Moral and political philosophers distinguish among different forms of privacy: physical, informational and decisional. When it comes to sex, we tend to have a strong expectation that we’ll be granted all three.
Physical privacy involves having access to a space, on a permanent or temporary basis, where we are permitted to do things, sexual or otherwise, without being viewed by others. Informational privacy grants a reasonable amount of control over who has access to our personal information, including information about our sexual lives, habits and partners. Decisional privacy is having freedom from undue interference from others in the decisions we make about our lives, and people commonly want to make decisions about their sexual activities and relationships without such interference from family members, friends, co-workers or governments.
By contrast, other social relations, such as market transactions, come with different expectations of privacy. Commerce typically takes place in public venues, and we expect there to be informational transparency about the goods and services we purchase. We often want market transactions to be scrutinized or regulated by third parties in order to insure that they are fair and equitable, especially when full transparency is not available, as in the cases of pharmaceuticals, health care and real estate. So for the greater good, all three types of privacy are limited during market transactions in ways that would be unreasonable in regard to private sexual activity.
But when sex and commerce meet, the rules regarding sexual and market privacy quickly get murky. For example, should exchanges of sexual services for monetary gain take place with guarantees of privacy or transparency? If the former, then we expect them to be free from the intrusion of others. If the latter, then we expect them to be subject to social regulation. But where, exactly, is the border between the private exchange of money or gifts and the impersonal profit-making of the market?
When sexual partners exchange money and gifts between themselves, we generally see this as a private exchange. However, what do we do if a person has several sexual partners, and regularly receives money and gifts from each of them?
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