One night poll

[ewx]

Apropos of this article.

[Poll #701581]

Notes:

• If you're in a monogamous relationship then answer as if you were not - i.e. I'm asking about your opinion about the activity in general not about your current situation.
• "Morally wrong for everybody" means you think nobody should do it. "Morally wrong for you but OK for other people" means you'd think you were being bad if you did it but wouldn't necessarily think the same of someone else doing it. "OK for everybody" means you wouldn't think anyone, including yourself, was being bad for it (even if they themselves would).
• You can think it's distateful, or indication of something missing, without necessarily also thinking it's wrong.

Comments

[lnr]

Argh. I'd (possibly) think someone was morally wrong for doing things that they think are morally wrong, even if I didn't think those things were wrong in themselves. Though I'd think the wrong would be in going against their own moral code, rather than in the having sex in itself. So that just about comes out as 'OK for everybody'.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yes, in that case the wrong from your point of view is the hypocricy, not the sex.

[emperor]

MMV on what constitutes "casual sex", of course.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'd say it has to be outside an established intimate relationship, but could (for instance) be between friends.

Prostitution and nonconsensual sex would not usually count (we might find exceptions in sex which you actually consented to but the law said you couldn't, or meta-consent type stuff, but I think those are sufficiently special cases that any variation in opinion isn't going to cause people to answer from importantly different premises).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

...bringing an entirely new meaning to "How far did you go" :)

[keirf.livejournal.com]

What if I think it's okay for me, but morally wrong for other people.

I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm just being pedantic.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Freakish edge cases are of course welcome to leave comments if the poll does not include their oddity.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Then you'll end up either a corruptor of innocents or frustrated.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I did wonder why that option was missing.

Does Richard really believe he has no moral hypocrites reading his journal?

[gerald_duck]

I clicked "OK" with a heavy heart; it's not OK, but you seem to have meant specifically "morally OK".

I think casual sex probably harms the participants, but if they consented, there's no moral difficulty.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yes, I meant morally OK, specifically in opposition to morally wrong. What harm did you have in mind?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure, so I checked the nearest option to what I thought.

I notice you didn't have an option for "OK for me but wrong for everyone else" -- lots of people *feel* like that, even if they voted it.

I'm not sure where I put 'morally wrong'.

If you're misrepresenting yourself to someone, it's wrong.
If you're indulging yourself unwisely, it might be equivalent to gorging on chocolate -- not 'evil', as not hurting anyone else, but 'bad' as in gluttony, you're ruining yourself.

Both could be parsed as "shouldn't do it".

I think the truth is sometimes people have sex for bad reasons, eg. just because they can, or in place of emotional support, but sometimes for good reasons, like they'll both enjoy it.

If I were looking for stereotypes it'd be that women might like it, but feel they need to live up to the idea that it's wrong -- if you walk into a club and admit that you would like casual sex, it obscures everything else; and men feel the need to live up to the idea it isn't, and regardless how they feel feel obliged to pretend it was just a fun fuck phoar :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I think that was unhelpful. Let me rephrase. I think whether things can be wrong in abstract, ie. wrong without harming anyone, is a different and complicated question.

The question I assumed you mean is "Would you have casual sex? Would you council a friend that's it's ok?"

To which my response is "It's not my long term plan, but I would and have when the circumstances are right". Which I think is 'yes'.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by casual sex? By 'casual' I understand you to mean without emotional involvement on either side.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That seems like a nice and succinct expression for the distinction I was groping towards in the discussion above l-)

[liv]

It does depend what you mean by casual sex. There are certain (consensual, non-cheating) sexual situations I would consider morally wrong for me, but not all sex outside loving, committed, monogamous relationships comes into that category. So I suppose I'm answering by defining casual as really casual, the pick up a stranger in a club kind of sex.

And as for how I get to morally wrong for me but not morally wrong for others, my moral objection to casual sex is for indirect reasons. It's in more or less the same space as eating pork. I do not want to eat pork, and the reason for that is definitely a moral one, but that doesn't mean I have a problem with other people eating pork. I'm holding to a standard of sexual morality, but it's a very personal standard, it's about where I am in relation to my religious tradition. It's not something that I would expect other moral people to come to the same conclusions about (and that goes for other Jewish people as well as for the rest of the world for whom this particular aspect of the question is irrelevant).

[mooism.livejournal.com]

46 is such a large sample size. What’s so special about Sheffield?

Morally OK, but socially it depends.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

What’s so special about Sheffield?

They're all mingers?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

In general, I would say it's morally acceptable for two people who both know as a result of experience they are capable of having sex without forming any emotional bond and have clearly established that the other falls into this category too.

I would tend to qualify this according to history and experience, though; it's one thing for a thirty-year-old with a history of sexual relations already, quite another for a sexually inexperienced by hormonally-charged twenty-year-old.

[j4.livejournal.com]

[...] they are capable of having sex without forming any emotional bond and have clearly established that the other falls into this category too

What if they have agreed (and have clearly established that this is the case) to deal (jointly or severally) with the emotional bonds that may or may not form? Do you believe that it is morally wrong to form emotional attachments as a result of casual sex?

history and experience

Correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here, but it seems to me that the thing that is 'wrong' in the example you cite is simply that someone with more experience is taking advantage of someone with less experience -- and I don't think sex is necessary (though it may be sufficient) for that to happen.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I don't believe that sex has any moral value in and of itself. (And I don't consciously maintain different moral standards for myself and others.) I also don't believe that it's distasteful, or an indication of something missing.

To be honest I don't even think it's inadvisable, or (say) more likely to result in unhappiness than, er, smart sex (that's the opposite of casual, right?).

I think the most I can generalise is that sex* seems to work better** when the people involved have -- implicitly or explicitly -- learned enough*** about the assumptions, expectations, and (for want of a better phrase) parameters of trust that they are bringing to the experience.

I fear that wouldn't make a very good news article, though.

----
* In fact, probably all human interactions
** That is, causing fewer harm to the people involved
*** YMMV.

smart sex

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Hahaha l-)

[aldabra]

I'm female. I think it's OK for some people and not for others. You haven't got an option for me (from which you can infer which group I put myself in).

[lnr]

Can you elaborate on what the differences between those groups are?

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

Wrong like Hitler or wrong like Hitler: The Musical?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Wrong like YOUR MOTHER. The former.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I think it's morally OK if you do it right, but morally wrong if you don't.

As with any other risky activity, you have a duty of care to try to make sure that you don't harm other people. That means no passing on of sexually transmitted diseases, and no breaking of hearts.

[karen2205]

I note that the orginal survey was of 46 women - hardly large enough to be making such sweeping conclusions.

Casual sex = OK, so long as there's no cheating.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

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<fx: makes ewx's poll more statistically significant than the original>

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I don't think that it's morally wrong at all, but it's definitely not OK for everybody, or even for some people all the time.

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

This is one of those questions that leave me gasping for air due to the need to apply vast numbers of conditions before it can reach a point at which a simple answer can be given.

Avoiding for the moment the question as to what you mean by "sex" (there's something of a continuum of behaviours, and the steps aren't necessarily quite where you expect them to be (and certainly aren't in the same places for everyone)), I am unable to find a basis for believing that any such physical act can be intrinsically wrong (any more so, than say masturbation), rather than wrong because of context or other constraints, such as the way it impacts on others, or causes harm.

There's clearly a need to discount instances where harm is caused by STD or unwanted pregnancy or lack of consent from all interested parties; I'll assume from here the rather hypothetical situation in which reliable avoidance of these is a given, rather than something that requires non-trivial care and trust.

So, I'm tempted to say that it's "OK for everybody in principle", but with a rider noting the depressingly large proportion of cases where it turns out in practice not to be ok, because of weakness, carelessness, selfishness, self-centredness or communication failure [not an exhaustive list] on the part of the people involved.

Those who state that it's ok "as long as there's consent including from interested third parties" should probably think very carefully about how often such consent is fully freely given (occasionally, yes, but ...). Even the act of asking for such consent can easily apply a pressure.

In the "bizarre edge cases" category, I suspect that the nearest I can get to my own position is "OK for anybody who has enough grip and lack of self-deception to do so without harming others, and not of interest to me", since I don't think I have the facility to remove emotional involvement. But that latter has nothing to do with whether I think it's moral for me.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Um, I don't think I think it's a question of morality. I mean, I think both parties should understand and be happy about their position[1], and preferably not be hurting any third parties by doing it. And I don't like the idea of applying such thinking to other people but not myself, IYSWIM.

Possibly the reason I don't think it's a question of morality is that I think morality is about affecting other people, so e.g. if two people slept together casually and it really hurt someone (perhaps because one of them has a partner, or whatever), then that would be a moral issue because of the third party involvment. But two unattached people having casual sex because they have both decided it's what they want doesn't have any effect on anyone other than them, really. I think :)

[1] Sniggering would be entirely unwarranted here!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think morality is about affecting other people

As do I; I guess using 'OK' rather than, say, 'right' in the poll betrays that. But there's certainly a disagreement there about right and wrong as compared to, say, someone who thought all sex between human outside marriage to be wrong.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's any moral question about it; assuming you're not making a habit of deliberately using vulnerable people, ie. generally making the world a nastier place with your cheap sex habits, then it comes down to whether it makes you happy to do it or not. It's certainly not for me, I find it empty in the extreme, but I understand there are people out there who get a lot out of it.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I don't know about morals, but I *like* emotional involvement.