Sex under false pretences - possibly triggering

[MightyMagnificentScarfaceClaw]

I have a question. If a woman consents to sex using a condom, and the man removes it during sex, or pretends to use one and doesn’t, that’s rape. Well what if a woman consents to sex with a man who is single and available, but he was lying and wasn’t? She wouldn’t have done it if she had known the reality. Is that rape?

Oh right yeah, and if he tells her he drives an Aston Martin but actually has a Fiesta on his driveway-does that make their consensual act of Congress 'rape'?

If he tells her he's wearing Armani aftershave whereas it's actually a cheap copy- does that make their consensual act of Congress 'rape'?

If he tells her he loved dancing on ice whereas he didn't really, he's just trying to impress her, does that make their consensual act of Congress 'rape'?

Come on now. Get a grip.

@MightyMagnificentScarfaceClaw That was, if I remember correctly, the whole basis of the Julian Assange Swedish rape case.

The woman consented to sex with a condom; he removed it without her knowledge.

Yes, in my opinion, it's rape as that is not what she consented to

The condom one IS a violation. Not using it puts the woman at risk of STDS and pregnancy. It's in the same vein of consenting to PIV sex,but then being raped anally.

The i'm single one is a lie. It's shit behaviour but not rape.

If he lied with the express purpose of coercing someone into having sex with him, yes, I would class that as rape. Coercion isn't consent.

Unfortunately, as you saw by @SnorkMaiden81's rude condescending post, some will not agree.

I think it's a good question. There are plenty of men out there who'll lie for the purposes of getting sex knowing that the woman would never consent if they were honest with her.
I think it's particularly common in online dating where the woman makes it clear she doesn't want sex outside of a relationship and he'll tell her what she wants to her until she's secure enough in the 'relationship' to 'consent'.
I think if you are deliberately lying to someone in order to get them to agree to sex that you know they would never consent to otherwise, then that's rape.
However, proving what's in someone's head is difficult especially when it was 'wanted' at the time (if that makes sense).
Either way, any man who does this is a massive arsehole and can't be trusted around women.

It probably doesn’t fit the legal definition of rape. But it’s abusive and can cause trauma. Like rape in marriage did before it was recognised as a crime. I imagine it would be difficult to expand legal understandings of conditional consent, but I don’t have any difficulty describing the situation as rape. However, I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t be prosecuted if the woman complained to police.

Thanks all for your responses. I don’t mind being told to get a grip, I know that when I wake early and mull things over my thinking isn’t all that clear. On the whole I’m with you @JustTurtlesAllTheWayDown - massive arsehole who can’t be trusted. Which begs the question of what I do next.

Intellectually I get it, but because of how things are in practice, I can't accept it as such.
Rape is basically legal when you consider how very few cases even get to trial, and even fewer get a guilty verdict. Men still get "innocent" even with CCTV evidence,with witnesses etc. Women are still put in the stand made to justify every action,thought,behaviour,history,text and even choice of underwear.

Men got off a rape charge by literally using @i slipped and fell" excuse. Men have raped and murdered women and got off with "sex game gone wrong excuse". Men have been caught on camera pulling and dragging a half naked woman and they were "protecting " her.

We can decide that x and y is rape all we want. We can even push to be recognised under the law . It's still fucking pointless.

I'm not minimising trauma or other's experiences, I just have no faith in the system and justice for women is a fucking joke.

If a woman in a relationship lied, claimed she was single then had sex with a man, would you consider that to be sexual abuse?
I don't think so - she'd be a shitty woman, not an abuser.

If a woman in a relationship lied, claimed she was single then had sex with a man, would you consider that to be sexual abuse?
If the purpose of her lying was in order to persuade someone into sex because she knew they'd otherwise refuse, then yes, I'd say that was abusive.
However, I'd say that men doing this in order to get sex is pretty common. I imagine it's rare for women.

What about the undercover policeman who had full relationships with women he was investigating. They didn't have a chance to give informed consent.

No. And actually I am a bit dubious about false identity being rape and removing condom being rape. I think they are reprehensible and should be criminalised but i think there is something qualitatively different between deception and rape. With the deception cases, there is consent to the act at the time but there are facts discovered afterwards that affect whether consent would have given. I think these should be classed as a crime of sex by deception or similar.

testing morally reprehensible and potentially should be criminal but not rape. Men and women lie ALL THE TIME about themselves to get sex. Lying about relationship status, salary, age, sexual history. The list is endless and we cannot police it.

I think that there need to be a few things that are so fundamental that lying should be a criminal offence. These include whether the sex was with a condom, the biological sex of the partner and whether the partner has an STD. I don’t think we can start to go further and I would be cautious about laws that could enable men to try to get women prosecuted for lying about taking contraception or similar. Which is why the condom removal one is a bit dodgy.

I do think there's something significantly different about changing the agreed-to sex act part way through - whether removing the condom, or turning consensual vaginal sex into anal rape.

In the condom case, what if the woman isn't on the pill and it puts her at risk of pregnancy.

(Incidentally, this would legally apply to cases where someone lied about some significant aspect of their sexual health. I believe men have been prosecuted for knowingly and deliberately withholding their HIV status from partners).

Your two scenarios aren't equivalent.

If someone tells a pack of lies to get you into bed, you've consented based on the information available to you at the time.

If the presence of a condom is an explicit in the terms of your consent, and he takes it off or forgets to use it, he's violated the terms of your consent.

Also worth considering that penetration sans condom may result in pregnancy, with all the potential risks up to and including death for the woman. This is not a factor in the first scenario.

The condom one is definitely different also because there's a layer being removed from his body so he becomes totally nude, taking the physical contact further than she consented to.

man convicted of removing condom during sex

girl convicted of sexual assault after pretending to be a biological male and penetrating partner with dildo

So the condom case is clearly rape, tricking someone into having sex under false pretences is sometimes a crime too.

In this country women cannot be convicted of rape, but if rape is extended to include consexual sex gained under false pretences then doesn't that open it up for women to be prosecuted on this basis too?
I guess people lie all the time in order to impress potential partners, about age, status, wealth, etc.

Ginger those two cases I'd say are equivalent.

In the first - consent was given to penetration with penis+condom. In the second - consent was given to penetration with penis. In both, the actual sexual act, on the level of physical bodies, was not the act consented to.

Whereas in the case of lying to get someone into bed, the actual physical act is consented to. The crime lies in the psychological realm, as it were, rather than the physical. It's "My consent wasn't fully informed" rather than "My consent was explicitly defined yet ignored."

@MightyMagnificentScarfaceClaw I think you should invest in a oxford dictionary and look up the definition of rape

to force someone to have sex when they are unwilling, using violence or threatening behavior

what the OP is implying is ridiculous if you consented to sex and someone lied about their relationship status that is not rape
but people these days throw the term around loosely

a good friend of mine was raped and you would know if you was a rape victim as it haunts you for the rest of your life

If she consents to sex with a condom and he removes it, that's known as "stealthing" and is rightly a form of rape, because it changes the physical act of sex from protected to unprotected and invalidates the victim's risk assessment of the sex act. Someone lying about their STI status puts you at physical risk without your knowledge and invalidates your risk assessment of the sex act. Someone lying about birth sex invalidates your risk assessment of whether they could leave you pregnant or become pregnant.

Catfishing, aka lying about life circumstances, is the mark of an arsehole who should be dumped, but it doesn't affect your risk assessment of the sex act. I'd hence argue that it's not legally going to fly as rape, but that you absolutely have every right to be angry, disappointed, and feel that you've been taken advantage of.

People who are worried that "she lied about taking the Pill" will be used to convict women of sexual assault if they become pregnant after a Pill failure, her defence is to ask her Pill prescriber for a letter confirming that she was on the Pill at the time and confirming that the Pill is not 100% effective.

AlisonGrant I think you should read the Sexual Offences Act 2003 section 1 for the legal definition of rape. No force nor threats required, just an absence of consent, which case law has established includes some circumstances where consent has been invalidated.

Alison for your friend. (I've been there with a friend of mine, too, it is harrowing).

But bd is right - the legal definition of rape isn't fighting back, or saying no, it's absence of a yes. And that yes can be rendered invalid by a range of circumstances - if someone lacks capacity (drunk to the point of insensibility or drugged; hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt, but the legal definition of rape still encompasses these possibilities). Or a man presuming that because a woman had consensual sex with him half an hour ago, or the night before, she must therefore still be up for it - still rape if he doesn't check she says yes. Or if a woman agrees to sex but only with a condom, and he takes it off - because he's now broken the conditions under which she said yes.

And while some cases of rape are clear-cut, society does such a number on us that it's not unusual for women (especially young women, or teenage children) not to realise they've been raped until later. They chalk it up as "bad sex", they feel deeply upset and violated, but it's not till they're older/more experienced that the penny drops: "Hang on, I never agreed to that. He had sex with me without asking or caring. No matter how 'stupid' the situation I'd got myself into, that didn't mean I was asking for it. The onus was on him to ask me and he didn't. It was rape."

@bd67th I don't need too

if you consent and someone lied about their relationship status I'm sorry but that is not rape

the op said "Well what if a woman consents to sex with a man who is single and available, but he was lying and wasn’t? She wouldn’t have done it if she had known the reality. Is that rape?"

that is an insult to real rape victims

@bd67th please show me one case where someone was convicted of rape when the lady involved consented but then he lied and said he was single and he was therefor convicted of rape? you can't