xPixelatedx said:
Was that bestiality? And anyway I thought the reason that was taboo to begin with was because animals can't consent. Howard isn't even an animal, he's an alien. When it comes to aliens I find this philosophy works best: If you can share a drink with it in a bar, it's ethically boneable.
I mean, am I wrong? It seems like arguing against my above point would be harder then defending it.
Most mainstream science fiction (and at this point that's as far as the conversation goes in our culture) seems fairly reluctant to address the question. I'd characterize it as "everything played by a human actor is up for grabs, but everything else is perversion". Just to hammer that point home, you often see humanoids hybridize, even though it should be profoundly impossible. Even relatively openminded and progressive series like Star Trek and Farscape never really gave the green light. They repeatedly stressed the importance seeing all sentient life as partners for conversation, but never touched on partners for... well anything more.
Offhand, I can only really think of Mass Effect as taking a stab at it, and even then it seemed more as a response from the player community than as something they actually wanted to do. (Tali and Garrus were not romanceable in the first game, but were in the second, with bonus points for brilliant medical advice from Morlun depending on your choices).
Anyway, I guess I find the topic interesting, because even though I've never given it a whole lot of thought, I sat down and wrote all this on it. The "share a drink rule" is obviously a a good starting point, though there still isn't a solid metric for "consent" or "boning" in this context. Western society has broadly agreed that young teenagers are largely off-limits even if they are emotionally mature, but late teens are not, regardless of how emotionally stunted they may be. Even though it's a little arbitrary (and not even close to universal among humanity), I think that's probably about right. But what about an alien species that never achieves an equivalent IQ above 60, but have impeccable conversational skills? Or completely nonsentient beings that take their forms and behavior from the expectations of sentient beings they encounter? Or beings that are impossible to differentiate from a cabbage except for their ability to wordlessly resonate emotions? The "have a drink with them" metric measures the ability of a species to ape human dating rituals, not their ability to understand and consent to a relationship. This is just the same problem of testing sentience, and this is the romantic equivalent to a Turing test.
"If the average person can't tell the difference between this new thing and a normal person, then it's best to just treat it as you would treat a normal person."
The real crux of the idea has got to be some kind of bell curve of equality (emotionally and intellectually). If one party is disproportionately capable of taking advantage of the other's naivete (even unintentionally), then it's already on that slippery slope. Think about Spike Jonze's "Her". Could Samantha really consent to being Theodore's lover after only being turned on for a few minutes? Did she even really understand what that entailed? On the other hand, could Theodore even understand what loving Samantha meant near the end of the movie? There was a window in time where they were capable of loving each other as equals, but outside of it, mutually satisfying love was impossible. I would imagine aliens are probably the same. Within the bell curve: whatever works, works. Outside of it, one partner will only ever be a pet of the other.
Most of this speculation tends to be one-sided: "how does a fully-capable human know if a potential alien partner could consent", but let's flip it. "How do
they know
we could? How would
we know
we could?" Imagine that Hutts were so immensely brilliant that they could convince a human being to do pretty much anything with words alone. Does that mean that if Leia actually volunteered for the gold bikini slave treatment, we should consider that to be consensual? She is able to consent by human standards, but what about by a Hutt's standard? What if Hutts don't share our concern about consent, but instead operate on aggressive manipulation. Should we extend our concept of consent onto the capabilities of a Hutt (thus invalidating any human love for them, because they are the equivalent to a child manipulated by a malicious adult) or do we accept that humans should just "be aware of what they are getting into" when dealing with those silver-tongued slugs?
As far as "boning", we're in the fucking woods here without the details to build on. Imagine a species of sentient walking trees that exchange narcotic fruit to reproduce. What difference would there be between sex (for them) and completely asexual drug use (for us)? Would we be willing to celebrate a mixed-species couple in that case? Shouldn't we? Is there anything fundamentally different about their "lovemaking" producing mutual pleasure than human sex? Would it make a difference if the fruit was chemically-addictive to humans? I would think so, but I'm just not sure.
I've really gone to too much length about this, but I guess the point is: it really is a species-by-species scenario, and there may ultimately be really good reasons for society to discourage some pairings beyond just the bare concept of consent, which itself is so thorny that I'm not sure you can really unravel it, anyway. So after all that, I do think the "share a drink rule" rule is mostly sound for individual encounters between individual members of individual species, but anything larger scale, like significant tourism/cultural melding, etc, I'm not so sure.
In short: If Leah Thompson wants to brave a giant corkscrew duck phallus, then I don't have a problem with it. Wow, that's a sentence I never thought I'd write.
