Sexual Deception in Online Dating

Online dating sites have become a platform for people to exercise deceptive practices. People pretend to be looking for love and long-term relationships when they are indeed looking for easy casual sex. Most men assume that women in online dating sites are cheap and easy sex targets. Conversely, women believe that men on these sites are old, miserable, and unattractive. Thus, they are unable to physical woo women and resort to online dating sites where they can hide their identity. The primary problem with these sites is that both men and women lie to each other and their motive of seeking relationships online is always not genuine. However, it is common for men to deceive women into having sex with them by lying about their profession and their income. They perceive that women hold men of a given caliber with high regard. However, deceitful seduction is wrong as it biases a victim’s judgment of the liar causing them to offer un-informed consent. 

According to a Telegraph article, people in online dating sites tell several lies about themselves.1 They assume that these lies make them highly appealing to their potential partners. For instance, it is a common phenomenon for men to lie about their height. Thus, they tend to add about an inch or two to their actual height in the pretext that women love tall men. Through the article, there are several other things that people lie about in these sites, and these are things like their age, their weight, their income, job, and physique. People also lie about their looks as they tend to use pictures they took several years ago or photographs of people they have photoshopped online. Other things that people lie about are details about their hobbies and their interest, their connections to celebrities and their lifestyle. Most people tend to portray that they have a lot of wealth because they think it will make them attractive and appealing to their potential partners.

The intentional dissemination of untruthful information about oneself for sex amounts to rape by fraud. When a person knowingly lies about to another person for sex, they are obtaining it through fraud. The victim of their deceit is persuaded to give their consent because the person lying has misrepresented the purpose of sex by advancing themselves as someone they are not. Sex is just like other negotiations and transactions in life.  Among the prevailing conditions for mutual consent sex to happen both parties should be interested in the act. Both parties should have exclusive information about the product which in this case is the other sexual partner. The third requirement is that both of them should act with full awareness of the product they seek to attain and agree that it satisfies their needs. They should also agree to the terms and conditions and choose to offer consent in light of all these requirements. Thus, sex is like other legally binding agreements where both people should act in full awareness of the nature of the agreement they are entering in before offering their consent. In case one party is guilty of deception, any original agreement between them is invalid. The deal becomes null and void since one person did not act in full knowledge. Ideally, contextual consent results in deceitful sex. That is, the person consenting to have sex only agrees because of what he or she has heard about their partner. Thus, if these details were absent, they would have likely said no to any sexual advances from the said person. In this case, therefore, sex is used in the exchange of several false statements which did not exist. Thus, anybody that needs to trick another into having sex with them is a perpetrator.

Considering the little lies that people tell online as a crime would cause everyone to be guilty of sexual fraud.  It is common for people that are striving to get into a relationship with one another to tell unwitting lies to get love or sex. Thus, even though these laws are punishable under the law, they are not highly severe to be considered rape by fraud. However, their potentially dangerous consequences tie them to the idea of rape by fraud as the victim lured into such an arrangement would otherwise have denied their consent if they were fully aware of the other party's true nature. Thus, it is imperative to determine which lies are serious and warrant labeling like sexual fraud, and which ones are negligible. For instance, lying about someone’s sexual status is a serious crime. However, lying about love to get a spouse into bed is not such a grave offense.  In effect, it is imperative to assess the degree of offense to discern the magnitude of its effect.

There is no justification for telling a lie with the intention of obtaining sex. A lie, whether small or big, results to sex without validly gaining the consent of the other person. Consent is the rights and permission that an individual must obtain so as not to wrong the other party by breaching their right. It is through such approval that the other party can gain permissible actions that would otherwise not be possible without consent. For consent to be morally valid, it requires more than an agreement between parties. Individuals should also freely give their permission without coercion. Thus, a person under intoxication is not in a position to offer morally acceptable consent.

Similarly, when a party deceives another into having a sexual relationship with them, they are not in a position to offer morally valid consent. According to the rights-based argument, a person has moral claim rights over the property that he or she owns. The moral default of these rights is that other people do not have the right to damage or interfere with someone’s belongings. The only way to shift a person’s moral rights is by allowing other people to partake of what someone owns or be involved in his or her life through consent. However, consent is a revocable waiver. Thus, a person is free to revoke his or her exemption when he or she feels cheated. The strictness of any right against any form of behavior lies in the significance tied to a person taking part in an act against someone’s will. Thus, the worth linked to sexual control explains the stringency of sexual rights. Therefore, it is wrong to infringe another individual’s sexual rights, which is possible unless one has obtained amorally valid consent.

A key argument in support of sex deceit is that the consenting the person agrees to the terms and conditions given to them. That is, he or she has a responsibility of due diligence, but he or she chooses to trust what the other person says and believes it without verifying the information provided to them. In this case, therefore, it is not the fault of the person lying, but that of the victim. It is a person’s prerogative to do a thorough background check of their partners, understand their personality among other factors before consenting to any sexual relationship with them.  Thus, a person’s inability to do his or her due diligence in obtaining more information from their partner is entirely their fault. Therefore, when a party enters into a sexual relationship with another without verifying their suitor's information, they are also partakers of the perpetrator's lies.  They are responsible for their conduct for failing to confirm the details of the other party before becoming intimate with them.

Conversely, the argument against sexual moralism states that a person is unable to offer their consent to a sexual encounter when a person lies about their fundamental features.2 Thus, there should not be any grey areas when seeking sexual consent. Consequently, it is only possible to issue approval based on the information offered. Nothing is trivial about what information one is using to base their consent. In effect, sexual consent is highly subjective as people have different criteria for determining what they seek in another before offering their consent. In fact, how much information is accorded to a person affects their capacity to make decisions. There are some minor aspects regarding a person’s identity that one should not lie about. One of the things that people should not lie about are issues regarding their sexual past, their attitude towards pet keeping or even how funny a person assumes the other to be.

A strict analysis of consent in the case of a sexual encounter overlooks the mutual benefit that both parties derive from the activity.  The degree to which each party consents to have sex with another is marked by what they would like to obtain from the encounter. Thus, when both parties enter into a sexual agreement, they are doing so with the intention of deriving given benefits known to them. Firstly, both parties enjoy the act. Secondly, both parties express their interest in engaging in the sexual act. Thirdly, when both parties have a sexual encounter, it is meant to satisfy both their sexual desires. Thus, both parties benefit from the agreement. Therefore, a person should have specific requirements that would violate their consent to sexual activity; it is imperative that they express such details.  It is essential that every party participating in the act communicates their intention to avoid the case of deception. It is also necessary for the various parties to decide what their reasons for having sex are as well as any deal breakers that would hinder them from engaging in sex with another person.

Any form of deception that revolves around issues that precede a sexual encounter is wrong. Since both parties agree to have a sexual encounter, one should not deceive the other into getting into an encounter with them by withholding some vital information about themselves and their identity. Among some of the lies that people should not tell during these instances are lies about whether they are on birth control or not, lies regarding the type of profession or anything to do with their mental attitudes.2  For this kind of deception to be considered wrong, it must also include a deal breaker. Thus, the person lying is forced to conceal more than just undesirable traits, or opposite characteristics of the other person.

Overall deceiving someone into sex by purporting to be someone’s else is not results to non-consensual sex. The underlying premise is that an individual consent to sex due to the lies they hear. Otherwise, they would not consent. Most victims of deception are complicit partakers of the deception they suffer. Ideally, people seek to hear and see some specific things from their partners that shroud their judgment. They subject their sexual partners into giving them the information they want to hear, so when they get this information, they agree to it without doing the due diligence required of them. In this case, therefore, they subject their partners into lying to them.

References

1. Dougherty, Tom. Sex, Lies, and Consent. Ethics 123, no. 4 (2013): 717-744.

2. Holmes, Peter, Ben Caudell, and Saul Wordsworth. Can you get away with the ten most common online dating lies? Telegraph. Accessed at: www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11922786/Can-you-get-away-with-the-ten-most-common-online-dating-lies.html