Do you care about your significant others sexual past with a poll.

[robvalue]

OK so... we agree questions should be carefully worded. Is this your point? This can all be sorted out by explaining exactly what you mean by "sexual history" when asking a question, can it not? It is up to the person asking the question to be as clear as possible, not for those answering it to try and work out what the question asker was thinking.

When is this a problem in the real world? Confusion in an Internet discussion is hardly cause for concern over a vague phrase. I'm failing to imagine the kind of conversations that would realistically occur. If I want to know how many people my partner has slept with, I ask them that. If I ask about their sexual history, and I don't make it clear I'm including crimes in that description, then for them to assume I am talking about crimes is... weird. People don't usually jump to "crimes" in polite conversation about pasts without being explicit. Are you suggesting this should be a phrase which is accepted as a polite way of asking about sexual crimes? And even if I flat out ask, "What is your criminal history?" there's no guarantee I'll get the truth. It's kind of something people have to feel ready to tell you.

If someone refuses to explain exactly what their question means and then jumps all over the answers for being "wrong" then that is just being difficult.

This all applies to any sort of question, and I fail to see the relevance of sexual stuff in any of this. The only other thing I can think is that you are asking for people to generally interpret "sexual history" in a different way to how they may currently do, and again if both parties are clear what the terms mean (they are not concrete) then there is no problem.

For example, if I ask about your education, am I also asking about whether you killed anyone in the classroom while getting your education? I could be, but if so I need to be clear about it. To expect people to know that is what I mean without making it clear seems pointless and inevitably leads to me having to explain what I mean anyway to make my "point".

But I've been round the houses already with this and made my points, so I'll sign off. Thanks for the discussion