#regardless i'm keeping that in the tags for fear of being misinterpreted

[superfallingstars]

one of the (MANY!) things that i can’t stop thinking about regarding that horrible discourse post is the way that the terms sexual harassment and sexual assault are thrown around. i think that whether or not the incident (where james turns snape upside down with his own spell and exposes his underwear in front of everyone) “counts” as sexual harassment or assault doesn’t really matter. at least, not in the way the people in that discourse post think that it matters.

how we as the readers would define this event based on our own morality is relatively unimportant. what actually matters in this situation is how snape experienced it. nobody involved in that discourse post considers whether snape himself would define this event as sexual assault – and even if he would define it as such, whether that would influence his perception of how harmful it was. after all, people can experience the same event differently; what one person considers a bad day can be extremely traumatic for someone else. because of this, trying to objectively quantify the degree of harm snape experienced by defining this incident as sexual assault, harassment, bullying, or whatever, obscures the most important part of the incident – which is how it affected snape! it's so frustrating, because this is something that we could actually have interesting discourse about. did james know how deeply his actions were affecting snape? would he have changed his behavior if he knew? or did he already know, and simply not care?

but even more frustrating is the fact that despite all of the animosity in that post, i don't think anyone involved actually cares about whether or not the incident was sexual harassment/assault. the function of those terms in that post is simply to assign morality to the people involved. if the incident counts as sexual assault, then snape is a Victim and therefore Good, and james is a Perpetrator and therefore Bad. if it wasn’t sexual assault, then the incident wasn’t really that harmful, so snape is Bad and james is Good. it’s mind-bogglingly reductive. i guess it's just remarkable that everyone involved in that post seems so confident in their ability to define sexual harassment and assault, while simultaneously ignoring any of the effects that this could have had on snape. instead, sexual harassment and assault just serve as proxies for morality in the never-ending argument of whether or not snape Bad.

tl;dr what you call this incident does not determine the amount of harm it caused, and also you should care about the amount of harm it caused if you're going to make claims about morality