“Virtual sex or erotic chats on the internet are grounds for divorce, Belgium’s top judges have ruled. The Flemish legal review De Juristenkrant reported that Brussels’ Court of Appeal had accepted printouts of a sexy conversation in a chat room as evidence in an adultery trial. The court ruled that fragments of erotic chats on the internet were, alone, insufficient to prove a partner had cheated on his or her spouse. However, the judges found that they could constitute grounds for divorce. They showed a husband or wife was behaving in a way that was not compatible with the respect they owed their spouse. The ruling means that printouts of chats, as well as dirty emails, will increasingly be produced in divorce cases. The judges have also concluded that laws protecting an individual’s privacy and correspondence cannot be used by cheating men and women to prevent chats or emails going before a court. Rights to privacy could sometimes conflict with other rights, ruled the court, meaning husbands and wives can print off illicit emails and chats, as long as they don’t use illegal methods of obtaining the evidence.” — Expatica.com (Belgium)

Frankly you need more information than this story provides in order to be able to form an understanding of the relation between cybersex and cheating. (PervScan was unable to find any further information on De Juristenkrant’s web site.) For example, suppose you have a chat with a random stranger, a person you’ll never meet except through the words and perhaps images you exchange on screen. What’s the difference between this and a random encounter that you might have with a real flesh-and-blood person? Particularly if you use cams, the only real difference is that you never actually touch one another (though you may well touch yourself at the behest of one another). Does that mean that a mere touch defines the borderline between fidelity and infidelity?

Take another example. Suppose you have an intense, long-term relationship with somebody — all online. You chat. You exchange emails. You masturbate together using live cams. You profess love for one another — but you never meet. Would this be more or less threatening to a marriage than a physical encounter with a random stranger? Really it seems like a “serious” virtual romance might pose more of a threat than a meaningless physical encounter, and yet it’s hard not to think that many spouses would be quicker to tolerate the long-term virtual encounter than the short-term physical one. There’s just something about touching that invokes the fundamental sense of boundaries, limits, skin.

But if that’s the case, then is cybersex cheating? It’s really hard to say. On one hand, it doesn’t seem any more threatening than pornography or strip bars. On the other hand, there are many spouses who don’t look kindly on their significant others ogling camgirls or frequenting Hooters. To be practical about it, you’d have to take it on a case-by-case basis. Most cybersex probably doesn’t amount to cheating, but likely there are a few cases that do. But how do you discriminate between these? Perhaps that’s the real borderline at issue — not that between cybersex and fidelity per se, but between tolerable and intolerable amounts of cybersex.

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