Hmmm. Now I'm wondering whether obliviation could be exploited to enhance the experience of early (but not technically first) sexual encounters. If one maintained the changes to confidence and presumably sexually relevant skills but also maintained the excitement, anticipation and perception of novelty of the first time...

Restoring the exact brain state is probably overkill.

I'd expect resetting to their previous values the connection-strengths in the portion of the conceptual activation network centered around <sex> to restore what I understand by "innocence" in this context.

In fact, it might be sufficient (assuming you didn't have the old values lying around to support a real reset) to just lower those connection-strengths by a constant factor. Which would perhaps be installing a new innocence rather than restoring the old one, but not only do I suspect it would be very hard to tell the difference, I'm not actually sure the distinction means anything in the first place.

Anyway, perhaps I'm just being pedantic. But it seems worthwhile, in a community that is often concerned with mind-as-algorithm rather than mind-as-attribute-of-brain, to acknowledge the distinction.

As long as I'm here, I should mention a third approach: activating an additional node that inhibits <sex>. A lot of real-world attempts at preserving innocence seem to operate this way, although it seems to me that the result is nothing at all like the innocence they purport to preserve.

Ah. I guess the laws of narrative causality demand that Draco Malfoy actually be a female 13 year-old rapist pregnant with Harry's baby. Given what he's up against, Harry really needs to be as fully-qualified a protagonist as possible.

I wonder if Dumbledore was the one who arranged it...