Last, and very certainly not least, in our annual collection of fascinating writing from elsewhere in the spankosphere, comes a wonderful discussion from Not an Odalisque, entitled “Consent, Non-consent, and “Get The Hell Away From Me!””.
Kinky people tend to have, or say they have, a profound belief in consent. When playing with fire (hard limit, no thank you), a nuanced understanding of how people agree to things is reassuring. Exploitation and coercion occur even when people seem to enthusiastically say “yes,” but consent’s a good starting point. When you’re seeing people tied up and beaten, and feeling reluctant to intervene, that’s valuable.
As a group, we’ve generally agreed that consent is an ongoing action, and might cease at any time. This destroys the, “she was wearing a miniskirt,” defence, but raises some difficulties. You can’t withdraw your consent to be on an aeroplane mid-flight, but you can mid-kiss or mid-beating. In the fetish community practices like safewords are encouraged so that withdrawal can be communicated. I know a man who likes to gag people, but always gives them little cymbals to drop if they want the scene to end. Then, what if you enjoy being pushed beyond the point at which you seriously say, “no”?*
At this point you’re sure to encounter a self-appointed member of the consent police. He admonishes those who dare to play without safewords (I find them useless, because by the time I need to use them I’m too far gone to speak), and reprimands those who don’t hide their kink well enough, for involving unconsenting members of the public (he’d probably outlaw kissing on buses). I prefer him, though, to the hardened criminals: those who believe that explicit consent provides a license to do anything. Beaten to within an inch of your life? Well, you said it was ok beforehand! People don’t always act in their own self-interest, experience certainly shows that I don’t, although I intend to in future. All of this means that the precise boundaries of consent are constantly debated in fetish forums, usually by people who aren’t going to do anything more dangerous to life than tap each other with sticks while looking menacing. It’s an academic squabble after we’ve agreed the central points…
I’m curious about how other people resolve the inconsistencies of desire and consent, because it seems like a tangle. And how, from the kinky perspective which so privileges consent, does one deal with the heavy-handed tactics of the vanilla world?
The ensuing debate – attracting 43 comments at the time – was one of the most thought-provoking and enlightening discussions I’ve read on a kinky blog. Well worth a browse – and a great way to round off our “Best of” for another year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it!
Yes, Abel, ‘consent, and non-consent’, are possibly the most important questions, that must be answered, in a ‘spanko’s world’. And since it takes ‘two to tango’, it can bring problems galore, if this is not understood by both participating party’s.
I suspect there will always be a debate and there will always be a discrepancy between what we want and what we say we want, and between what we say we want and what we get.
The best we can do is to make the rules and live by them as well as possible, knowing that the variances will always exist. The better our intuition about the other person (people) involved in our activities, the better we’ll probably like the results.
In rare moments I can look into my lover’s eyes and see the unspoken truth. Her eyes beg for something more than what her words say. Should I act on that? At times it is only intuition alone that guides me. I have to be willing to take a risk. She’s taking a risk in giving her vulnerability to me, don’t I owe it to her to take risks for her?
Every day I pass by a hundred people that are doing things I have never given consent to. The man on the box that always asks if I have a quarter. Who gave him permission to speak to me? The girls that look at me as I walk by. Who gave them permission to look? The ones that don’t. Who told them they were allowed to ignore me like that?
Today at lunch, I passed by a huge PDA at the door to the restaurant. Should I be offended by prolonged public snogging, especially right before a meal? Or, should I be offended instead that am I generally being denied my right to see unfiltered and blatant sexuality in public?
The world, in my experience, never conforms to my wants. It goes on to do what it damn well pleases, and I’m left to conform to it. As long as it isn’t unduly hostile and cruel, I don’t generally complain. (Even if I did, to whom would I suggest improvements?)
Consent is made more acute by our activity, but it’s not divorced from the remainder of human experience. We’ve become sensitized to it. But we should keep it in context.