Sex, choice, and minding yo’ own bizness

My respect of blogger Francis W. Porretto (Eternity Road) just went up ten-fold due to his recent post about sex, choice, and minding you own business. A choice exerpt:

Moral conduct toward others is a hotly debated subject. Your Curmudgeon doesn’t expect it to be settled in his lifetime. However, there’s at least one principle that appears to have general assent: It is wrong to treat another person solely as a means to your own ends.

As regards sex, some of the implications are obvious. To lie to a potential bedmate about your intentions toward her, just to get her panties off, is clearly wrong. To coerce or intimidate or bribe or “guilt” sexual access out of her is clearly wrong. To subject her to hazards that you know about but she doesn’t is clearly wrong. There can be no serious debate about these cases.

Herein lies the explanation for many of our society’s quasi-taboos. Men lie, arm-twist, and conceal to get sex. Women offer it in exchange for other considerations, sometimes immediate, sometimes deferred. None of this is wholesome; all of it constitutes the use of another person purely as a means to one’s own ends. When we learn of it, we frown on it, even if we’ve occasionally been guilty of it ourselves. It might not be possible to enforce laws against it, but it’s no less reprehensible for that.

But when two mature adults come together sexually under conditions of “informed consent” — that is, both are of sound mind, neither has attempted to coerce or defraud the other, and both are as aware of the hazards as a mature adult is expected to be — their decision to couple, whether permanent or very temporary, is theirs alone. Each is operating under the old principle of “assumption of risk.” Neither can validly claim afterward that he was anything but a free agent acting on his own vision of his best interests. And whether they’re married or unmarried, the rest of us should butt out.

Please read the entire post. His words accurately describe why I don’t talk about sex and morality on this blog. And I never will.

[zing! to Francis W. Porrento]

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