Sex

Is cybersex a sexual encounter? If you discover that your partner engages in it, is he/she cheating on you?

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This is a nice question, and one variants of which have been turningup lately in the advice columns in newspapers. I don't have anyfirsthand experience of cybersex, but from what I understand, it is akind of virtual sex, involving assumed identities and purely electronicinteractions. So, is it a sexual encounter? I would say 'yes' and 'no'.On the 'yes' side, it is an encounter of some sort--it involvescommunication, back-and-forth response, mutual acknowledgment--and itclearly has a sexual content or character. On the 'no' side, it is notliterally sex, which would seem to require, at a minimum, physicalproximity and contact, and certainly it has little of the practicalconsequences or risks of literal sexual interaction. I suppose it iscloser to phone sex than it is to literal sex, but with greatershifting or concealing of identity. (I should say, for the record, thatmy knowledge ofphone sex comes only from Seinfeld episodes and Nicholson Baker's novelVox!) Anyway, the answer to whether you are cheating on yourpartner when you engage in cybersex is also not simple. Theanswer I would be inclined to defend is that you are not, by any normalunderstanding of what 'cheating' involves, but that you arenonetheless doing something that your partner might feel, if/when he orshe becomes aware of it, changes the nature of the intimaterelationship youhave, and perhaps not for the better. On the other hand, were you bothto engage in cybersex openly and by mutual consent, it might lead toan enhancement of your relationship. Who knows? At this point, it is amatter to be further explored, if at all, with your partner, thoughobviously you run a risk by even bringing the matter up for discussion.

Jerrold's reply is nicely done. Philosophers and legal scholars have been addressing these questions. If you want to explore them in more depth, take a look at Louise Collins, "Is Cybersex Sex?" in A. Soble and N. Power, eds., The Philosophy of Sex, 5th edition (Rowman, 2007), pp. 115-131. In an earlier paper (in Social Theory and Practice) she deals more directly with the "cheating" issue (see her note 24 for the bibliographic information). Other essays worth reading are listed in her notes as well on pp. 497-98 of POS5e. The most interesting, perhaps, are Aaron Ben-Ze'ev's Love Online and John Portmann's chapter "Chatting is Not Cheating." Portmann, by the way, argues that cybersex is not sex because it lacks physical contact (a necessary condition). Collins makes the point that a condom on a penis prevents contact, so if Portmann is right, any coitus in which a condom is used is not sex. Hmmm. We need to do some philosophical work on "contact." Other problems with Portmann's account are mentioned, en passant, in my essay "Sexual Activity, " in Soble, ed., Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2006), pp. 15-25. [P.S. I must confess to having had "phone sex" a few times. Sure felt good. Whether, if I were interviewed by a sociologist surveying frequency of sexual activity, I would or should count these episodes, is another question.]

I don't disagree with anything that my distinguished co-panelists have said, but I'm inclined to add a few rule-of-thumb suggestions for anyone for whom this isn't a merely theoretical question. You might ask yourself: when you do this, do you feel like you're cheating on your partner? Would you feel cheated on if you found out that your partner had been doing the same thing? If the answer to either question is yes, you might want to pause and think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Answering "yes" to either question isn't conclusive; sometimes we have feelings that turn out on close scrutiny to come from nothing other than habit and prejudice. But this is an area where self-deception is particularly easy. If you think that the nature of your relationship would make it wrong to have an old-fashioned physical affair, then you might want to ask yourself how much weight you can really put on the fact that there's no skin-to-skin contact here.

People sometimes use the phrase "emotional infidelity," and so here's another question: does the cybersex runs the risk of undermining your intimacy with your partner? (That could be true even if your partner never finds out.) If the answer is yes, and if you value your relationship, then you might think twice before indulging. [And in the confessional mode: telephones aren't to my taste. I prefer megaphones.]

Allen, Louise Collins's earlier essay in Social Theory & Practice bears the title "Emotional Adultery," and she argues (not merely reporting her feelings) that cybersex might indeed be morally and pragmatically suspicious for the sorts of reasons you mention. I have always been struck by how deeply conservative her arguments are, especially because much of her essay is also "feminist." I have elsewhere argued that religious and secular conservatives, on the one hand, and some feminists, on the other, are sexual-philosophy "bed partners" (i.e., are not having mere at-a-distance phone sex), and both make sure to keep away from megaphones so as not to spill these potentially embarrassing beans too widely and loudly.

I can't comment on Alan Soble's intriguing suggestion that one can have sex by taking up a philosophical position (can one become a philosopher by taking up a sexual position?), but I would like to suggest that anyone who doubts that "virtual sex" is a kind of having sex view the excellent and hilarious film The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Look for the scene where Janeane Garofalo has a "conversation" with her new client. And watch it at home, preferably with someone you like to do philosophy with, if you see what I mean.

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