There’s the story about George Bernard Shaw asking a woman to have sex with him. She says no. Then he offers her a ridiculous amount of money, and she says yes. Then he offers her a smaller amount, and she indignantly asks if he thinks she’s a prostitute.
“We’ve already established what you are, ma’am. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
If you marry someone who is wealthy, and sue for half their wealth when you divorce, then you’re a prostitute. We can determine your rate by dividing the amount you’re claiming by the length of service.
If you only claim half of the wealth that was accumulated during the period of the marriage, then you might have some claim to not being a prostitute.
I was lucky in my marriage to get out with the losses I suffered. If I had more, there’s no way I’d throw all my chips in, betting on the relationship lasting forever.
Nonsense. Lies are immoral for reasons I shouldn’t have to reiterate. And your slavery analogy is even more ridiculous.
And no, “everybody does it” is not the sum total of my argument. People apparently have a fundamental need for sexual fulfillment once they reach a certain age. Going without can be an unhappy state of affairs. But the notion that premarital sex is a “sin” is illogical and is interfering with the process of normalization.
Where does that leave the person who has examined and considered the idea of marriage and decided to never marry?
I see very little about the institution that I like. I have no interest in sexual possessiveness and exclusivity. I reached those conclusions back when I myself was a virgin. Well?
It’s impossible to do anything without the risk of socially negative consequences. You could slip on a banana peel by accident while walking down the hallway at work and the rest of the office could mock you for being a clumsy idiot behind your back for the rest of your life. You could also slip on a banana peel by accident, split your head open and die. Anything can happen in life; we take risks every time we get out of bed in the morning and go out into the world.
I’ve been thinking that instead of pushing for Universal Health Care, what we really should be pushing for is a government Universal Sex Service.
U.S.S. would even leapfrog the legalized prostitution debate because USS would make sex FREE to anyone who wanted/needed it.
Just think… any person in the country who was bored and needed some physical companionship for an hour could just go to the neighborhood USS – without paying any money.
The ability to relieve the tension of all citizens would lead to numerous benefits:
less pornography
less boiling aggression leading to rape crimes
elimination of prostitutes in dark alleys
teenagers wouldn’t have to be obsessed with losing their virginity and concentrate on school work instead
marriages that are based on true friendship compatibility instead of the initial lust of sex since sex can be obtained outside of marriage from the USS for free
less road rage
more tax revenue to the state to fund this service
regular sex activity lowers blood pressure which leads to less costs for UHC
It’s a win win all around. I see no negatives.
I’d settle for people just shutting up about it myself. We have religions basically founded by people who clearly didn’t like sex, and a religion whose leaders have given it up, which led to this weird Western feeling it is bad. If a couple wants to wait until marriage, that’s fine with me. Just don’t act holier than thou.
As for “condoning” sex, anyone my age sees we are already. When I first visited my now wife at her college there were strict and enforced rules about when men were allowed in the dorm. They had disappeared by the next year. They were more liberal than rules a few years before mine. From popular culture people actually cared if you went to a hotel with a woman not your wife. Condoms were not in supermarkets. A rite of passage for men of my generation was having to ask for a condom in a drug store, and being asked what size. The revolution is over, people, and we won.
That’s highly debatable. If it’s risk that worries you, you should ONLY have casual sex. You should avoid children and marriage and emotional attachments, because all of those things create new sources of risk.
The point is, marriage and children and so on carry unique significant risks of their own. If the general principle is “Avoid risks by not doing things”, then you can apply it to them as much as to anything else.
Of course you should weight the risks vs. the rewards, for everything; but as it happens, many people perfectly rationally find this to come out a net positive for casual sex. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
If I were to find out that my (hypothetical future) college-age children were having safe sex, I would hardly bat an eye. But if one were to come home freshman year and tell me they were proposing marriage, I’d be very, very worried, and try my best to persuade them to wait a while; I would not expect them to be ready yet to make such a commitment. The risks of jumping too early into the latter seem far greater to me than the risks of the former.
[That having been said, I should clarify that I don’t think there’s anything immoral about early marriages; I’m just predisposed to be skeptical of their working out]
And it’s not necessary to “support procreation” to maintain humanity; it’s only necessary that some people do so. And we have too many people, not too few so it’s a non-issue. Sex is usually for social bonding and pleasure among humans, not procreation anyway.
