty sure it's monsters they carry in their chests though, not dragons.

 

The concept of love potions is some real fridge fucking horror. I imagine the views on them (and sex in general) are divided by blood politics, and purebloods probably have a pretty disgusting rape culture, especially towards muggles, while the rest of the British wizards use them as recreational aphrodisiacs like ecstasy or ghb.

In Crimes of Grindelwald we see the fallout of Queenie's love potion and her subsequent wizard supremacist alignment. I feel like Merope Gaunt might have had everything handled and kept hush were she in a normal pureblood family and the genders were reversed. Maybe a small portion of the muggleborn population are pureblood bastards? Contraception is easily accesible though, so I can't imagine it's a regular occurrence (more of a plot bunny, tbh.)

And as Arthellion pointed out, implicit to any discussion of wizard sexual culture is the fact that the romance that happens in HP is idyllic and, well, bad. Maybe wizarding Britain is also behind on the divorce trend?

 

Concern with female purity (and as such a negative view on female sexual promiscuity) is a very common phenomenon, almost universal until a few decades ago, and still present in many parts of the world. That is because at least one of its drivers is purely biological; males, unlike females, can never be 100% sure that their offspring is truly theirs. Ensuring that your bride is a virgin is a magnificent way to prevent yourself from getting cuckolded, and as such, passing those handsome genes of yours to the next generation. To make a point of it; It is not evident to me that something that happened in the west very recently (and very much by design) could be achieved just due to the equalizing effect of magic [For added reference, contrast the first and second waves of feminism- and the thirty or so years between them].

 

Long time wide availability of effective contraception in the magical world would lead to more healthy views of female sexuality. JKR wrote Wizarding Britain as vaguely Victorian but I am not convinced she actually considered such details when she was merely trying for "quirky" when world-building.

 

Playing devil's advocate: Love potions make a lot more sense if you assume that wizarding society is strictly abstinent.

I get the feeling that love potions don't work long-term, at least on wizards. That, combined with a strictly abstinent attitude towards sex, means that love potions go from a date-rape drug to being closer to getting someone drunk and getting them to do something stupid. Given the existence of love potions, it's also likely that you can't get married while under the effects of one, similar to how you usually can't get married while falling-over drunk. Plus the effects of the potion are pretty obvious, so you rely on your friends to step in to stop you from doing too stupid, again like being drunk.

Love potions are probably mostly used by girls to get a guy to notice them, or (as the fact that they are sold by Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes would attest to) to make your friend fall madly in love with Professor McGonagall as a joke. The sort of long-term use that Merope Gaunt used, or to use as a date-rape drug, is most likely illegal.

 

That could easily be an alternative explanation for this...

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I don't remember if there's any canonical magic that can tell whether or not a child is a bastard but it's not hard to imagine that something like that exists. So if you believe that puritanical views about women are caused by the possibility of infidelity, magic could probably address that issue causing wizarding society to be more gender equitable than it's muggle counterpart.

 

You don't remember whether or not Harry Potter, the children's books, addressed the existence of magic to determine the legitimacy of a child? It's not A Song of Ice and Fire. It's directed at middle school kids. It never even mentioned sex, directly.

 

Yes, sex and infidelity do not good children storybooks make ('Yer a bastard, Harry'). Also, I think you are missing the point @gamarad. The point is not that there is no way to determine if a child is yours, the point is that there wasn't a way back in the good ol' days (i.e. in the ancestral environment), meaning that jealousy and possiveness appeared as the best/only alternatives. Today you could call those feelings - and their corresponding social impact- uneccesary, but that does not mean you could get rid of them any easier than (say) your tailbone, which was useful back when our ancestors had tails, now, not so much.