Who You Have Sex With is the Community’s Business

Jeffrey Polet argues that any well-organized community will and ought to have a say in the selection of sexual partners :

The hoary cliche goes like this: “Who I have sex with is no one’s business but my own” – a phrase that obscures more than it reveals. On the surface of it this idea can’t possibly be true, for surely it is the business, in one way or another, of the person with whom one is having sex. (Here I’ll freely confess that, as a father, I think it’s my business too if it happens to be one of my kids.)

Once this concession is made, the libertine takes a step back and introduces the idea of consent. “Sex between two consenting parties is no one’s business but those two parties.” But even here, one suspects that the libertine cannot effectively make a rearguard action, for introducing the idea of consent necessarily involves an examination of the characteristics that make one capable of consent. In other words, it will require, in some fashion, a discussion of the necessary and natural characteristics a person has such that their engagement in sexual acts is considered acceptable.

These reflections are grounded in a community’s deliberation about the nature of sex itself, the nature of the persons who engage in it, and its appropriate contours and expressions. Without such communal deliberations connected to sex’s nature, lines of legitimacy become hopelessly blurred and arbitrary, even confused.

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