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MadameMarque -> RE: CIAW (3/11/2007 7:47:11 PM)
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Here's a little something...ever consider what happens when people pretending to be exclusive, sexually, come home and have unprotected sex with their partner, because there's no convenient way to explain having protected sex with your "only" partner?
Even in the "best" case scenario - if you can call being betrayed and disrespected by the person you imagined loved you most, whom you thought you knew most intimately and could trust - if you can call any example of that "best," -
if the person screwing around uses protection carefully, completely, and every time, - say it with me, everybody - is it called safe sex or "safer" sex?
But people aren't using protection. If you think that this exact scenario, of people cheating and bringing home diseases, isn't a significant contribution to the spread of HIV infection and STD's, right now, you are mistaken.
And in heterosexual adultery, even if birth control is used, does anyone who uses birth control ever get someone pregnant? If there is an unwanted pregnancy, will any of the potential parents involved want the baby? Will all of them have a custody battle? Do you envy a baby born into that situation, stuck being a symbol of infidelity?
Also, cheating sometimes leads to violence. Sometimes the violence gets directed at the partner being cheated on, from someone the cheater was seeing.
And, sentimental as I'm sure it seems to Dan Savage and company, there is the psychological devastation of discovering that the person you thought you knew, you didn't know, the one you thought you could trust, you couldn't, of having a big chunk of your reality pulled out from under you. It makes people doubt their own judgment. It's definitely painful enough if your significant other *is* honest with you, and the news is bad. But lying and betrayal is so much worse.
And who gets to decide whether you're willing to take all these risks? Why, your cheating partner will decide, for both of you. What's so safe, sane, or consensual about that?
It's human to be weak and find it too hard or too scary to be honest and take the consequences. It's human weakness to want to do what you feel like doing, but not want to give your partner a chance to make their own *informed* decisions on how that effects them.
But for someone to be indignant about having the right to do wrong - that excerpt of Dan Savage's is pitifully assailable.
It literally does not even occur to Dan Savage that there is another alternative to either staying and cheating or continuing on for the rest of one's life, in a manner that they find unacceptable. That would be telling the truth and taking the consequences.
How about giving your partner a chance to decide what *they* want to do, too? What's the matter, would that be too inconvenient or uncomfortable? Because, if you aren't fulfilled with them, maybe they'd rather find someone who is. Because, if they knew what you were potentially exposing them to, by screwing around, they might decide for themselves they don't want to take those risks, including, perhaps, exposing themselves to the heartbreak or the indignity.
They might decide to leave you. You might have to move on. You might have to decide whether you want to put up with the risks of both of you seeing other people.
People who cheat don't want to give their partner a chance to make their own informed decisions, too.
This is exactly why I never bother with Dan Savage, unrepentent poseur that he is. He'd rather continue to say what he fancies to be cool or rebellious than to ever have a conscientious scrupple over his glib advice.
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