Exploiting a power imbalance to get sex is in fact morally wrong.
I think you have to be very very careful when you start labelling things as moral or otherwise.
Not to nearly the same extent, no. If someone has power over you and you refuse them sex, they could potentially do you all kinds of harm. If someone is very sexually attractive but has no power over you, then the worst that they can do is leave you a bit sexually frustrated.
In other words, being offered sex with strings by an attractive person is hardly as bad as being threatened by a powerful person.
>I think you have to be very very careful when you start labelling things as moral or otherwise.
Behavior that is clearly wrong is clearly wrong. The danger lies in not calling it out and allowing it to become normalized.
On the question of morality I stick to my guns: I think we are all tempted from time to time to ascend to our high horse and start declaiming of our righteousness, but my question to you would be: are you really so pure of morals that there are none that might find fault with you, given the chance?
I'm also struck by the stridency of some of the statements I'm reading on HN. I wonder if this is a cultural thing as to my British ears they sound almost comically absolutist. Perhaps in Europe this kind of forceful speech is less fashionable?
Sure, in a sense. But as I said previously, your sexual attractiveness to a person is not something that you can use to threaten them or ruin their life. On the one hand, you have situations where an attractive woman tries to get what she wants by offering sex. On the other, you have situations where a powerful man threatens a woman who refuses his sexual advances. You only have to think of it from a first-person perspective. Would you rather be coerced into sex, or offered sex in return for a favor?
>to my British ears they sound almost comically absolutist.
I am also British.
If you are someone's boss, you can control and humiliate them by, say, having them fired. You can't say "no thanks" if your boss fires you.
That is the distinction that I was drawing.
Much of this information, if released publicly, would be dismissed out-of-hand as incorrect to anyone who is an upright and decent person.
To the poster below me, the offer of sex can be used as control regardless of acceptance. If a wealthy and attractive person offers you sex, and you are unaware of an ulterior motive, the mere act of offering does factually impact your psychology and changes your cognitive biases. If the changing in these biases is directed, you are being controlled.
I recommend brushing up on your espionage knowledge. This isn't magic, it's intellectual honesty.
>the mere act of offering does factually impact your psychology and changes your cognitive biases.
Everything impacts your psychology and changes your cognitive biases. In that broad sense of the word "control", we are all "controlling" each other every day, no sex required.
I did not say that there are no women who use sex to control men. I said that it is not possible to control someone merely by offering them sex. It requires the cooperation of the person who is being offered sex. This is in stark contrast to the kind of power older men often have over younger women.
>And the idea that we can just decide to switch lust on and off is ridiculous.
Who said anything about switching lust off? All you have to do is decline the offer, which is eminently possible.
Edit: I can no longer reply due to the thread length, so here is reply to below post:
To say that someone offered you sex, is to inculcate the idea of a sexual relationship with a person which you would otherwise not be associated with in such a context.