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'.

[emperor]

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

[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]

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

[ewx.livejournal.com]

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

e.g.

[emperor]

"YHWH told me to get laid"? :)

Got to be a BT about it somewhere...

[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.

[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'.

[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)

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

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

[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?

[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.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

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

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

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

[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).

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Then I don't think it exists. Not between friends, anyway, although of course many women fantasize about the zipless fuck; shagging a complete stranger in, I dunno, a dark alleyway and never seeing them again. Or is that just me?

Anyway, my point, or whatever is left of it, is that I think it's very hard to have sex without some emotional involvement resulting, although that doesn't preclude the example that you gave of both participants just deciding to stop.

[emperor]

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

[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?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Then maybe I change my mind. I would say sex without emotional involvement is inevitably a bad idea, and that with someone you don't know well you *probably* don't, but you *might* do.

This question is complicated, agh.

[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.