That Guy You Slept With Last Night – Is He Really Who You Think He Is?

Sexual deception comes in many different guises. Some may be criminal. So is there anything wrong with pretending to be someone else – if it works?

Anne Sexton, 14 Oct 2011

Damien is a good-looking guy – he does alright with the ladies. More than alright, if the truth be told. If he were a woman, you’d call him a slut, but since he is a bloke he is regarded as a lucky devil and a bit of a stud.

It probably helps that in addition to having a handsome face and a gym-honed body, he is smart, funny, confident and knows how to flirt. It is a pretty irresistible combination – at least I had some difficulty resisting it, but only initially. These days I know him well enough to be immune to his charms.

Having been there and done that, it doesn’t surprise me that Damien is a popular man. What did surprise me was his confession that, on occasion,

he used to seduce unsuspecting women using a different name.

“His name was Richard Ryan,” he told me. “

Richard was an idiot, a pompous asshole and a bit of a sexist pig.”

Richard, he explained, was happy to have sex with the kind of girls Damien himself would avoid like the plague, and according to him, there is a certain class of woman who likes nothing more than for seduction to be conducted with insults, lechery and a general sense of entitlement.

This level of deception struck me as troubling and more than a little unethical.

I’d like to believe that most people are smart enough to know that you can’t believe everything a stranger tells you on a night out. However, having said that, I tend to be trusting – because I tell the truth, I naïvely expect that others do as well. It’s not that I have never told a lie, or spun the truth to make myself look better, but for the most part I don’t see the point.

If someone told me his name was Mark and that he was a computer programmer, I’d believe it. If he told me I was absolutely adorable, well, I’d be a bit more suspicious. Not that I don’t think I am worthy of a compliment, mind you, but flattery from strangers should not be taken at face value.

I can’t help but think that the issue of consent becomes a bit murky if you lie outright to a potential partner. If you head home with somebody believing that he or she has told you the basic facts about who they are, only to discover that you were fed a false history, have you been unlucky, foolish or sexually assaulted? The answer depends on where you live.

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