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Pavitra comments on Interlude with the Confessor (4/8) - Less Wrong
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Eliezer Y: The fact that it's taken over the comments is not as good as I hoped, but neither was the reaction as bad as I feared.
Heh, well, I will (perhaps?) make the reaction worse. It is interesting what people choose to use as an example of what would be "shocking" but possibly/arguably better. I will note that this choice (non-consensual sex) is guaranteed to make a lot of women uncomfortable to the point where they may, pretty justifiably, have difficulty responding in an unemotional, bayesian manner to it as a purely hypothetical premise. But I don't see your typical white male geek having quite the same problem, even if it is still shocking to us.
I'm pretty sure it would be possible to find a premise where it would work the opposite way (women would be shocked, but mostly capable of discussing the ramifications as rationally as humans tend to, while men would have a lot of difficulty holding even to that weak standard), but oddly, I've seen a few of these ventures on blogs (I don't mean to imply that this is the whole point of your story, which is very interesting, and I look forward to the next installments), yet I've never seen a guy come up with such a suggestion when the time comes to hypothetically discuss things that might shock people horribly. Just a thought.
I'm not saying that I think you should make it your business to be avowedly feminist, but it might be useful to observe the difference in reactions, and it's worth considering the ways in which your (and other reader's) gender influences their response to that part of this story. I see that no identified women have commented in this part of the discussion yet. Of course, there are few enough regular female identified commenters here that it could be random.
alright, you've taunted me into posting. girds my uterus
I wasn't going to post just because weird and anti-female ideas about what sexuality should be in an ideal world are obsequious to science fiction. the idea that women should be nude all the time is a common example, or just that sexuality should be free from emotional commitment (drama), that sex should be considered healthful and natural to be engaged in with as many people as possible with no jealousy or competition. that these ideas are common to science fiction says more to me about what kind of person writes science fiction and what they think of sex than what would be realistic or reasonable. but this series references the ship having it's own 4chan, realism is not to be expected and I understand that.
it's just, I wish the author had thought about what non-consensual sex, about what rape as a concept, as a thing used to torture and to dominate women, really meant before tossing it off as a badly explained line about how much more mature and well adjusted this polyglot culture of the future is.
does the author mean that in this supposed shining utopia of the future that a person can attack another person if the context is sexual? does it mean that all ideas of pair bonding, of marriage and commitment between equals has been abandoned in favor of one night stands? were those stands initiated through an attack, through an impingement on another person's right to autonomy? does it mean that rape in the context of arranged marriages between unwilling strangers is the norm?
this is not explained. rape is legal, that's all there is to it. rape of the underage, rape of the indigent, rape of minors, legal of course, the right of a free society. as far as this was explained.
it seems odd to me that a people so viscerally opposed to cultural infanticide would condone sexual attack.
because that is what rape is, it is an attack. is harming people in other ways legal as well? can I go out for a night on the town of stabbing people? no?
anyway, allow me this moment to object, as rationally as I can, as a person in actual possession of a working vagina, against the idea that rape is, was, or could be, legalized or condoned in any way.
if by rape the author did not mean rape, as many commenters suggest as a defense, then he is either insufficiently articulate or misguided, if he did not mean Rape-rape, but merely snuggle-kisses-rape-hugs then that intent should be better reflected in the text itself. as it is not I am forced to conclude that by rape, the author meant the forcible unwanted sexual victimization and attack on a person or persons by another person or persons.
I would suggest the author examine the blowback around the idea of the Open Source Boob Project for more articulate arguments about the right of women to posses their own bodies. http://feministing.com/archives/009066.html
I don't think this future society was intended to be perfect or utopian or a recommendation for how we should develop. I don't think that EY is seriously (or non-seriously) suggesting that society would be better with decriminalized rape.
Rather, this is most likely an expression of the principle that the future will contain things that we would consider a moral outrage, just as every century in recorded history so far has contained things that the people of one or two centuries previous to them would have considered a moral outrage.
There's a lot of discussion in this comment thread already looking at the question from different angles, and I recommend you take the time to look through it.
I agree, though, that the logical implications are not well-thought-out. Can I delay or prevent someone from getting from point A to point B by accosting them in the hallway for sex? What if three people all decide they want sex with the same person at once? Twelve people? A hundred? At a certain point, sexual intercourse is an unavoidably rivalrous good this side of forking uploads.
I wonder how much fiction has been written about fucking forking uploads.
Legal does not mean "accepted". For us you could replace it with hugging: "Can I delay or prevent someone from getting from point A to point B by hugging them in the hallway? What if three people all decide they want to hug same person at once? Twelve people? A hundred?"
Most interaction between people is controlled by people losing social status when behaving wrong, and some mild violence (mostly pushing away) for more extreme misbehavior. Laws are only needed for really extreme cases.