Informed Consent

My own opinion is that if someone lies for consent to sex, there is no consent. if there is no consent for sex then by definition, at best that's an assault, at worst a rape.
The only reason why someone would lie for consent is that they fear it would be a "flat no". if that's the case it's deception with intent.
It's premeditated assault.

A woman can withdraw consent at any point. before, during and after...

The law as we know it with regards to consent and rape needs a serious rethink as it is not fit for purpose. Rape has been made legal. It is without consequence.
0.3% of rapes reach prosecution. Most rapes are perpetrated by someone known to the victim. Stranger rapes are rare- being beaten into submission is rare.

"Shitty behaviour" the fact that men still believe it's okay to trick a woman out of Autonomy over their own bodies is abhorrent. it's about saying- " I need sex in this moment more than I have respect for you and your right to consent".
It's about saying "you are for my use" "your control over yourself is secondary to my need for sex".
If that's not criminal I don't know what is.
This forum is full of women- most of them parents , 50% with sons. I hope they teach their sons respect and consent. Boy's are not "best".

It was deleted.

I think the courts/prisons are busy enough without prosecuting all the men(and women) who tell someone they are single when they aren't!!!
There wouldn't be any room for the actual criminals

Having thought about it more since the other thread, cheating and exposing a partner to std and where that partner could reasonably expect to be in a monogamous relationship, is a kind of assault or fraud, even if you wouldn't categorise it as rape. Same as lying about identity or your sex to trick someone. This things cause real damage to people

I'm not sure making everything we consider immoral also illegal is the best way to combat them.
It would be very difficult to prove that someone had lied, or omitted to tell a pertinent fact.

We can't make cheating illegal, much as its deeply fucking unpleasant and that's the kind of thing suggested here. We also can't keep criminalising everything. It's a no.

You want to criminalise cheating as rape? Perhaps you would be better suited to living in Saudi Arabia.

I think it would be very difficult, and where would it stop? Say a woman said she was on the pill and turns out she wasn’t, how would that be proven? Or a wife had a long-standing weekly ‘appointment’ with her personal trainer (I.e. was having an affair with him but denied it). How could you prove that? I think a lot of police time would be wasted trying to prove these things. Where would you draw the line? Lying about degree grade is fine but lying about your job isn’t? It sounds an ethical minefield to me.

I commented this on the other thread I think it’s the same one? It was deleted, but my friend slept with a guy who told her he wanted a relationship, after he ghosted her, she said she had been raped because she never would have slept with him if she knew he was lying! I couldn’t believe what she was saying , Men lie to get women into bed all the time where do you draw the line?!

They're was a bit of drama on tik tok recently where a woman with a bit of a following had started a relationship with another man with a following. I think he was poly but she had told him at the start that she wanted to be exclusive and does not consent to sex with him if he's having sex with other people and he agreed to be exclusive. But then had sex with other people behind her back knowing she'd told him she wouldn't consent to sexual activity with him if he was with multiple partners. She would have chose to let him live his poly life with consenting people and go her own way.

She made some tik toks clearly upset and feeling violated and got a very hard time. I can see the reasoning behind that.

I think there's definitely room for the law to catch up... having looked at a thread this morning I looked at some of the legal cases and was really surprised that lying about contraception isn't illegal (or that it was overturned, I guess).

I think there's also a space where morality should kick in, even if the law doesn't. It's not illegal to do lots of things that it's immoral to do.

The same, I think, applies to lying to someone with the sole intent to get them to have sex with you they wouldn't have otherwise - whether it's that you're on the pill or are married or something less serious.

Consent should be freely given with all the information available to you, and if you're deliberately(1) withholding or concealing something that might reasonably(2) alter someone's decision to consent to sex - ESPECIALLY if you know it's likely to do so - then you're morally obliged to tell them or they're not giving informed consent. I don't care if that's legal or not, it's immoral not to.

(1) Deliberate as in - says they're on the pill if they're not, says they're not married etc. Not "I didn't realise I needed to tell them that I'm actually Swedish despite having no obvious accent" - intentionally decieving or withholding information

(2) Obviously, 'reasonable' does a lot of legwork here - I'd go with 'In a study of 1000 people, would the average person want to know this about someone before they had sex'. It'd be reasonable to assume most people would not want to have sex with someone married, with someone who had an STI, with someone who wasn't on contraception without a discussion first, with someone who was an undercover police officer using them for information. I'd say it's not reasonable to assume you need to disclose, e.g. natural hair colour, your football team, etc, because that's not something I think the average person would consider before having sex with someone.

I think the law as it is has it about right and certainly wouldn't want deception as to fidelity to vitiate consent. I'd rather not have the state involved in matters of personal morality more than is absolutely necessary. As PP asked, where do you draw the line?

Deliberately or recklessly giving someone an STI can already prosecuted as GBH.

I'd also say that to call this kind of thing rape isn't necessarily the best way to describe it.

We don't consider burglary the same thing as fraud though they are both anti-social, dishonest, and a way of accessing things that a person is not entitled to. Relabeling fraud as burglary isn't really what is going to make people take it more seriously. It might however make people think burglary is less serious.

Unless you're prepared to hike up your taxes to eye-watering levels in order to pay for the millions of new prison places then yes - YABU.

I think as a society we are now too keen to use laws to try to enforce "niceness". I would rather see our Police/courts/prisons - who are overworked to focus on the most serious issues in our society,

Maybe it would be better to teach our kids to use condoms and to never trust sexual partners blindly.

I don't think telling lies is necessarily going to make consent non-valid. If we said that was the case and applied it outside of sexual issues, it's obviously going to produce crazy results.

I think the test is probably, could this lie have serious or ongoing consequences for the other individual. Pregnancy or an STI obviously yes.

Is this person really a pilot with a Mercedes - no, not really.

Pretending to be male or female when you aren't - probably not long term consequences though I think could be rather shocking to discover if it becomes clear unexpectedly. It's on the line, perhaps, between real fraud and a nasty deception.

It's interesting thought that at one time, when there was more of an expectation that sexual activity should be confined to marriage, that many of these things like identity fraud or even adultery could be illegal or grounds for divorce. So there was, I think, a link between consent and truthfulness that goes beyond what we expect for less formal liaisons.

Even lying about having a vasectomy doesn't mean it's rape currently.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/23/judges-rule-lying-about-fertility-to-sexual-partner-is-not

The law absolutely needs to be changed in this regard.

Laws certainly need updating, but it is a moral/criminal minefield and I am not sure where lines should be drawn. I do believe that any law should apply to all sexes, genders and sexualities equally - it would be wrong that a man could be convicted for something that a woman could not, such as lying about being on the pill or having had a vasectomy. This example is more clear for MF sex but how would you frame such a law for MM or FF sex?

Sex after lying about a) hobbies and interests b) job or wealth c) relationship status - "I agreed to sex when I thought he/she was a single, rich, eco-warrior, and they weren't" - what if they were two out of three? And what if "He/she was actually an undercover police officer"

Lying about HIV, STIs and other health issues - what about somebody who has Covid or other disease?

You would even have to consider something extremely marginal such as lying about your age, or whether you had any children. It could even stretch to more distasteful objections such as your hair colour or if you were wearing a wig "I would not have consented if I had known he/she was ginger" and consent after lies about nationality or religion.

Legally the only deception that "counts" is pretending to be someone else (as in an actual person that the victim knows, rather than just pretending to be a lawyer when you're actually a builder). I'm not sure if I agree or not tbh.. it would be horrific if someone lied about having had a vasectomy/being clear of STIs, but there does need to be a line somewhere between being an arsehole and being a rapist

@ImAvingOops that's interesting. It's a bit like deciding which actions, based on the notion of the greater good are acceptable and which aren't, but we the general public don't know about the options or what goes on really, and therefore don't have a say.
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There were the undercover police officers who infiltrated environmental groups and had relationships with women in those groups. Their entire identities were fabricated. Those women were denied their right to informed consent and imo what those police officers did was a sexual assault but iirc the law deemed otherwise

If I had known my husband was having an affair I wouldn't have had sex with them and it wasn't because I was worried about STDs, it's because I was having sex with him on the basis we were monogamous, and I'm sure that's the case for a lot of people. I was a victim of stealthing 10 years ago and I felt betrayed so never had sex with that person again. It's only recently it has been considered sexual assault. I also know men who used to pretend they were investment bankers to have sex with women because they knew they wouldn't get a look in if the women knew they were in low paid jobs. In my opinion any time you lie to me to get me to have sex with you I haven't given informed consent. I hope the law does catch up because we make so many excuses for this sort of behaviour simply because it is common.