This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places.
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
The law usually treats force and fraud symmetrically in the sense of punishing both, though the latter more leniently. It is a crime to take money at gunpoint. It is also a crime, though normally a lesser one, to take it by false pretenses. But generally it is not a crime to use false pretenses to entice a person into a sexual relationship. Seduction, even when honeycombed with lies that would convict the man of fraud if he were merely trying to obtain money, is not rape.
In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion.
Almost certainly not.
Back in July, it was reported that the two met in a Jerusalem street in 2008, had consensual sex within 10 minutes of meeting each other...
It was also reported at the time that Kashur was charged with rape and indecent assault, and the conviction of rape by deception was a result of a plea bargain.
New details in the case emerged when the woman’s testimony, which had been kept secret, was declassified last week.
It shows an emotionally disturbed woman who had been sexually abused by her father from the age of six, forced into prostitution, and lived in a women’s shelter at the time of the encounter with Kashur.
During her initial testimony, she repeatedly broke down in court as she accused Kashur of rape.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind.
Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Coercing sexual intercourse via physical violence or the threat thereof.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Note: This post is explicitly not about PUA. I do not believe that I have heard of any PUA technique involving roofies or blackmail.
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
(nods) That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
Okay, though you should probably be aware that those are somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of rape and violence.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
You’re right.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I am.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
No, I didn’t. I pointed out a feature of sexual morality that you completely ignored.
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
Poorly. It does not seem to be of much benefit any motives which I could plausibly attribute to you.
Downvoted for professing to be a troll.
OK, why have this comment and the next one I made garnered this many downvotes?
Two is not many. Four is not even many.
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
Almost certainly not.
BBC
Thanks for the updated data.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind. Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.