I see your point, but what you’re describing isn’t what happening in my story. It’s not a serious, dedicated, all in sex slave/master owner and owned relationship, it’s a woman in a relatively open-ended D/s relationship agreeing to be bossed by his cousin for a weekend. I think some people are overstating the power dynamic between Judd and Beth, possibly because of a bias against people who are mentally ill.
Either way, it’s just a silly story and nobody is obligated to like it. But I am curious about exploring the questions of sexual ethics it raises. If we do that though, the dynamic between the characters needs to be clearly understood. (Which is also part of my responsibility as a writer - perhaps I failed in that regard.)
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Imagine that you were talking about scat or adult incest instead of BDSM would you be so harshly critical of your husband then if he was offended?
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When he and I have disagreements on principle we’re usually quite frank in taking down one another’s arguments. I’m no more ‘‘harshly critical’’ of his opinion than he was of the underlying ethos of my piece. But this happened months ago, I was thinking about returning to revise the work, and I thought his argument was cogent enough to see what folks here thought before I made any changes.
I can see three potential issues with this scenario.
Can sexual consent ever be signed away? I still remember an old Cecil column that said a songwriter, regardless of what contract terms he’s agreed to with his publishers and label, always retains the right to decide who will issue the first recorded version of song. Seems to me that the relationship between Beth and Judd gets into similar territory. Despite any safe words, or Beth’s ability to back out later, just the suggestion that Judd has a proxy to give Beth’s consent could be a red flag for a lot of people.
Beth goes from a situation where she would need to give active consent, to one where consent is assumed and she’d need to actively refuse.
Suppose the emotional equation was a bit different, and Beth was in love with Judd. Beth doesn’t want to have sex with Kale, but she knows that if she refuses she’ll disappoint Judd. It’s not just a question of two consenting adults anymore; Judd (deliberately or not) will be influencing Beth’s decision. How much influence can he have before it becomes coercion?
Now, none of those are insurmountable obstacles, but I can definitely see them getting into the grey area of consent, and probably over the line for some people.
Guys who won’t watch porn because they feel it is immoral (despite the actors and actresses all consenting) would probably make up less than 5-10% of all males. Solely based on that, I’d say your husband is an outlier. I do agree with him that consent is not sufficient for ethics. A man or woman who has 0 self esteem and a history of abuse will consent to things they wouldn’t consent to if they had self esteem and had never been abused. An 18 year old who has been abused by the people they were supposed to trust (parents, priests, teachers, etc) is going to agree to sexual things that still make actually engaging in those sexual things unethical.
The fact that Judd sends Beth over w/o consulting Kale first is more iffy in my view. Some submissives like the idea of being sexually shared w/o the Dom asking their consent first, so I don’t think that part was iffy. It was more involving a guy who didn’t agree w/o asking his consent that would bother me. But it is just a story, not real life.
But society still likes to meddle into the consensual sex lives of adults on the basis of knowing better than the people involved what’s good for them.
I personally find BDSM and related sexual/dominant practices distasteful – but I’m with whatever floats folks’ boats (with the exception of kid porn, non-consenting adult, and animal participations). And I’m iffy about claims that street prostitutes are “seizing the power over their own bodies.” I have no position on consensual cannibalism :).
FWIW, I’m a gay girl with vanilla tastes.
Funny story: I had an acquaintance who was a dominatrix and hauled around a “portable dungeon” to appointments. She strapped the dungeon cage to a little trailer she pulled behind her car. One day she was involved in a minor highway accident and the trailer was overturned and the cage got dumped in one of the lanes. Apparently, it caused a massive traffic jam as people stopped to gape :D.
It might still be subjective, but it introduces another factor to take into consideration. As it stands, having sex with an incompetent person is a crime (and the poster I was responding to extended the concept even more, by deeming unethical sex with people suffering from ailments that are way below the bar required for legal incompetence). If you introduce this second factor, you have two questions to answer 1) can we rely on this person to decide for himself in general? 2) Do we have a reason to believe that having sex with this other person was harmful for him? This make a significant difference.
The current approach is at best lazy (simple to solve : this person can never have sex, anybody having sex with him is a criminal), but IMO it rather rests on a spurious and prudish assumption : sex is bad and harmful except in some specific circumstances, while the reality for most people is that sex is good and beneficial except in some specific circumstances. If I myself end up with some mental disease, I might be unable to handle my affairs, but it doesn’t mean that I will suddenly begin to hate blowjobs. And it’s extremely preposterous to assume that if I was magically cured I would want my hypothetical wife to spend a couple decades behind bars for having given me one.
Even if deciding on this second step is still somewhat subjective, it changes a lot. “Dr Z, do you think that the daily blowjobs are harmful for your patient?” is very likely to result in a “no, at the contrary” answer in a case like that. While it may be different in different situation (say, a staff member at the hospital having sex with random incapacited patient), it beats the one-size-fits-all current assumed answer “Of course it does! It’s sex! Let’s throw the wife in jail, that’s undoubtfully what he would want!”
If Spice Weasel can bring up philosophy, I’m going to bring up accounting.
Seriously, though, one of the principles a CPA aspires to is ethical behavior, but beyond that to avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior. It’s unethical to lie on an audit of a company, and we recognize that have an investment in that company creates a conflict of interest, and provides a motivation to lie. Thus, you would not audit a company you were involved in. It’s not enough to say “But I did the audit honestly and ethically!” The risk for unethical behavior is higher than normal and that’s not acceptable.
The story in question makes me think of Stockholm’s Syndrome. While we recognize that this starts with non-consensual abuse, once someone has been conditioned, they would consent to what was happening and even defend their abuser for doing it. In a fictional story, we can see into her mind, but we don’t have that information in real life. I would be worried that someone could impair their judgment though less-abusive measures, such as a simple desire to please a partner or a fear of being alone. Where is the line between I personally don’t know where you draw the line between “pushing her limits” and “abusing her” or when this crosses into psychological conditioning that causes a false consent.
So, personally, I would never be involved in loaning out my partner and I’d be pretty uncomfortable with a partner who said they wanted that.
If we’re talking legal standards, I’m pretty much in favor of keeping the government out of it. If you decide you’re being abused, you should ask the legal system to provide help. It’s a nice idea to protect people from themselves, but legal systems can only do so much.
Even some varieties of animal sex doesn’t bug me. If a guy wants to “have sex” with a horse, there just is no way I can see that as “harming” the horse. The hoss is just gonna laugh. (“Yeah, yeah, whatever, ‘Tiny.’ When you’re done, ya gonna feed me?”)
No, actually, I don’t. Or at least, what I said has nothing in common with what you quoted him as saying.
You said he thinks Beth is being exploited and isn’t capable of giving true consent. I specifically said that it doesn’t sound like Beth is being exploited and that I assume she’s capable of consenting.
If you misread what I wrote to that point, I’m not positive that what you think your husband said is actually what he said.
OK, this is interesting. I have to think about it.
Also, for the people talking about society meddling in people’s sex lives: saying ‘I think this is unethical’ is totally different from saying ‘I think this should be stopped.’ In this case, the ethics are my business because the OP asked what we thought - but if any of the hypothetical people were a friend of mine and told me the story without asking my opinion, there’s no way I’d express one. Because what happens between consenting adults isn’t up to me, or to society, to police. But I can still have an opinion.
That is what troubles me. Are you sure the person is truly giving consent? People, even those not abused or in weird situations, often “give consent” to things they would not do if they truly had a choice.
I am the “slave” in a very happy Master-slave-like relationship, with heavy physical BDSM (at my request as I am a masochist). I have well-controlled depression and anxiety issues. My life is good, happy, and loving.
This thread is kinda freaking me out. I can consent.
(And while “loaning” does happen in M/s circles (rarely, as far as I know), it is generally with the slave’s very clear approval of the concept.)
Beth was attracted to Kale. If Judd had loaned her out to a man she was not attracted to and was in fact repulsed by, but Beth felt pressured to agree to it in order to please Judd, I think that would make the situation very different, and abusive.
I was asked that, too, the last time I brought up the bit about there being no right to interfere with two consenting adults.
It’s extremely disgusting to me, but I fail to see how disgust can be a meaningful method by which to make ethical decisions. People are disgusted by different things. These people obviously were not disgusted by it.
The only issue that gives me pause is the intersection of mental illness and consent. This is not to say that people with mental illnesses give away their ability consent. But there is an innate desire to avoid death in most humans, with some exceptions for intense suffering. If the guy was actually suicidally depressed or actually delusional, or if there was some sort of coercion or codependence involved, then meaningful consent is no longer the default position.
And, yes, suicidal depression is not sufficient for suicide. Untreatable suicidal depression, maybe. But, otherwise, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Still, assuming actual proper consent, which assumes the mental ability to consent, then there is no reason to deny them. And what happened would not be murder but assisted suicide.
Consent is the only issue. But consent is itself complicated.
As for your story–no problem. You basically explained it. He is using circular logic. He must provide a way to determine the supposed mental illness without regard to this particular situation. Every single issue I allow for above has a test that does not involve the particular situation. It can be tested.
He cannot say that disagreeing with him proves a lack of ability for consent. That argument would also work for those who say that homosexuality is a mental disorder. You cannot declare something a mental disorder merely because you disagree with it. He has to prove harm to self or others.
Then you are using the term in a way that basically makes it meaningless. Ethics isn’t “your opinion.” It is what you think should not be allowed. If you believe it should be allowed, then you are agreeing with those who say consent is the only issue.
Unless you actually wouldn’t get involved if you found out there was a lack of consent–which would inherently mean there was abuse going on. But then your issue is that you think you have no ethical right to stop anything.
These are pretty common reasons to do things you would rather not do, and if we were to consider them abuse, then a lot of people would have to be locked up, many of them not even having a clue that their partner “isn’t consenting” (people rarely say “I’m sleeping with you only because I fear being alone”).
Besides the fact that it seems to be a very unreasonnable extension of the requirement of consent (at some point people have to be held responsible for their decision to have sex, whether they decide to have sex because they want the sex itself or for some other reason like keeping a partner in their life in your example), I’m not sure why you should be more concerned about this possibility when the scenario involves D/s than in any other relationship.
Ethics isn’t about what I think should or shouldn’t be allowed. It’s about what I think is right or wrong. At no point did I say that I have no ethical right to stop *anything *- only that I and society have no ethical right to stop *consenting *adults doing what they want with their bodies.
There are some things that I think are wrong and shouldn’t be allowed. That includes nonconsensual sex.
There are other things that I think are wrong but none of my, or society’s, business. That includes some things that consenting adults choose to do with their bodies.
I’m really disturbed by people who genuinely can’t see any distinction between ‘I think x is wrong’ and ‘I think x should be stopped’. That kind of thinking is the source of a LOT of the world’s problems.
Just to throw in an example of the distinction I’m talking about:
I know a woman who thinks gay sex is wrong (she’s from an older generation and very Catholic) and yet voted for marriage equality in our referendum last year. Basically, she doesn’t feel that it’s her place, or the state’s, to decide whether or not consenting adults should do something that she considers wrong.
If everyone was capable of making that distinction, the world would be a much better place. Without that distinction, you end up with legislation discriminating against gay people, you end up with legislation banning abortion (like we’ve got here), you end up with IS blowing up people for not living the way they consider ‘right’.
I did make it clear later in the post that I don’t see enforcing this level of consent at a legal level, and I also started by comparing it to the way a CPA’s code of ethics would avoid even the appearance or risk of unethical behavior. Framed that way, you can’t really think that I was proposing locking anyone up.
If someone insists that its their preference and their consenting choice, then I’m not going to stop them, but it is behavior that I would absolutely avoid myself, and that I would not encourage anyone else to do. It sounds to me like playing with fire and it’s a risk I would avoid.
In my personal like, the answer to the OP question would be “no.” But I can’t speak to everyone’s relationship, so my general answer would be “if both parties go into it with eyes wide open and in agreement, yes.”
