#ksjdksjdlskd

[sneverussape]

random thought i had in the shower but: what do you think severus thought of women? and i don’t mean what he thought of them in a romantic way. i mean...do you think he was progressive in his mindset, or do you think he shared a similar mindset with the bulk of his generation (lol snape is a boomer...i will never not find that funny) which viewed men as the superior gender? 

(disclaimer that i only mean this discourse in a purely academic sense and i’m deliberately not trying to project my own beliefs onto him; i just want to approach it from his character’s pov based on what we know and can deduce from canon.) my take is: given his background and the environment and time period he had grown up in, it was likely the latter, although i don’t think he would have been as overt in showing it. he was himself an easy target and would have learned to keep his mouth shut early in life, but i bet that there had been instances growing up when he’d told lily she couldn’t do certain things because she was a girl, or when he’d bristled whenever she teased him that he looked/threw/ran like a girl. i bet there were moments growing up when tobias degraded him because he hadn’t deemed his son “masculine enough”. i bet that a lot of the time the marauders had bullied him, mcgonagall had given slughorn the “boys will be boys” excuse within earshot, and snape would have had to begrudgingly accept because no way could he have been seen as less. he was a man and had to take it like a man. there would have been no other recourse.  i’d like to think too that he wasn’t so far gone that he thought all women were less important or less intelligent than men. in canon he never made any derogatory remarks about anyone’s gender (that i remember at least, feel free to correct me), and never correlated it with performance and such; he doled out punishments to anyone, after all, and was more concerned about students’ behavior than anything else. he also seemed the type to have known better anyway once he was more grown-up, or at the very least he had known what to say and not say in polite company. we never really know how he interacted with anyone else, especially with peers and colleagues, under normal circumstances though, which is a pity as that would have given us more clues. all in all it doesn’t seem to be so far-fetched that he may have learned and espoused misogynistic beliefs growing up (let’s not even get started on what he thought about lgbtqa+ because i think he’d have been very old-school about that too) but it’s also possible he may have attempted to unlearn it as he got older, or at the very least, learned to restrain his tongue enough to not spread those ideals any further than his own mind. there aren’t a lot of fics that show this side of him...they often write him as a bit progressive, but it’s equally believable, if not more so, that he wasn’t.