If there is a forced sex trade, I would expect the victims to be Muggles or Squibs. It would be too dangerous to keep Witches and Wizards as sex objects. All it takes is for them to get a hold of a wand (which I expect would be easy to sex up someone and steal their wand), and they can wreak havoc.

That being said, I could see date rape drugs being the imperius curse or dosing someone in a love potion. If reported, I bet it is the Aurors who gain the evidence and look for suspects.

I doubt the Wizarding World is kinkier than ours, they just have different ways of dealing with urges, pornographic material and ways to spice things up. I bet most couples don't necessarily try gender-bending sex compared the lack of interesting in similar things in our world.

Lastly, I believe some of Polyjuice potions are hard to get, and very suspect if bought. I wouldn't be surprised if for certain potions, its akin to buying certain types of medicine in the US. Much harder to get and easily could get put on a list if done too often.

 

@Haze @Zenzao

Genuinely can't remember, unfortunately. Mentioned it partly in hope that someone else would know.

 

The Goblins did have that waterfall to remove disguises which was able to nullify polyjuice. While yes, I realise it's a bank and hence has rigorous procedures to scan for identity, it is an example of an institution checking for polyjuice-based subterfuge. As to the complexity and restricted nature of it, I'd point you to Zombie's answer (which I've quoted later in this post) and the fact that I'm talking about the sex trade, which in of itself is illegal. I'm not sure people in that business care about how restricted polyjuice is.

Regarding the rest of your post, I'd say that the very reason I ask about the sex trade in the wizarding world is because of the points you make. Since there is a lot more equality between men and women in the wizarding world (though not complete equality: a lot more men support the Dark Lord than do women, if my reading of the numbers of death eaters mentioned in canon is correct), they would have to have some alternate form of sex trade. There are women in the wizarding world who have been put in horrible positions. An example is Merope Gaunt. We don't see her get forced into anything, but JKR was writing for kids. Hypothetically, if they did get into the sex trade, would they fetch a price at all, given men can transform into women using polyjuice? How does the economics of it work out?

The entire point, though, is that this is a potion all sixth years are taught to brew in school (If I remember canon correctly). The ingredients themselves don't seem like anything restricted, it's just the end result which can have certain results. The ingredients were restricted for younger students only, iirc. It's considered a fairly difficult potion to brew for sure, but a sufficiently amoral potions master might have no compunctions about brewing polyjuice for shady folk, given adequate ingredients and compensation. In addition, canon never tells us whether a potion has to be brewed in a certain quantity. In that case, wouldn't making 10 standard cauldron-fulls be the same as making one?

Tbh, this makes it a very interesting chemical engineering question if we knew how the ingredients worked and interacted, but since we don't, I'd go with the supposition that magical ingredients react the same way in bulk as they do in smaller quantities to a large extent. In that case, making a lot of polyjuice would merely require a proportionately larger amount of raw ingredients.

An interesting parallel is the making of TNT in the real world. You're taught how to make it in university (if you're a chemist), but you're not actually allowed to make it. A vast majority of law-abiding chemists do not make it at all. But there are enough for there to be a vibrant illegal trade in it.

I totally agree with this. we shouldn't judge the complexity of making polyjuice from the comments of a 12 year old. The recipe to make it is kept in a school full of schoolkids. Even if it's restricted, it's available for 16-17 year olds quite freely.

The one thing JKR seems to have underlined in canon is that wizards and muggles aren't that different at their core. The culture differs and they argue about different things, but human nature is the same. The sex trade is as old as humanity itself, why would it not occur among wizards?

 

Alas. Thanks anyhow.

Aaaaand now I'm picturing Snape dosing whomever to look like Lily Potter. He was there at Godric's Hollow in the films. A few hairs kept to remember her by and... Ergh.

 

Why did you think he became a potions master after he lost his dream girl, huh?

 

Can you take hairs from a person who is transformed via polyjuice and use it to transform again ?

 

I see polyjuice as a transfiguration effect that lasts around an hour, perhaps an hour is the sweet spot between stability, accuracy etc. i.e. adding more boomslang skin and it could last longer but it would not be as accurate.

Cutting your hair off while transformed and it would stay the same, until the hour is up. Adding that hair to a new batch of potion before it reverted to your own hair may produce a working polyjuice potion.

Crouch JR kept moody around because it would be too difficult to keep a potion going non stop without a live subject.

 

So no fucking Cleopatra despite having a hair from her long dead head. If you could do that, I wonder what would be defined as necrophilia in the magical world...

 

If you could use hair from a dead person Snape would be engaging in grave robbing.

 

Let your thoughts not come near my shower thoughts, else you'll regret it for the rest of your life.

But if you did try this with a hair of (say) Nearly Headless Nick, you'd be fucked for sure if the hair of a dead person doesn't kill you outright. Dead people in the wizarding world simply do not seem to die of old age.

 

What an interesting conversation you're having in here. If I were to write a story about the magical sex trade I would probably make Polyjuice something that only the most refined of prostitutes/brothels have in their arsenal. An expensive option that might be given to a person on account of their continued patronage, with the demand to keep it a secret.

Or maybe as something that is regulated differently by various countries, giving it some political complexity. Let's say it's forbidden in Britain -- and therefore really exclusive, since there's always danger of the owner of a brothel getting busted -- but more or less liberally used in Egypt or France or what have you.

 

Well, the problem probably is that the law of supply and demand would probably cause polyjuice to be smuggled into the country. I'm unsure of how easy it would be to disguise, but I imagine quite easily, especially if you transport it in say, a half-brewed form.

The thing is that hosting a brothel itself is illegal in a vast majority of these countries, so a brothel being busted is in of itself a problem. In the UK, at least, I believe that brothels are illegal, but offering sex for money is not. In this case, an expensive wish-fulfillment industry might actually work out if the British government believe that making polyjuice legal but heavily taxed is a good option to raise money. If they have their heads in their collective arses, then I suppose the busting of wish-fulfillment rackets would depend on the efficiency of the DMLE. Polyjuice itself isn't illegal, but using it for the purposes we're discussing would only get you in trouble if you were to get caught. Which is difficult when a wizard doesn't want to get caught, as we saw in DH.

Also, forget organised brothels for a moment. Think of kidnapping girls for sex, or transporting them in for a particular event, something outright banned everywhere (but it still happens). That industry might completely change in a world with polyjuice. I imagine trafficking people is much harder than polyjuice, so you could just source random people locally, dose them with the appropriate amounts of polyjuice and sell sex. Busting that up would probably be an interesting exercise for an auror team.

Possibly through grave-robbing?

 

Given how the potion made Crouch look like Moody, it seems that the potion makes you look the same as the person's physical appearance at the time of pulling the hair(except the haircut?) rather than some abstract of them.

However, would the hair make you look like the person at the time of the plucking? Could Harry yank out a few dozen hairs of himself at sixteen, and if someone used it twenty years later would they look like Harry at sixteen or Harry at thirty-six? If the former is what happens, could you polyjuice into yourself at a younger age?