Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Deception, for the purposes of sexytimes

There was a question asked in a nonmonogamy themed Facebook group I am part of.  "Do you consider it unethical to sleep with someone without disclosing existing relationships?"  That is, if you are thinking about having sex with someone, do you feel obligated to tell them that you are married, or dating, or occasionally having sex, etc. with somebody before proceeding?

Personally I would always let them know.  I am loud and proud about being polyamorous so I have no intention whatsoever of ending up in bed with people without them knowing that.  However, the question was about the ethics of the situation, not my personal tendencies, so I will try to answer that.  Keep in mind that this is about people in general though, not my own approach.

I think a lot of people get this wrong by making the trigger for 'this is immoral!' be the other person's knowledge.  I think the trigger should be an attempt at deception instead.

For example, if two people meet at a party, talk for awhile about cars and beer and sports, end up making out, and then have sex, the fact that one of them is in a non monogamous relationship isn't a problem.  If it didn't come up in conversation they don't have any moral requirement to disclose.  That non monogamy doesn't present any threat to the other person, so it isn't something that must be revealed.

Now the other person might well be interested in that fact, but they might be interested in lots of facts.  They might have an objection to vegetarians, Catholics, hunters, liberals, or clowns and they wouldn't have found out about any of those things either.  If you have sex with someone you barely know and you don't ask about your (completely unrelated!) dealbreakers then it is entirely on you if they happen to be the sort of person who has those characteristics.

However, as soon as someone starts to deliberately deceive the other person then they are being immoral.  If I was on a first date this week and my date asked me about my weekend I could say "Oh, my out of town girlfriend was visiting and she and my wife and me and a few other people went out to dinner to celebrate my wife's birthday."  That would be honest.  I could also say "I went to a birthday party on Saturday for someone I have known a long time."  That would be deliberately deceptive, and I would call it immoral.  Quite simply if you are choosing your words carefully to avoid suggesting that you are non monogamous in order to get laid, you are acting immorally.

In any dating type situation I would say you have a moral requirement to make your relationship style known.  That doesn't mean you have to say everything, because if you say "I am a relationship anarchist and I am open to having multiple relationships at once, but I keep them all entirely private and separate" then your potential date knows what they are getting into.  People have a completely reasonable expectation that a date is an honest, open attempt to discover if there will be romance and/or sexytimes, and discussing your relationship styles before proceeding is important.  If a discussion about dating and styles comes up and you don't disclose yours, you are acting immorally.

It does bother me that people are expected to disclose non monogamy in this way while monogamous people are not expected to.  I think everybody should be explicit about what they want whether or not their relationship style is the most common.

In sum I think there are definitely ways to end up having sex with someone without telling them that you are non monogamous and have it be perfectly ethical.  However, if you are distorting what you do to hide your relationship style or failing to answer questions about the topic honestly and completely then you are being immoral.  That applies no matter what the issue you are avoiding is though!

You do not have an obligation to tell anyone you have sex with things about yourself that don't affect them directly, but you do have an obligation to be honest about those things, both in terms of not lying and also in terms of not deliberately hiding the facts.

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