There’s an old joke about the beautiful young girl who’s drawn into a conversation with a stranger on a bus. She confides that she’s a nymphomaniac with an uncontrollable attraction to Jewish cowboys. At that point, the stranger says, “We really haven’t been introduced, so allow me to introduce myself: I’m Bucky Goldstein.”
Joking aside, a couple of threads lately have touched upon the aspect of misperception or deception between people that have had sex, with sometimes tragic consequences when the misapprehension is brought to light.
I’m curious what the community attitude here is towards that sort of thing in general. What’s the culpability of the man who claims to be a doctor or a lawyer (or a cop or a fireman, for that matter) to score a one-night stand? How about the man that claims to be single when he’s married, or wealthy when he’s just driving a rented Jag? Or the twin brother that impersonates his brother to score with the brother’s erstwhile girlfriend? I knew a guy in college from Fredericksburg, Virginia, that had never set foot outside the US but learned an English accent and wore Union Jack T-shirts; he claimed it never failed. How about the guy that claims to love “Sleepless in Seattle,” but secretly can’t stand it?
Obviously all of these are very different – but where does it cross the line into out-and-out WRONG?
I once heard a “women’s consciousness” speaker claim that even the most tiny of such deceptions amounted to rape, the rationale apparently being that without full knowledge and disclosure, the sex was tainted. This seems an extreme position.
On the other hand, we’ve discussed the cases of pre- and post-op transgendered persons - do they really have an obligation to reveal their birth chromosones to a sexual partner? What about a person who is not transgendered - that is, doesn’t self-identify as a woman, for example, but dressed as one in an effort to seduce a straight man?
In general – where is the need-to-disclose line crossed?
- Rick