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

[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).

[emperor]

I think your line in the sand may be in a different place to mine, although your first paragraph sounds a bit like a hedge. You could (though I'm not sure I would) argue that friends who are having sex are in an (established?) intimate relationship.

When you say casual sex, I think of "Go to pub, find cute person, take somewhere suitable, fuck", which is a different thing (I think) to shagging your best mate.

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

I think casual sex is something to do with whether the context of your connection to the other person includes sex as a possibility or expectation.

(S)

[lnr]

Hmm, in your example do you think it make a difference whether you went out *intending* to do that or if it just sort of turned out that way?

[emperor]

I'm think it does, yes. I don't claim to have a very well-defined position on such occurances, however.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

There's a spectrum of possibilities with randoms in pubs and one end and things like marriage at the other, and the boundary between sex with friends and proper relationships is probably somewhat blurry. Still, I think I'd put the line somewhere around there.

Perhaps a good test is how you feel when you or the other person want to stop; if the people involved are upset about it then perhaps what was going on was more than just a friendship that sometimes strayed into bed.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I do see grey areas. If you're friends, but you're not committing to any future sex. If you slide from friends to ohmygodwhatdidwedo to off-again-on-again relationship to dating, stopping at what point would have been casual if any?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the ohmygod was casual at the time but perhaps retroactively turned out not to be l-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

If you *do* end up in a relationship then that *is* precisely what happens[1]. But my point was that if nothing happens after ohmygodwhat -- is that casual or not?

[1] FTR I think some people would object to that description, I think, as implying that their first night was *ever* casual when they think it was falling in love; but if you view it objectively without knowing their feelings at the time, I think it's a completely accurate description.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If it's really ohmygodwhat - you might imagine tipsy flirting in which neither party backed down - then that might look rather like something deeper than friendship coming to the surface for the first time. As such a definition of casual sex which did encompass friends might nonetheless not include it. (The cliché in this case would be that everyone had worked it out some time before the people most directly concerned...)

But you might also imagine one deciding to try to pull the other just to see what happens and the other going along with it for the same reason, and the two of them deciding they liked the results on a more than informal basis. In that case, if you think sex between friends can be casual sex then that does seem like an example of starting out casual but ceasing to be so. (To balance the above parenthesis I guess the equivalent might be outside observers asking "...when did *they* start shagging?")