TheLawSexAndMarriage 1:Facts About Sex I Wished Judges & Lawyers Understood

The justice system gets involved with sexuality on an almost daily basis. Sex comes up, for example, in custody hearings, domestic violence cases, questions about the legality of one teen having sex with another, claims by Wal-Mart photo developers that a bathtub shot is child porn, and demands that a public statue be taken down because it’s “offensive.”

In order to make our justice system more fair and less punitive, here are just some of the things I wish more lawyers and judges knew about sex:

* Many people who lie to their mates about sex are, in every other way, good partners.

* People into kinky sex can be perfectly good parents. In fact, millions of good parents are into kinky sex. Think only bad parents buy butt plugs and wear see-through blouses?

* Knowing what porn a person looks at, or what their sexual fantasies are, doesn’t tell you anything about that person.

* Even the most conservative-sounding people do outrageous sexual things at home.

* With 50,000,000 Nigerians watching porn each month, you can’t predict anything about someone based on whether or not they watch porn, or what kind they watch.

* There’s a dramatic difference between violence and S/M. Violence is coercive. S/M is consensual. Violence is done to someone. S/M is done with someone. The victims of violence don’t control its boundaries. Participants in S/M determine its boundaries together, in advance. In summary: there are no “victims” of S/M, even if the activity is ill-advised.

...to be continued.