An anonymous commenter keeps coming back, and just left a comment no one would otherwise have seen to an older post on consensual sex. Much as I find it annoying to go over old ground when the goal here is writing new posts, what's even more annoying is debating commenters, as this blog is not a debate. But what's more annoying than that is to waste time and energy writing a reply that no one will see. So I thought it deserved a new entry.

Here's the comment:

My question is completely serious and shows that your premise is hopelessly flawed, perhaps that is why you continue to evade the point. I'll spell it out for you in greater detail via the following hypothetical.

Person A and Person B are deeply in love. So much so that Person B desires to submit to every aspect of Person A's being, by becoming Person A's chattel slave...property. In time, Person B becomes so bound up in Person A as to desire to become part of Person A's very physical being. And so Person B desires to be killed, in a loving and erotic way, and eaten by Person A. Therefore Person A erotically asphyxiates Person B, providing as much pleasure as possible along the way.

Then Person A dismembers Person B, cooks and eats all the tasty parts, in keeping with the stated desires of Person B. This scenario is completely in keeping with your premise, yet you would prohibit Persons A and B from expressing their love for one another as they see fit.

Therefore, it is your task to explain how the killing and eating of Person B by Person A causes any intrinsic harm to you, much less society. Alternatively, you can admit that erotic murder and cannibalism are things that you may personally disapprove of, but you can't find any justification for society to prohibit.

This is the dilemma your own premise places you on. Squirm how you wish, I see no way you can get off of it, although your technique of ignoring the question and pretending it doesn't exist is one approach. A callow, immature and fruitless one, to be sure, but it is an approach. And a popular one, too, going by what I see both on and offline.

As I explained previously, there's no way I would allow consensual murder (whether for erotic reasons or any other reasons), for the simple reason that allowing consent to murder is against the interests of society. It causes direct, intrinsic harm to me and to society to allow someone to murder someone else, because that sets a legal precedent of allowing murderers to argue as a legal defense that their victims consented. This means that if someone took my life, he could be heard to argue that I told him it was OK.

The implicit position that I would defend that not only puts words in my mouth, but contradicts what I have said.

Sex is not murder, and the above attempt to eroticize it is irrelevant. No doubt John Wayne Gacy would claim that his victims enjoyed their autoerotic asphyxiation.

I think the commenter is trying to conflate sexual activity with slavery, cannibalism, and murder, when these things are not the same, nor are they related. Sexual activity between adults is not sex with children, it is not slavery, and it is not murder. From a legal perspective, the hypothetical is no different from wife asking a husband to shoot her. Society does not allow him to do that, nor should it. I'm not sure why the commenter believes that disallowing this is inconsistent with allowing two adults to have sex, but again, I think murdering someone -- whether consensually or not, does direct harm to society, because society has an interest in protecting the lives of its members. To the extent that society has any interest in sex between consenting adults, it would be to prevent them from doing it in public or, say, discouraging the violation of marital vows by sanctioning divorce. Society has no more interest in a private consensual sex act between two adults than it does in masturbation. (And of course, more harm is done by allowing two men to publicly pound each other's faces with their fists than by allowing them to use the same hands on each other's genitalia. I realize that moralists would argue that the former is morally preferable to the latter, but isn't that between a man and his choice of god or gods?)

I can't help notice that the commenter keeps coming back to a blog post that readers can no longer see, yet insists on remaining anonymous. I suspect he wants to argue with me, and as I have said many times, that is not the purpose of this blog. If his position is so important that he wants the world to see it, why can he not put it out there in his own blog post? (I'll oblige this time, but again, I'm not here to provide others with a forum.)

Finally, I don't think the words "callow, immature and fruitless" to describe my opinions are persuasive or helpful. Again, I don't think the goal is persuasion, but winning.

Commenters who want to "win" debates are wasting their own and my time here.

Except that the waste of time continues. Right after that, "Just Asking" left yet another comment:

And of course the same applies to consensual slavery. If a group of people consists of dominant and submissive people choose to engage in chattel slavery, even going so far as to sell and buy other human beings, how can you oppose it? How are you harmed by such a practice in any real way?

Sure, erotic murder & cannibalism, and chattel slavery may not be your idea of a good time, but you've already established clearly that no one has the right to tell anyone else what kind of sexual acts they may engage in so long as consent is obtained. So that bus left an hour ago, you cannot buy a ticket on it.

You have to show real harm, or admit that these things ought to be lawful under your premise.

As for the child sex thing up the thread, I regret to point out that the poster may be correct, although the language is clearly trolling for flames. There have already been attempts to change the DSM (DSM IV, IIRC) to make pedophilia only a mental problem if the practitioner feels bad about it. This suggestion (or whatever the psychs call it) did not pass, but the fact that it was put forth at all doesn't bode well for the future. Unfortunately I won't be surprised at all if down the road 10 years or so some specious "research" claims that 8 year olds can give informed consent to sex, and this is seized upon by the same political process within the DSM that was used to "normalize" homosexuality.

When, and if, that occurs I fully expect most liberal/libertarians to go along with it, and some to applaud it. What would you do? Mumble "Gee, this wasn't what I intended" or some such?

Sexualizing slavery and murder does not render these things other than slavery and murder, any more than having a sexual fetish for robberies changes the nature of the robbery. The difference between robbery and murder is that if one consents to robbery, it is no longer robbery. Whether consent to slavery changes the nature of slavery I don't know. It's a stretch, but feminists have maintained that marriage is slavery, and I suppose that it could be argued that some people essentially consent to do what is not in their own interests.

Why, now that I think about it, blogging might be a form of self-imposed slavery!

However, allowing someone to become chattel irrevocably, and allowing that person to become legal property to be freely transferred and sold, that would mean that he would no longer be free to withhold consent. So, arguably it's no longer consent.

But is it an argument that's really worth having?

CORRECTION: Sean Kinsell correctly notes that I should have said "erotic asphyxiation" and not "autoerotic asphyxiation.