Loud Sex Noises Landed This Woman In Jail

It’s never fun to overhear people having sex — be it on your dorm hall, in a neighboring hotel room, or even just as a result of poor communication with your roommates. But if you are that person making the noise, well, it’s hard to feel too bad about it...especially if you are Caroline Cartwright, now known as the woman arrested for having sex too loudly.

For Caroline Cartwright of Tyne and Wear, England, having sex has become quite the situation for local law enforcement. Cartwright and her husband, who have been married for more than 30 years, have a bedroom that backs onto a neighboring residence, and their loud sex noises have driven the neighbors mad. After 30 visits from police for noise disturbance in the neighborhood, Cartwright was served with an Anti-Social Behavior Order (ASBO), which is the British version of a restraining order. This ASBO banned Cartwright from making excessive noises during sex that could be heard on a neighboring property or outside for a four-year period. But Cartwright, who felt like she was doing nothing wrong, refused to comply with the ASBO, and was sentenced to eight weeks in a bail hostel. Less than a year after her release, Cartwright again violated her noise abatement order and ended up back in jail for another 12 weeks.

Cartwright has no regrets and no plans to stop; she sees nothing wrong with having sex with her husband in her own house. While it’s easy to sympathize with Cartwright’s neighbors, who claim that they can’t even hear their own TVs during the couple’s two-hour-long lovemaking sessions, the actions of the British justice system also seem questionable. Such close regulation of a person’s sex life, no matter how disruptive, is extreme and a bit scary. If you can’t have wild and crazy sex in your own property, where can you? And why should the government have a say in what sex noises you can make? Don’t they have better things to be doing?

Until we get the answers to these questions, I'm sure that Cartwright will continue fighting her freedom to making as much noise as she likes, one sex session at a time.