Sexual Ramifications Of Harry Potter’s Room Of Requirements

Harry Potter will rightfully go down as one of the greatest stories ever told, but it's not without its unanswered questions. Why are love potions, which are essentially magical date rape drugs, legal and sold in stores? Why do wizards let Muggles starve when they could wipe out world hunger overnight? And, most importantly, were Hogwarts students fucking in the Room of Requirement?

As a refresher, the Room of Requirement is a secret room in Hogwarts. If you walk past it three times while thinking about something you need, the door will appear to you, and there's no apparent limit to what the Room can conjure up (although it can't violate Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, obviously). Most notably, the Room was used as a training area and headquarters by Dumbledore's Army in The Order Of The Phoenix, and as a hideout for students who resisted Voldemort's control of the school in The Deathly Hallows. It could also be used, I posit, as an emergency fucknasium.

If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about the sex lives of fictional teenagers. And to minds like ours, Hogwarts poses an especially challenging thought experiment, thanks to its status as a dangerous magical boarding school -- hardly the most sex-positive environment. We do know that some of its students are sexually active. They're teenagers, and that's practically proof enough. But if you're a prude who thinks magical British teens would be chaste, consider this canonical Easter egg in the Prisoner Of Azkaban credits.

Consider also Chapter 23 of The Goblet Of Fire (and its equivalent movie scene), wherein, during the Yule Ball, Snape catches couples making out and punishes them by docking house points. If Snape hadn't wand-blocked them, they presumably would have gone further in their games of Hide the Flobberworm. And that's just one incident in a chapter that's more about relationship drama than it is the main plot. Hogwarts students are no strangers to teen romantic angst, and I doubt that they're all going through that emotional stress just for a peck on the cheek.

So it's safe to say that Hogwarts students fuck. But do they fuck in the Room of Requirement? The Room appears when someone "needs" something, but can it ever be truly said that one needs to fuck? However, like many concepts in Harry Potter, "need" is ill-defined at best. That means we're going to have to define it ourselves.

Let's examine the scenarios in which the Room has appeared. In Hallows, students face immediate and brutal, albeit non-lethal, physical threats. The Room also acknowledges Neville's need that the Death Eaters and their followers must not be able to access the Room and discover them. Draco pulls the same trick when using the Room to plot Dumbledore's assassination in Half-Blood Prince, ensuring himself privacy. This implies that the Room is indifferent to the morality of what occurs within it, assuming that it even understands the concept.

But what about Dumbledore's Army? Harry and his followers didn't need to fight back against Dolores Umbridge's corrupt control of the school, and they didn't need to organize and train in the Room. But they wanted to very much, because they felt it was the right thing to do and the best location in which to do it. Had they stayed out of trouble, there would have been no immediate physical danger they needed to avoid. Yes, the wider Wizarding World would have suffered for their inaction, but if that was the Room's basis for allowing them access, why would the Room later allow access to Umbridge's goons, led by a student who "needed" to betray her friends? Again, the room appears either indifferent or ignorant to rules.

Most other examples are anecdotal, but they support the idea that a "need" is really just a very powerful want. The Room is first alluded to by Dumbledore, who discovered it when he really needed a bathroom. But despite Dumbledore's advanced age, we're never given any sense that his body is failing. So we have no reason to believe that he couldn't have made it to another bathroom, or even conjured up a magical solution. The Room was simply more convenient.

Dobby uses the Room to help Winky sleep off a hangover, and Filch, the caretaker, discovers cleaning supplies in it. Neither of those are a "need" -- Winky would have just been embarrassed or uncomfortable elsewhere, and Filch would have merely had to make a longer trek to find supplies. Again, the Room is actually responding to a desire for convenience, not an immediate physical necessity in the biological sense.

But perhaps most convincing is the fact that Fred and George once hid in the Room while they were being chased for their late-night shenanigans. In other words, the Room willingly sheltered students from the potential of nasty consequences that wouldn't have existed in the first place if not for their own initial actions. In fact, one of the Room's defining characteristics is that, in the right configuration, it's full of forgotten items that students "needed" to hide, lest they lose them to the administration. And if the Room tolerates pranksters and rule-breakers, surely it would have no objections to consensual bouts of bodily transfiguration, despite it being frowned upon by the school?

So the Room would clearly allow Hogwarts students to fuck in it. But why would the students need/want it, out of every room in the sprawling castle? Because the school is structured in a way that makes it difficult for a student to polish their wand in private, let alone while in a small study group. There are spells in place that prevent boys from accessing the girl's dormitory, and while the reverse isn't true, remember that Harry shared a bedroom with four other boys -- privacy is almost unheard of at Hogwarts. Every room in the castle, from the bathrooms to the classrooms, are either in constant use, rendered inaccessible by the nightly curfew, or simply dangerous to spend time in. At best, a moment of privacy could be interrupted and ruined by embarrassment or even academic punishment, like Snape dished out in Goblet.

While I'm sure some solution involving a broom cupboard and a series of clever spells could be concocted, the Room of Requirement and the guaranteed privacy a smart request of it enables would easily be the safest and most enjoyable option. It's easy to access if you know its secret, and you could "need" any luxurious, romantic surroundings and accessories that you wanted. That, after all, is what we just established -- the Room of Requirement is more accurately the Room of Want.

So we can only conclude that generations of clever Hogwarts students were using the Room of Requirement for decidedly non-academic purposes, be it riding the Romanian Longhorn, engorgement charm practice, or even some lonely unicorn maintenance. Furthermore, it's distinctly possible that, in every instance in which the Room failed to appear when desired, the Room wasn't rejecting the request -- it was merely already in use by students who wanted a little privacy to blast the skrewt. Every time Dumbledore's Army showed up to train, the Room probably had to clean out forgotten articles of clothing and empty flasks of whatever potions wizards use for lubricant and contraception. And God knows how many trysts created a need for a trip to that special little place in Knockturn Alley that can take care of the sort of unexpected magical creation that ruins an academic career.

While this justifies a tremendous amount of my exhaustively detailed self-insert fanfiction, it also raises a disturbing question. As mentioned, the Room of Requirement had no qualms about assisting Draco and his Death Eater companions in plotting a murderous attack on the castle. So what other crimes could the Room enable? How long before Hogwarts is embroiled in a love potion, false memory charm, and Room of Requirement-fueled rape scandal? Or worse, how many crimes have gone unpunished? Ms. Rowling, I look forward to reading your relevant Pottermore updates. I hope to discover that Hogwarts is taking this issue very seriously.

Mark is on Twitter, and has a book which he promises isn't about Harry Potter sex.

For more, check out 5 Horrifying Realities Of The "Harry Potter" Government and Why Everyone In "Harry Potter" Is Kind Of A Jerk.

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