Grim's Hall

Sex, Lies, and Fraud in the Inducement

Here's a story about how our notion of fraud and crime can get tangled up in times of radical changes concerning sex, hedonism, and ethnic hatred. An Israeli Jewish woman had consensual sex with a man she believed to be a Jewish bachelor "looking for a serious romantic relationship." After what sounds like a rather casual assignation in a building near where they met in downtown Jerusalem, she discovered he was an Arab. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in prison on the ground that her consent was invalidated by his deception.

I can certainly understand that consent to sex is invalidated by force or the credible threat of force, and perhaps even by blackmail, though I think blackmail is stretching things. (That is, I'll buy nonconsensual sex as the value extracted by blackmail, to support a blackmail conviction, but not blackmail as the force to support a rape conviction.) But really, by deception about ethnicity?

I take this story as a ugly confluence of racism with the present totally confused state of affairs regarding casual sex. We haven't seen a rash of criminal cases involving garden-variety dishonesty in sexual relationships, and a good thing, too, or the courts wouldn't have time for anything else. This court obviously thought that lying about one's ethnicity put the dishonesty in a class by itself, which is just tawdry. The court's reasoning also revealed a gaping disconnect between its protective assumptions about the young woman's purity, versus her actual conduct. "The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls," the judge wrote.

But hold on, now. The details are sparse, but the sex seems to have involved a fairly casual encounter. There was a time when society would have wasted little sympathy on a woman foolish enough to have consensual sex with a near stranger. She was expected to get to know something about him first, and preferably to let her family get to know a good bit about his family. The modern attitude, particularly with the advent of birth control, is more permissive regarding casual hookups. But then should a woman who barely knows her lover be heard to complain that she was deceived about his social context? Should we be imprisoning a young man for violating "the sanctity of her body and soul" that she appeared to hold so cheap? (I realize I'm using "we" very loosely here; this was not an American case.)

Here's an old song about the dangers of leaping before you look, with the genders reversed. The song's humor can't work when it's the man being deceived unless he's been snookered into marrying his partner first, which shows us something about what we assume it takes for a man to be irretrievably ensnared by a sexual encounter: "Now all you young men who would marry for life/Be sure to examine your intended wife."

There once was a lawyer, they called Mr. Clay
Who had but few clients, and they wouldn't pay
At last, of starvation he grew so afraid
That he courted and married a wealthy old maid

...The ring on her finger left no room to plead
For his failure to ask for a warranty deed

. . .She hung her false hair on the wall on a peg
Then she proceeded to take off her leg. . . .

The courts didn't cut Mr. Clay any slack. Caveat emptor!