No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
One’s spouse isn’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex. That is not their purpose.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
All right, slavery is too strong.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
[I]’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
“You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters.
From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction.
From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances
I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
you … misunderstand the issue
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
Cold comfort for someone getting repeatedly forced to have sex while they wait for the divorce to be finalized.
It was my understanding that most divorce proceedings encourage separation early on in the process.
In some states, it is mandatory to have a period of separation prior to divorce, and having sex with your spouse will reset the timer.
All right, slavery is too strong.
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Possibly. Looking up the word, “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel” pretty much matches my meaning.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
Yes, that’s probably right. It seems it has to come down to either:
You don’t think not having sex constitutes misery/suffering, or
You don’t think withholding something that would alleviate misery/suffering from a loved one is cruel / lacking compassion
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters. From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction. From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
Or maybe 3. He thinks that having sex when one doesn’t want to constitutes misery/suffering that outweighs the misery/suffering of not having sex.
For the record: I think this is often true, but largely irrelevant to my current exchange with thomblake.
That implies 2, or else is irrelevant to the claim that it is inhumane.
ETA: For reference, I also think 3 is often true, for some reasonable methods of “weighing”.
It certainly isn’t #2.
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
I think more typically tension arises from points on the spectrum between these extremes.
Absolutely agreed.
Fair enough.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Having an overwhelmingly low prior for your husband saying something like this for reasons that are cruel certainly helps!
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
These aren’t similar statements, in that while monogamy demands fidelity 24⁄7, refusing sex should generally be a temporary.
However, in a situation where the latter is permanent, then I agree that we have a problem.
I see no reason it should be so black and white.
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
Because it is rape?
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
Is it “they” or “you”?
Missed one. They.
That’s precisely begging the question.
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
Brilliant! I am totally using this for private contracts in the future. Is that done already?
I think I’ll prefer ECDSA for my documents. Elliptic Curves are so much sexier.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
Yes, that’s the scenario I was imagining. The hashed part presumably could be arbitrarily verbose and specific, thus rendering it indecipherable.
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s the gist of any digital signature algorithm.
As for using it in a wedding? I’ve never been to such a ceremony, certainly...
But you already signed the contract. Like what if it happens before you get divorced?