I have been blogging a lot about family things lately, which isn’t why I originally started keeping this blog/journal. Writing is my way of processing everything going on right now, so I needed the brief outlet. I would now like to get back to other topics, and that is what I am doing with this post.
Consent has been a topic of heated discussion in my local kink community (and in the greater community at large) over the past several months. I have seen many threads on various sites started to discuss it, and I have seen the topic come up as discussion points for local meetings. I cannot even count the number of Facebook and blog posts centered around consent, and on multiple occasions consent has been the topic of interest among friends in my home. As I have heard and read more, I have come to realize that what I would gauge a consent violation is very different than many others.
As I begin my definitions and discussion below, I want to make it clear that by doing so I am in no way saying that any differing definitions, opinions, experiences, etc. are less valid than my own. We all have to form our own perceptions and opinions based on our own experiences, and every single one of us will do that in a different manner with differing results. That’s what makes life, our community, and people in general so interesting. Please think about this before attacking me over my opinion. If you do not like or do not agree with the opinion I am about to express, I will be happy to discuss your reasons in a reasonable, adult fashion. Or, you can just ignore my post and move on. Please, once again, do not attack me or anyone else who chooses to share their thoughts here on my blog.
We as individuals and as community of people who participate in BDSM in all of its forms, by the very nature of what we do, have to take questions of consent very seriously. If we see or hear of consent violations happening, we have to do what we can to investigate the situation and make sure it doesn’t happen again for the safety, peace of mind, and reputation of everyone involved. If we do not take such accusations seriously, people will get hurt and possibly killed, people who are committing these violations will continue to do so, and then no one will be willing to interact with others in our community.
I have always participated in kink activities in a risk aware manner. Every time I say yes to participating in any type of exchange, there is a risk that things can go wrong through no fault of mine or my partner. Depending on what the activity is, there is a risk of minor up to very serious harm happening. Things can go wrong without us even realizing it sometimes. I'm very serious about discussing the potential for those mishaps occurring so that my partner and I can have a plan on how to deal with them if they occur. Negotiation and communication are so very important. Discuss every possibility you can think of during negotiation so there are as few question marks as possible. I realize there will almost always be possibilities that I haven't thought of. If one of those possibilities happen and I'm not cool with it, that's what I have a safe word for.
I couldn’t describe a single truly satisfying exchange where something hasn’t happened that was outside the bounds of what prior negotiations covered. Did that mean that my partner violated my consent? No. It meant that neither of us thought of this particular possibility prior to the moment. Maybe it was a spur of the moment addition to a scene, or maybe it was a calculated turn that was meant to push my boundaries. If this new activity isn’t something I’m okay with, it’s my responsibility to put a halt to things either temporarily or permanently. I shouldn’t expect my partner to read my mind and know that I am not okay with what is happening. That’s putting an awful lot of responsibility on the other person for my participation. I do not think that is fair to either of us. If you are one of those people who falls into such a deep headspace that you do not feel you can say no beyond a certain point no matter what it is, you need to set safeguards for yourself. Perhaps you should have a spotter nearby you can trust to watch and make a decision for you. Whatever works for you.
If you go through with an exchange to the end without voicing any sort of objections or concerns, two days later you can’t go back and say your consent was violated. If during the exchange I used my safeword and the person didn’t stop, my consent would have been violated. If I had pre-negotiated that I wasn’t willing to do something as a hard limit and my partner did it anyway without re-negotiating it with me, my consent would have been violated. Regret after the fact is not the same thing as consent violation. I hear stories involving this all the time. These are the sorts of stories that set my anger ablaze for various reasons.
There have been plenty of times where an activity was initiated in that gray area. It wasn’t previously addressed, so no one had said yes or no to it beforehand. The majority of time it has worked out positively for everyone involved. There have been a couple of times where one of us has called a stop because something wasn’t right about where the experience was going. There have been times where I have left at the end of the evening feeling okay but then later had second thoughts about doing whatever it was again. My reaction in that case was not to attack my partner and claim that I had been victimized. I talked with the person, explained my concerns and feelings about said activity, and either chose to try it again on a tentative basis or not at all. I am not a victim. I am responsible for my own actions and my own reactions. Being a submissive does not make me weak, does not make me easy to manipulate into doing something that I don't want to do, and does not make me someone who needs protection from my partner or from myself. Being a dominant does not make my partner a mind reader or give them perfect interpretation of body language every single time I react to something during a scene. If something goes wrong (or for that matter very right) discussion afterward is an extremely powerful too. The more you understand about each other and each scene you participate in, the stronger you become in your chosen role.
Secondary to personal growth and understanding is another very important detail to keep in mind when making the statement that your consent was violated during a scene: Reputation. You only get one reputation as a person, as a submissive, as a dominant. We interact in very close knit communities in the BDSM world. We all know each other. We go to the same events, group munches, and meetings. We serve as references for each other, and we all (at least I hope all) try our best to protect one another as best we can. It's our responsibility as a community to identify any predatory activity and remove the perpetrators from our active circles. Overall, I think we are very good at doing that. The grapevine is fast and vicious when it comes to violence or consent violations occurring within our safe havens because we want to keep those places and event safe for everyone. For these reasons, reputation is everything. One wrong comment insinuating a partner has violated consent even if retracted later can ruin a person's reputation within the community forever. It may seem harmless to sit around with friends a week after a scene and rehash all the details, how you decided three days after the fact that a particular action by your partner or instance during the scene made you feel violated and that it never should have happened. But then those people go tell three other people each and those people and those people, and before long your partner who didn't know they did anything wrong at all is suddenly banned from community groups and events that they had been participating in for years. Even if later you go back and say it was all a misunderstanding, that you've talked it over and worked out what went wrong ... the damage is done. Some people will accept that it was all a miscommunication, but to others that person will always be a predator who cannot be trusted.
Do consent violations happen? Do predatory actions happen where people are hurt emotionally, physically, psychologically? Should reports of these violations be taken seriously and acted upon to make sure they do not happen again? Absolutely yes to all of these. If it was something criminal like rape or the use of drugs, the situation should be turned over to the police to handle. If it's one of those gray areas, investigation into the matter should happen right away. Thorough discussion should happen with all parties involved. What were the details of the scene? How did each individual feel about it at the time? Did those feelings change afterward at some point? How so? Perhaps both partners were feeling the same way about what happened but they didn't know how to discuss it with one another. Maybe the other person misread a cue. Maybe something else outside of the scene happened three days later that made that person's reaction to the scene change. Maybe something in their past flared up to cause negative feelings that no one had anticipated beforehand or during the scene. There are so many factors to be discussed in these sorts of situations before jumping to the conclusion that the dominant is a horrible person to engage in play and can never be trusted again. At the end of all of that, if you still feel the same way about them, choose not to play with them again and add a few more things to the list to include in your next negotiations. If they truly violated your consent in any way, make it known loudly so that it doesn't happen to you or anyone else again. If they didn't actually do that, don't ruin their chance of interacting with and continuing to be accepted in the BDSM community they call home.
