of sexual revelations / headcanon
A long, long headcanon about Minerva’s first years of discovering her sexuality
For a long time, Minerva looked down on people who slept around. Internalised sexism filled her with cynicism and a pretentious, and perhaps bitter feeling that she was above that. She was raised in a home where sex was not talked about, where it was something that was supposed to be saved until after marriage, and for a long time she believed that a woman could not be respected if she was sexy, if she dared to fuck someone she wasn’t in love with, let alone married to.
This changed over the years, of course. Minerva began to understand that what she thought was wrong, and that a woman’s sexuality should not be more shameful than a man’s and that it was okay to have sex with someone when you weren’t sure you wanted to spend your entire life with.
She lost her virginity in her last year at Hogwarts to her first boyfriend, who she quickly broke up with after because the Quidditch rivalry between the two was too strong. Or at least, that was what she told herself. What she didn’t admit to herself, was that she had been lying to him and herself when she told him she loved him, too. It was selfish. And that’s why she ended it.
For a while after that, she once again stayed away from sex. Not because she was scared people wouldn’t respect her --- they would respect her either way --- but because she felt like she was unable to fall in love. Often she had worried about how cold-hearted she could be, how she could not relate to things others worried about -- perhaps her way of thinking was just different, but most of the time she was quite sure something was wrong with her.
But one night she and her co-workers had gone into wizarding London to drink some beers and laugh a little after a long week at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Minerva found herself in a situation she had not ever anticipated herself to be in: kissing a girl. Her sexuality had always been something she had struggled with, something she found hard to understand and so in some ways it didn’t come as a surprise. In many others, it did.
Her lips were painted a deep red and her laugh was one of the best sounds of the world. Her kiss seemed to be addictive, but not in the romantic sense --- in the physical one. Soon after their lips met, they left the pub and Minerva’s co-workers (who were all quite surprised) and went back to Minerva’s appartement, where the woman stayed the night in which not much sleeping happened.
Minerva made her breakfast the next morning, and once she was asked if she wanted to meet up for coffee one day, she found herself saying no.
Because Minerva had found something out that night: you did not need a relationship for sex. And there was no shame in that. There was no shame in not wanting to be in a relationship with someone, but wanting to fuck them anyway.
It was a revelation that was of importance to her, one that was so different the one years and years ago. Minerva would not identify herself by the amount of people she had slept with, she would not identify herself with the amount of people she had dated, she would not identify herself by anyone but herself.