I invented the Slytherin Gift to Virgins in December 2000, but it has been unwrapped by only a dozen or so email correspondents. Clues as to what it is could be found in 'Letter from Exile' and commentaries in its review boxes - I daresay this little vignette will surprise no one. If the same technique has appeared in any other writer's work in the interim, I'm unaware of it (and believe me, I've read many a Slytherin sex scene). I really did make this up. The central simile may be as tired as they come (sic) but as far as I know, this is the first time that fandom has transformed that simile into so literal a metaphor.

This is pretty much as I originally wrote it to correspondents, but with some bits tacked on to the beginning and end.

• Dora (meaning 'gift'). Real name, Ida Bauer. From Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Freud's patient perceived herself very clearly as an object of exchange in adults' sexual games. (Her father tried to trade her to his best friend in exchange for a hassle-free affair with the best friend's wife.) Freud never quite understood what she was fussing about, and persistently sought other causes for her illness -- ones that were less clearly a reproach to patriarchal power.
  
  
• The various editions of A Discours on Luvve's Expresciown: elaborate excuse for my forgetting Anglo-Saxon (including exactly when it died out) and blurry reproductions of Middle English.
  
  
• Snape-the-Puritan: it's been done and done since Snape-romance began. So sue me. I was packing in the Jacobean refs three years ago. Honest.
  
  
• The talking cunt: I presume there's film of this somewhere? Or has cinema only come up with the talking cock? I've not yet seen The Vagina Monologues but gather this isn't quite what that play does. The idea of a woman 'speaking her desire' is a satire on French feminist theory and a tribute to a very British ex-colleague of mine. She declared she could think of nothing worse than her vaginal 'lips', pace Irigaray and Cixous, constantly touching each other in permanent self-arousal. "How inconvenient, how exhausting!" (Mr Sphinx -- "Well, now you know how men feel.")
  
  
• The scroll: sorry this is a spoiler for a much later chapter of A Decoding of the Heart -- though I do wonder if I'll ever manage to write up to that point in the story. The intention to do so is still there. (The scroll is a critical token in Christian the pilgrim's progress.) The 'Dementor Girl' refers to Hermione's nickname in A Decoding of the Heart; she found a way of defeating them. The 'Perriand' is the Charlotte Perriand chaise-longue (upholstered in Nagini) of chapter 3 of A Decoding of the Heart. There are a couple of things here that only make full sense if you've read Why Slytherins are Sexier and Letter from Exile. The ring is a sapphire containing a particle of Severus's soul. It shines just as long as love does.
  
  
• The Nun getting the papers -- straight out of the 'Women's Prison' scenes of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. I think I can also lay at her door (to The Bloody Chamber collection) the alliterations around sexual activity. At least I hope so. The cunt's speech seems to be a little like Grawp's in Order of the Phoenix.
  
  
• "Tiresias." Encyclopedia Mythica from Encyclopedia Mythica Online.
  [Accessed May 31, 2004].

Tiresias
by James Hunter

Tiresias was the son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo; he was a blind prophet, the most famous soothsayer of ancient Greece.

The most famous account of the origin of his blindness and his prophetic talent is as follows. When Tiresias was walking in the woods one day, he came upon two great serpents copulating; he struck them with his staff, and was thereupon transformed into a woman. Seven years later, she/he passed by the same place and came upon the same two serpents copulating; she/he struck them again with the staff and was turned back into a man. Some time later, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who had more pleasure in sex, the man or the woman: Zeus said it was the woman, while Hera claimed men got more pleasure from the act. To settle the argument, they consulted Tiresias, since he had experienced life as both sexes, and Tiresias sided with Zeus. In her anger, Hera struck Tiresias blind. Since Zeus could not undo the act of another deity, he gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy in compensation.

Another account says that Tiresias accidentally saw Athena naked, and she covered his eyes with her hands, thus rendering him blind. When Tiresias' mother Chariclo asked Athena to restore her son's sight, the goddess could not undo her own action but gave him the gift of prophecy as compensation.

There are many tales about individual prophecies of Tiresias: he predicted the manner of Narcissus' death; he tried to warn Oedipus of the rashness of that king's inquiries about his parents; he predicted that the sacrifice of Menoeceus, son of Creon, would permit the forces of Eteocles to repulse the army of the Seven Against Thebes. Tiresias eventually died from drinking from the spring Tilphussa, but even after death his shade was able to offer valuable prophecy to the hero Odysseus.

• I hadn't heard of it and hadn't read it at the time, but Diderot wrote a story called 'Le Bijoux Indiscrets' in which a Genie magics women's 'jewels' (vaginas) to speak.  'Tis now on my reading list.