RichardKennaway comments on Interlude with the Confessor (4/8) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2009 09:11AM

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Comment author: christopherj 16 March 2015 05:05:57AM -1 points [-]

Weirdtopia? No -- history. For example, the Bible rules allowed for capturing the enemy's women as loot, having sex with their slave, and I'm fairly certain that a woman's wishes in terms of consent mattered a lot less than those of the male in charge of her. I seem to recall that at some point in Europe the feudal lord or whatever could have his way with your wife, and you had no recourse. This, of course, probably has more to do with inequality than anything else.

As for consent, it's ... complicated. For one thing, it exists in the mind and thus cannot reliably leave a physical trace (because of how memory works by retroactively fitting facts into a narrative, not even the owner of the brain can be certain). And then there's sleeping, and drugs, and mental illness, and changing one's mind, and how we decided that none of the usual applies when the person is below a certain age. As a hypothetical example, consider a mute quadriplegic who can only communicate by blinking, gave consent, then withdrew consent halfway through the act but while their partner couldn't see their eyes.

Besides, it's not like any modern society would allow assault or harassment, so if they got rid of the laws concerning the special case where sex is involved, it wouldn't really change much.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 March 2015 11:24:06AM 2 points [-]

Weirdtopia? No -- history. For example, the Bible rules allowed for capturing the enemy's women as loot, having sex with their slave, and I'm fairly certain that a woman's wishes in terms of consent mattered a lot less than those of the male in charge of her.

Mattered a lot less, to whom? To the men. I'm sure they mattered a great deal to the women. That is where the story is performing weirdtopia. In the story, nonconsensual sex is taken lightly by everyone involved: not only the doers but the done to.