6th June 2026: No Safewords, Yes Limits, Some Consent

[it's over 26,000 words long with an estimated reading time at 1 hour 40 minutes]
[sorry]

this is not going to be especially academic. also, the pdfs for the new topping and the new bottoming book are mislabelled on the website itself, so, i’ve gotten it correct but it’s gonna look like i’ve gotten it wrong. this is also – mostly – going to be about scene-based kink.

still! this is going to be a more-or-less sincere effort at trying to figure out some things around safewords, limits, and a few books on consent i’ve read recently. we’ll get to capital letters and a nicer writing style in a moment, i promise (mommy prommies). for right now, i just want to lay out the point to y’all. and the point is this:

we need to disambiguate. i promise you (another mommy prommy) that a little disambiguation isn’t going to hurt. we are caught in this nightmare of constant cross talk. if someone says “safewords”, “limits”, or “consent”, do you actually know what they mean? are you sure? ask, and prove yourself wrong. and i’m not saying here that we need to define terms so strictly or understand them out of context (were such a thing even possible), but we need to figure out what we’re saying and how other ways of saying it differ.

this is not an attempt to set out the true definitions of a safeword, or a limit, or a consent. what this is, instead, is an exploration of some ambiguities in our lexicon and a gesture towards a terminology that i think is useful. when i say that – “useful” – i mean it makes clear aspects of negotiating the sorts of kink i am interested in, in a way that other terminology makes opaque. whatever the fuck i mean by that will hopefully become clear across the course of this essay blog post. it’s also worth noting here that i’ve tried to stick to likely introductory resources for parts of this essay, figuring out what someone who is coming into kink for the first time might find or what experienced people found when they were first coming into kink. ojst, for example, is not the best source for a lot of this stuff, but i remember when it was very present in kinky cultural consciousness.

anyway, here’s the outline:

the first chunk of this is going to be about safewords and no safewords play. this is going to be in three sections: a pseudo safewords 101 (as in, a pseudo 101 for safewords not a 101 for pseudo safewords); a no safewords 101 basically even though i’ll say it’s not that; and a bit about disambiguating our language around this.

the next chunk is about limits and it’ll be in three sections as well: what limits are and why they matter; language and what i’ll term gestural and affective limits as well as static and dynamic limits.

then, for the middle chunk, i’m going to take a brief interlude to talk about negotiation and how i negotiate no safewords, yes limits scenes

the fourth chunk is going to be about introductory consent content, as well as the books tomorrow sex will be good again by katherine angel, sex beyond “yes” by quill r kukla, and sexuality beyond consent by avgi saketopoulou, each with its own section. i’m going to be pretty harsh about quill’s book but i’ll say here that i mostly (…mostly…) really liked it, and then really didn’t like the last section. the avgi book is something i’m going to try to reappropriate into a less psychoanalytic, more practicable framework – and i’ll contrast this with quill’s book. then i’ll get into a final section relating the feminist theory to the kink educator theory.

that chunk is going to be followed by three sections about how fucked the whole discourse is. i’m going to have a kind of extended aside about kink writing and discourse itself, followed by a critique of consent itself, and then i will get onto the question that emerges for me from all of this, which is emblematic of the other questions we’re facing when we think about why we as a scene are constantly at odds with ourselves: is “consent” even worth saving?

my answer will be no, and in the conclusion i’m going to gesture towards a mode of kink conduct to account for the harm we constantly enact on ourselves and each other. a framework for the aftermath.

that edgy enough? i love you. let’s go talk about sex.

No Safewords

Safewords 101

Why don’t we pretend you don’t know what a safeword is. How about we look up some introductory resources together? Here, I found an Oh Joy Sex Toy comic for us to look at. It tells us that “the sub is really the person who has power in a [kink] scene, and can stop it whenever they want by using a safeword!” Safewords stop scenes then. Dossie and Janet put it similarly, stating that “a safeword is a word agreed up by the players in a scene that means stop, there’s a problem, we need to change something, something isn’t working, someone’s in trouble.” (pg. 25) More simply it means “Stop, something is wrong.” (pg. 44) You’ll even encounter this on the Fetlife Kinktionary [sic].

If you’ve seen television media or any film that makes a joke out of the mere fact that someone is kinky, you might have seen safewords depicted as a single word that means stop. However, as with all things, kinksters have expanded on safewords to make entire systems of semi-formalised codes. Most common in my own circles is the traffic light system. Green means go, obviously enough. I have read about blues, pinks, purples, and so on, but never heard these used so I’m not going to write about them. We’re going to instead focus on yellow and red.

The Oh Joy Sex Toy comic gives us an explanation of the traffic light system as well: “Yellow means ‘please ease up and stop this thing’ and red means ‘stop everything right now!’” The difference here is maybe a bit oblique but we can think of yellow as “stop in a way that keeps the scene going” and red as “stop the scene”. The same distinction appears in The New Bottoming Book (pg. 45) and in Pavlov’s writing on Fet. On the other hand, the Fetlife Kinktionary tells us that yellow means “slowdown or check-in is needed” and that “the person is reaching their limit”, meaning that they have not reached that limit yet (make a mental note of that phrasing); instead, they “need to actively communicate about that boundary”. Red here also means that “play is stopped entirely for that session, not to be resumed.” Sure, except Dossie and Janet would argue that “just because someone safeworded doesn’t mean that the scene has to be over.” (pg. 28)

So we’re already seeing some wrinkles here in this introductory material. The primary function of safewords is to indicate an immediate stop to the scene, but there are also things that we call “safewords” which don’t perform that function. Instead, as is the case with yellow, safewords can also indicate that something related to – but distinct from! – stopping should occur. Whether yellow means “stop but keep going” or “keep going but stop soon” is unclear in the material we have to hand. Similarly, it’s unclear whether red – that is, whether stopping entirely – refers to pausing the scene in a way that can be resumed or exiting the kinky encounter in a way that any further play would be a newly negotiated scene.

Perhaps an understanding of why we use safewords might clarify these discrepancies. Everyone states that safewords are for both tops and bottoms (no reference because literally everyone says it), but most of the advice on safewords seems oriented around their use by bottoms because, well, bottoms are the ones using them most. I’ll continue in this fine tradition by paying lip service to the fact that tops can safeword, writing about safewords in a way that’s only relevant to bottoms, and then throw in an extra little sentence about tops safewording too just to cover our bases.

To get back on topic, Dossie and Janet would tell you that “in consensual BDSM there are always safewords or safeword equivalents.” (pg. 47) The implication seems to be that safewords make kink consensual, or at least are an essential part of a scene’s consensuality. In The New Topping Book, they again emphasise “A safeword is simply a code we use to communicate the status of consent. Responsible tops play consensually – the safeword is your safety net, to let you know what you’re doing.” (pg. 29) Pavlov doesn’t use the word “consent” but does elaborate that safewords give her more power to “manage and control the scene”, which matters because, in her words, “I don’t want to harm you. Probably because I like you. Definitely because I don’t want to deal, myself, with having harmed you.” Vahavta too makes clear that “when we talk about communicating stops to play, we talk about removing what is causing harm.” Even Dossie and Janet weigh in to say, “As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms.” (pg. 27) It appears that another operative word to consider is “harm”.

Safewords then seem to preserve “consent” and prevent “harm”. Both those words appear in quotes because I think they’re worth examining further, but that’s for the back half of this essay blog post. At least for right now, this seems like a reasonable goal, and safewords seem to do a reasonable job at it. For tops too, the ability to make clear their own boundaries against a pushy bottom is essential since, as we are all aware, top and bottom are not synonymous with active and passive. If I were writing a 101 at this point, I would tell you to make clear in your negotiations what red and yellow mean to you – that is, whether code for “stop” means “stop for the evening” or “stop for right now”; whether code for “slow down” means “I have reached my limit” or “I am approaching my limit”. With all this information, you can probably go to a play party and do some kink without your partner having to explain ten minutes worth of concepts to you. However, I am not trying to write a 101, and I think that there are more tools than safewords for preserving “consent” and preventing “harm”. Let us try to imagine one.

Running Reds

If that was(n’t) a safewords 101, then this is(n’t) a no safewords 101. Let’s (not) start by negotiating a no safeword scene and seeing if we can do it in a way that fits our criteria: preserving consent and preventing harm (not in quotes for right now because that would get annoying; also, we don’t even have strict definitions for these terms yet, and – hate to say it – we won’t by the end of this essay blog post either).

My flatmate wants to stick a bunch of needles in me. Neither of us want to use safewords. We are freely agreeing not to use safewords. Off to a good start! Now we negotiate what the scene is actually going to look like. He’s going to start at 20g needles and work his way up to 10g at most. He’s going to have me in ropes and then move me around using the ropes while the needles are in me. As he does that, he’ll take out the needles. Sounds fun, right? Well, I need assurances about all this. I need him to practice on me with some big needles first so I can see how they feel. I also need him to practice on me with a lot of little needles and a spotter. I need a spotter for the scene to feed me Supermix and Lucozade Ice Kick. I need a plan for how to get me onto the floor safely if I pass out. We do the practice, troubleshoot, talk it out, and when we get to the scene, everything is to a standard that I have signed off on. We have put a lot of effort into preventing harm – even if I can’t decide for myself once the scene starts when to end it, my flatmate knows and will accommodate everything I need to get through it on the terms I have set out in advance. The only question mark remaining is whether we have preserved consent, but if you can believe that dental surgery is consensual even though you might have the capacity to say (a perhaps muffled) “stop” which would end up ignored at the point where you’re halfway through, you can believe that this too is consensual: both are free agreements made with full knowledge of what the scene/surgery would entail and the risks therein.

(i’d be remiss if i wrote all that with a straight face, like, god if you’ve heard me talk about this stuff you know where i’m going but if you haven’t, just,, i want you to know that i’ll loop back around to critique this logic. mommy prommies.)

Dottie and Janet would argue that this still doesn’t account for something like a heart attack (pg. 172). However, saying “heart attack” will get the specifics of what’s wrong across better than a red, which would then have to be elaborated by explaining “I’m having heart attack”. It’s worth stating now that no safewords play isn’t an argument against communication; it’s a move to the final say about what is communicated to be the top’s rather than the bottom’s (so a scene where the dominant is really the person with the power). In a recent scene, I stated “I am going to faint” and my flatmate let me down from the ropes. We didn’t have a safeword, he just decided he didn’t want me to faint. Safewords can be necessary to prevent harm if medical issues that neither top nor bottom want to deal with, such as the case where one of my ex’s “joints might be wrenching out of its socket”, are risked faster than a sentence describing the issue can be eked out – I will make that concession at least.

Still, in the absence of those sorts of immediate medical issues, I’ve negotiated a no safeword scene that fit challenge set out by the introductory safeword material. Harm (whatever that is) was prevented and (some) consent was preserved. Now the question is this: What’s the value of a no safeword scene?

Dossie and Janet are once again pretty harsh on my favourite type of play in The New Bottoming Book:

We have met bottoms who say they don't want to negotiate a safeword because "if I have one, I use it before I'm really ready for the scene to stop." Our experience has been that as you learn more about your own limits and about your partner, you'll learn how to "stretch" and allow your limits to be pushed further and further. There's also no reason why the use of a safeword should mean that you have to stop playing entirely, unless that's the specific meaning you've negotiated for your safeword: you can safeword, drop out of the scene, do whatever communication is called for to make the scene work for everybody, and then go right back to stretching those limits. Don't give up on safewords ...[sic] simply learn more about your own capabilities and desires. (pg. 46)

This is a particular use of the word “limit” that we’ll get to in the next chunk of this essay blog post, but what I want to focus on here is the idea of “stretching”. Fortunately, Joseph has me covered already with a rebuttal from Leathersex:

The ecstatic in leathersex is approached only by leaps. You have to overstep your supposed limits by giant steps to get there. If the limit just creeps up, you are effectively building up a psychic callous rather than moving toward the ecstatic leap. For this reason—and other obvious reasons like safety—you want to put yourself into the hands of Tops you trust completely. Then you will relax your limits more, take greater apparent risks, and, in the end, risk ecstasy more than injury. (pg. 73)

I’d agree with Joseph here from my own experience that the “psychic callous” which forms as one becomes used to something gets in the way of that “ecstatic leap” (something I experience on occasion while playing with my flatmate). This argument about the value of stretching doesn’t really hold up to me, unless taking more in terms of what is done to you without taking more in terms of how it feels for you is the point. Safewords then serve to get in the way of this ecstatic leap by diffusing the erotic energy at the point it becomes more than the bottom thinks they can handle (just as Patrick Califia depicts in No Mercy (pg. 233)). Conversely, no safewords play facilitates this ecstatic leap by foregrounding what is necessary to preserve consent and prevent harm while simultaneously trapping the bottom in an experience where they might experience the rare bliss of being made to bear the unbearable.

Other kinksters find value in no safewords play too. Pavlov writes “I love playing [as a bottom] without the emergency break” and finds value in the aftermath: “When they help put me back together? Our trust and love is made stronger. Our dynamic is intensified and grown.”

In conversation with other sickos as well, I have heard several times the sentiment that no safewords makes play easier. This is also true for me. The way this works is that as soon as escape isn’t an option, it ceases to be a concern. I realise this is a particular emotional response that not everyone is going to have, but for those of us that do have it, it seems good to be present in the scene rather than trapped in our heads contemplating whether we need to red out. By changing the tools we use to negotiate play, we have managed to change the affective experience of that play. This is an important point and we will revisit it.

Obviously, this is not the case for everyone. My flatmate, for instance, wants it to stop the whole time he is bottoming serious impact for me without a safeword and he’ll beg for it to stop, but he won’t safeword. Or, he could safeword, but that wouldn’t make it stop. He finds erotic value in this dynamic, that he could be subject to pain at any time, and he trusts me not to create consequences for him that would hurt each of our lives individually as well as our life together.

For others, no safeword dynamics don’t look like this constant consensually non-consensual struggle. Hannah writes:

A common misconception about this dynamic is that it usually involves yelling, “No! Red!” and being ignored. That’s not how my dynamic works at all. It’s not about saying no and being ignored—it’s more about just not saying no. The reality is that as much as I might want to say no to something in particular, I don’t want to say no to Mistress in general, and that’s better to keep in mind.

This is somewhere between mine and my flatmate’s experience of no safewords play. It’s not my relaxation into in experience as something I cannot escape, and it’s not my flatmate’s erotic terror at wishing he could escape any given scene. Instead, Hannah’s no safewords dynamic seems to foster an internal discipline and subservience to her Mistress, which she clearly values as her consensual slave. I see something in here echoed by my ex when she writes that having a safeword she isn’t allowed to use keeps her present. (Keep “a safeword she isn’t allowed to use” in mind for a moment.)

There is, I think, a largely bad faith (though of course not necessarily bad faith) concern that safewords are essential to prevent sexual assault – that bad actors will abuse no safewords bottoms with impunity. This is ridiculous as a claim. In a practical sense, at least at the scenes I am in, if someone is beaten up and cannot make it to work the next day in a way that was communicated as an unacceptable risk, if someone’s teeth are knocked out without negotiating that as part of the dynamic, the bottom is going to have the backing of the entire kink scene against their top. “But they said no safewords” is never going to be seen as a good reason for that kind of harm – and this is still the case in situations where bottoms do actually want to be beaten up that badly or have their teeth knocked out; some people will still think tops are abusive for indulging this sort of heavy no safewords play and side with the bottom against their own wishes in a conflict that is only happening in this outside observer’s head.

Vahavta addresses this concern for us:

There is nothing wrong with trusting the people you play with to have common sense. There is nothing wrong with expecting the people you play with to be honest about their desires.
There is nothing about playing on the edge that makes assault any more likely or warranted than any other time.
And besides, if someone were going to break my kneecaps without discussion if I didn't list it as a hard limit, they weren't going to listen to a safeword, anyway.

So, where are we at with no safewords play? I have argued that through negotiating limits, desires & expectations (which I will later explain more fully as “investment” in the scene and one’s “deal”), and assurances, no safewords play can still be play in which consent is preserved and harm is prevented, supposing there are no issues that might arise in which saying a sentence either takes too long or is otherwise impossible. I also think this sort of play has a distinct appeal and allows us as kinksters to experience things not allowed for by traditional limits. Great! Again, I wish this were a no safewords 101 because I would just stop here. Instead, I think we have some unresolved issues bubbling below the surface of all these words. Aren’t I just taking safewords to the sentence level if I can say I’m fainting and my top will stop? Is it still a safeword if my ex can’t use it? Let’s keep scratching at the scab.

Disambiguation

As I’ve mentioned before, we kinksters struggle to find the right words. Let’s try to find what has been ambiguous in my own writing, and then let’s try to disambiguate.

So, a safeword, mostly simply, is a word that means “stop”. We mostly use and establish safewords when we want to say the word “stop” without that meaning “stop”. Easy enough. My flatmate informs me that Reddit kinksters (no reference for this cause I’m not going on Reddit) will tell newbies that safewords are only necessary in CNC play, but “stop” will suffice otherwise. This elides over the fact that “stop” is still doing what a safeword is doing, and what is still unclear in all this is what this “stop” itself means. On the one hand, the bottom allegedly has all the power in the scene and their actual “stop” is the final say; on the other hand, the top allegedly has all the power in the scene and the bottom’s “stop” is only information about how the scene is going. This is where we come into our first disambiguation: safewords-as-action and safewords-as-information. (it’s two in the ayy emm so lay off about the terms i’m making up, okay?)

Pavlov outlines this ambiguity for us:

Sometimes we say “safewords,” and we mean “communication of how things are going.”
Sometimes we say “safewords,” and we mean “emergency breaks the bottom can use to stop or adjust play.”
When I top, I insist on safewords as communication, and that the bottom trust to me to make the right call once I have that information.
When I “bottom without safewords,” I actually still use them as communication of how I’m doing or feeling, but my partner and I agree it's okay for them to ignore my feelings. We’ve agreed I have no emergency break.

The former use of the word safewords there is safewords-as-information in my terminology, and the latter is safewords-as-action. What’s bizarre and kind of telling about this whole quote though is that Pavlov describes what she does as involving safewords and “without safewords” depending on whether she’s topping or bottoming respectively, but she’s using safewords-as-information in both instances. Right.

It seems important to figure out which meaning of safeword one is using while negotiating a scene. It’s awful to be told that you can take a bit more by a top if you red and expect immediate cuddles; but it’s also awful to red because of some temporary joint issue that needs the top’s slight (but immediate) adjustment and no more, and to be thrust out of the scene entirely into aftercare and cuddles. The former is violatory in a fairly obvious way, but the latter situation undermines the bottom’s sexual agency by paving over the space between go and stop where the bottom can tell the top, “Stop right now but stay in control”.

The stereotypical kinkster response here would be to meet my accusations of ambiguity with suggestions of a dozen different safewords, each another colour, one for every situation imaginable. On the Fetlife Kinktionary, there is an entry for “beige” which means, “Activity is fine but boring. Please change.” This is emblematic of an issue I have that underpins the logic of this solution, which is that when the top is at risk of being a mechanical kink-dispensing machine when the bottom starts directing them. Negotiation doesn’t end once a scene starts, and safewords (in both senses) can’t replace clear communication, only support it. If a bottom is bored, they should let themselves act bored, and the top should have the wherewithal to pick up on that. I for one am not interested in bottoming for people who need me to say a colour to tune into my most basic emotional state, and I am not interested in topping people who would obfuscate the way they feel while I am trying to give them an intense erotic experience.

What confuses the issue even more is that some kinksters will consider only using safewords-as-information in a scene to be no safewords play since they see safewords-as-action as the only valid form of a safeword. Other kinksters, however, will consider using safewords-as-information the same as any other safewords play. And honestly I can’t even answer the question I posed about my ex. What’s a safeword if you don’t let yourself say it? As always, we find ourselves using terms that gesture at the same set of things – stopping a scene, reaching a limit – but we need to have conversations as part of our negotiations which explicate what these terms mean, and what it means that these terms mean what they mean.

When I say “no safewords” in terms of scenes I bottom, I mean both no safewords-as-action and no safewords-as-information. I don’t want to use safewords-as-action because I don’t want to actually have the power in the scene; I want that to be taken from me, in fact. I don’t want to use safewords-as-information because I feel like I can better express myself with plain language, I don’t do character based roleplay, and I honestly just have a personal distaste for the traffic light system (inasmuch as I think it’s tacky; this opinion is totally unwarranted but it is real). I feel confident in doing this sort of play because I believe that if I screamed “I’m having a medical emergency” (which is possible) or “I’m going to shit myself” (which is also possible) then my top would take heed of that information and act on it in a way that they could at least reasonably justify afterwards to me. (Put that idea – the “reasonably justify afterwards” thing – to one side for me, right next to “consent” and “harm”. We’ll get back to it [though not in that exact phrasing].) I might still say things such as “stop”, “don’t”, or “no”, which in a non-CNC context effectively act as safewords, but I expect my top to take that as information or tune me out, depending on the situation. For example, “stop” before a big needle insertion could amount to giving me a moment to steady my breathing; “don’t” could indicate that my top is ruffling my hair in a way that’s sensorily unpleasant for my autistic self; “no, no, no” could just be my ambient moaning in so much pain with so much pain still to come: what’s important is my top knows me well enough to be informed in parsing this information and acting on it.

All of the above – all this detailing what I mean when I say “safewords” and what it means when I say I don’t use them – is something I need to discuss in negotiation or otherwise make clear to be able to accept a no safewords scene. That’s in addition to all the conditions that have to be met for me to feel safe and scenecraft that makes the play work at all. We need to make this disambiguation part of how we communicate and negotiate with each other, and we need to do that without acting as if one language for describing all this is more true than another. We are talking about kink – the words are all made up anyway. What matters is knowing what it means for your partner to call red (or to not), and what that says about what they want out of a scene.

Yes Limits

Limits 101

So there is this kinky parable which, I assume, has countless variations. I will relate the version of it I have heard:

There’s a new guy on the scene. Cis guy. Straight. He’s a bottom. He’d do anything for a powerful woman. He approaches an experienced femdom at an event. He begs her to play. Fine. She says she’ll play. She wants to negotiate a scene. He wants whatever she wants. She asks about his limits. He says he has none. Fine. She ties him to a St Andrew’s cross, blindfold him, and then takes out her sharps kit where she stores her needles, one of which she promptly, painfully – but safely! – inserts underneath his big toenail. She takes the blindfold off and asks him if he still has no limits. It turns out he does.

This is the line in kink communities: “We all have limits.” (pg. 38) This is also a line that is the subject of much debate. Obviously, the femdom in this parable is in the wrong. Asking the guy about needles in his toes would have gotten the point across fine. Still, the parable serves a purpose to us – the newbie at a munch – inasmuch as we now understand that there are things that we really don’t want to happen when we negotiate a scene. Is that what “limits” are then: “things that we really don’t want to happen”? Let’s look at the literature to figure out if we can find a better definition.

Unfortunately, the literature is giving me a little less to bounce off than the safewords section. While Dossie and Janet mention limits repeatedly in their New Topping and New Bottoming books, they never actually explain what they are – much less start with a definition. Across both books they only ever bring up a “hard limit” once (pg. 71) and that’s in the context of saying that if your partner is a novice top and you’re a novice bottom, you should go along with their suggestion for a scene unless it’s a “hard limit” to encourage your kinky growth. It’s good advice, by my estimation at any rate, but why are we expecting two novices to know what a “hard limit” is? As far as I can tell as well, Oh Joy Sex Toy doesn’t have any educational content on limits specifically, though the consent strip mentions them in passing without really explaining them, and the BDSM safety strip talks more in depth about making a list of of “yes”-s, “no”-s, and “maybe”-s regarding what you might want to do in a hook-up with someone. The “yes/no/maybe” exercise is found in The New Bottoming Book too (pg. 33–35). The exercise is to help people find “their desires and their limits” (pg. 34), but again, the way this all lines up is slightly unclear. Here are the questions I’m asking: 1) Is “maybe” a limit or a desire? 2) Is this exercise to be used in scene-by-scene negotiation or to be done in advance to inform negotiations? 3) What actually is supposed to go on this list?

These questions only illuminate that the “yes/no/maybe” list is an inadequate tool for… whatever it is trying to do. This is because none of them have a real answer. In terms of 1, Dossie and Janet suggest ranking the items in the “maybe” column “from what feels safest to what feels scariest” (pg. 35) and also noting down which “maybe”-s you want. They write that “maybe”-s are “those things that you might do if it felt safe, or if you were turned on enough, or your partner was confident enough, or you were confident enough.” (pg. 34) They then seem to be conditional “yes”-s, except “yes”-s themselves are conditional. Having something on a “yes” list does not grant everyone consent to do that to you out of context, and even within a scene, having a “yes” for impact does not mean that play should continue if you start vomiting blood. Perhaps then a “maybe” is a “yes” where you don’t know what the condition is, or where that condition is unlikely to be met in the scene. Still, it is considered uncouth to take a look at your bottom’s list of “maybe”-s and systematically try to hit them all evening, and why that is can’t be explained by this framework because, on the face of it, “maybe” might mean “yes”. I think this is because “maybe”-s are limits until they are desires, but by explaining “maybe” in terms of limits, I have once again put the onus on myself to actually explain what a limit is.

Similarly frustratingly, though for different reasons, 2 fails to clear anything up either. The list exercise is an unwieldy tool for negotiating a scene at a play party or a kink event. To give some rare credit to Oh Joy Sex Toy, a hook-up where you haven’t been chatting so much online and want some way to break the ice and assess compatibility in a neutral setting before a whole evening of fun does actually make sense for this framework – issues with ambiguity aside. Still, the suggestion in The New Bottoming Book (pg. 33–35) is that you should go home and do this exercise yourself, which to me reads like a thoroughly undialectical misunderstanding of sex and sexual desire. Context is not simply a lens through which sexual desire can take on different shapes, it is an inseparable part of the sexual acts you are driven to engage with. While an easier way to make my point would be to say that your “yes”-s will be different between the darkroom, the bar, your own bedroom, your pal’s flat where she’s hosting a play party (and I believe this is true and reveals how unwieldy the exercise can get to be comprehensive about it), I am trying to make the point that there is no contextless “yes”. We do not only fantasise about what we want to do, we fantasise about who with, where, and how – and these are elements that can never really make it on to a “yes/no/maybe” list because we often don’t know them until we meet the person, until we we arrive at the party, until we have it happen, whatever it is that happens. Doing these lists completely honestly would mean sticking everything in the “maybe” column, which is useless.

This brings us to 3, which is my question about what actually goes on these lists. I mean this in the sense of what is expected not to need to be said, what wouldn’t make sense on the list, and how someone is supposed to know what is possible in the first place. In the first sense, most people are not putting “Murder” in their “no”-s; we take that as a “no” by default. Still, the position of that line is unclear and often disavowed (if you can recall the parable, I would argue that the femdom should have taken needles in the foot as a “no” by default from the newbie). Similarly, inserting things outside of your control seems outside the scope of list. Putting “my partner having a good time” in the “yes” column or “being interrupted by fire alarms” in the “no” column doesn’t make sense in either case, but they still reflect real desires that can cause real distress if they are unfulfilled/breached. Finally, we cannot know what we do and do not want if we haven’t considered it in the first place. Likely the newbie from our parable had not thought that needles could show up during a kink scene, and certainly not have thought of putting them underneath toenails. Can we really blame him for this? I expect none of you to have “thagomisation” on your “no” column were you to perform this exercise, but I assume you would might be a bit peeved if during our next scene together I came at you with a thagomizer. So we always have an uncertain idea of what even is supposed to go on the “yes/no/maybe” list, and without knowing what has been left out, we aren’t even able to make clear what has been left ambiguous, only that ambiguity remains.

I promise this all relates back to limits. We still need to figure out what those are, though, and what they’re supposed to do. Going back to our favourite resource, the Fetlife Kinktionary, there is a distinction made between “hard limits” and “soft limits”, where “hard limits are non negotiable [sic] boundaries set by a BDSM practitioner” and “soft limits refer to personal boundaries set by a BDSM practitioner that are negotiable.” In a genuine way, I think most people would nod their head at this definition. However, we’re left with the question of what a boundary is. Fortunately, Fetlife Kinktionary has us covered again. In the consent section, there are two frameworks for doing kink that mention boundaries: CABINS (Consent, Aftercare, Boundaries, Intentions, Negotiations, and Safety) for which boundaries are described as “What’s off-limits, what’s negotiable, and what’s non-negotiable”; and RBDSMA (Relationship, Boundaries, Desires, Sex, Meaning, and Aftercare; and, sorry,, this is the worst acronym ever, what the fuck? who is typing or saying “rbdsma”?? anyway,,) which defines boundaries as asking the question, “What hard and soft limits do you each have for the activities you want to or do not want to participate in?” Clearly, our definitions are circular if we are saying that boundaries are limits and limits are boundaries.

This limits 101 is going poorly. I could have started with a quote from Pavlov, perhaps: “These specific words [i.e. “limits” and “boundaries”] can have different meanings, contexts, and nuance which continues to confuse my thoughts.” In the same post she goes on to talk about her framework of “can’t”-s, “won’t”-s, and consequences, evading the issue by approaching it differently. We’ll come back to that. What I think is really the issue is that we are using “limits” in this plethora of different ways and defining approximately none of them with even an attempt at rigour. I’m sorry the limits 101 was a failure. Let’s do the 102.

Limits 102, wherein I invent a lot of new vocabulary

Vahavta gives us the best definition of limits we’re going to get in Submission Beyond Limits, which is paywalled (thank you to one of the sickos who sent me a relevant screenshot here) so isn’t actually going to be anyone’s introductory material but does have our best definition of limits yet: they “exist to tell someone what you do and do not consent to” (pg. 39?). Vahavta even delineates boundaries from limits, explaining that the former is up to you to enforce, whereas the latter is up to your partner to uphold because it’s a matter of consent. This, obviously, kicks the can down the road a bit to defining “consent”, but I think there are still issues we can pick in this definition too.

The issue with this definition – as with a lot of writing about limits, figuring out your hard and soft limits, playing within and respecting your own and others limits, and so forth – is the same as the issues I’ve outlined with the “yes/no/maybe” list. Limits are contextual: not yours in some kind of way that transcends context, but something emergent within you that is dialectically intertwined with a given context. Limits are also surrounded by ambiguity: no “thagomisation” on any of the kink profiles that I’ve been looking at. Vahavta’s definition still doesn’t tell us what should be a limit: depressed tops and fire alarms don’t equate to consent violations, however much they might hurt. I think the main takeaway of this definition though, the one thing that we can say limits are actually doing, is making (a particular definition of) consent legible. Maybe it’s fine to say that tops having a bad time is a limit if you’re bottoming; maybe you know that will hurt you so much that you can’t actually consent to a scene where it’s possible; maybe when you negotiate that scene, someone will refuse to go forward with it because they can’t promise to uphold your consent in this way – or maybe they don’t want to negotiate within your framework of consent. That last point is for later but the first three points are for now.

Let’s try making some definitions up to pick apart all of this a bit better. Vahavta herself points one dynamic out:

There seem, to me, to be two schools of thought in negotiating a scene: inclusive and exclusive.
Some people play negotiating for everything that is included. In this situation, if something is not discussed, it is assumed a nonstarter. I guess some people may call this affirmative consent.
Others, including myself, only negotiate if something is to be excluded. They may have a standing list of hard limits, or may before a scene say "I'm really interested in [blank]” or "I can't do [blank] today," but outside of that, it is up to the top.

So there, we have exclusive limit frameworks and inclusive limit frameworks. In exclusive limit frameworks, everything that is not a “no” is a “yes”; in inclusive limit frameworks, everything that is not a “yes” is a “no”. There, we’ve resolved one of our ambiguity issues – some of you will remain unthagomised. “Frameworks” here is because it’s not the limits themselves that are inclusive or exclusive, but the method of negotiation and what is assumed to be assumed is inclusive or exclusive with regards to limits.

I am also going to delineate between gestural limits and affective limits. This is what is done versus how it feels. We can almost think of two different axes on a graph, where the x-axis is, say, the gauge of needle in play, and the y-axis is how bad it feels. Saying that 10g is your limit is putting a line through the x-axis, and you can’t be a sobbing mess because you have work the next day is putting a line through the y-axis. We’ve now got a defined space to play in: the needles can only go so big and it can only hurt you so much. (It is worth keeping in mind that scenes usually involve more than two moving parts and that not everything is as scalar as needle sizes, so I’m trusting you to extrapolate the logic here rather than trying to graph out every scene you do.) This is part of the function of safewords, to make it clear to your top where you are in this space. Red could serve as an indication that you are imminently about to start bawling; yellow could serve as an indication that the 10g is the limit because they hurt.

Part of what I think is important in outlining gestural and affective limits is the framework around them. Are these your limits or are they the limits of the scene? The former is generally how limits are talked about in the kink literature that I’ve been reading. That is, limits are something inherent to you and the scene is built to respect them or to push them (which is a form of respect, I think) or, more generally, operate around them. We can call these intrinsic limit frameworks. The distinction with the opposite is a bit oblique, I grant you. An extrinsic limit framework means that limits belong to the scene. To go back to the previous example, the limit of no bigger than 10g needles could either be something you are carrying around with you – that you feel you cannot go into single digits, at least right now – or it’s something you negotiated as part of the scene and that’s the limit because that’s what you and the top decided the scene would go up to. Obviously, we switch between these frameworks constantly. Intrinsic limits is how we talk when we are finding and flirting with potential partners (the limits we “have”), and then extrinsic limits is how we tend to talk when we actually get down to negotiating a scene (the limits we “use”). Maybe both you and your top have gone into the single digit gauges before, but you’re sticking with 10g because you want to get more in and that’s the point of the scene; you’re still asserting a limit on play, just one that doesn’t belong intrinsically to either of you. Again, safewords allow us to express intrinsic limits as part of the scene. Needles in your forearm was a maybe when you were negotiating, but now you’re here it’s just all wrong. Red in this case takes the limit from an intrinsic limit framework (an experience you cannot consent to) to an extrinsic limit framework (an act you are revoking consent for).

Finally, we have static and dynamic limits. I prefer these terms to hard and soft because I think does what they’re trying to do a bit better. (As an aside, when I say that – that a term is “trying to do” something – I mean that in the context of this language as a tool for navigating kink in the way that we as groups of people want to navigate kink. What “soft limits” is trying to do is make conceptual space for something that you don’t want and so want to indicate should be excluded from your scene, but is something that you realise you might change your mind on, potentially quite suddenly, and don’t want to back your top into a situation where giving you what you want and continuing on the scene naturally amounts to sexual assault.) Static limits are limits that you are asserting that moving beyond will always be non-consensual, whether that’s true for you as a person (intrinsic limit framework) or for the scene (extrinsic limit framework). In our example needle scene, 10g is the static limit. A dynamic limit then is knowing that a limit is present but making clear the uncertainty in where the limit lies. If you instead negotiated the needle scene to that that you could only take so much, but you didn’t know how much, then that would be a dynamic affective limit. Similarly, if you instead said that you should plan for 10g, but you were up for going bigger if you were really feeling it, then that would be a dynamic gestural limit. This distinction matters because it address some of the discourse around “negotiating up” in scene; if it’s clear that something is negotiable, then negotiating up is fine, which is different to the oppositely loaded term “soft limit” and the much less clear term “maybe” (and it’s fair to say here that 8g in this scenario is a maybe, but the term “dynamic limit” foregrounds that there is this willingness to move).

Let’s check back in on where we started. Do these new terms help us make consent legible in the context of a scene? Yes. Obviously. I wouldn’t spend this long explicating my own terminology if I thought it were bad. But for real, by explicating what kind of limits and frameworks around limits are being used, we can also define what is and isn’t a consent violation within a scene. Issues arise when we are talking at cross purposes. Someone who is using an inclusive limit framework and someone who is using an exclusive limit framework might negotiate a scene and have something crop up that was neither a “yes” nor a “no”. To borrow an example from a pal, if your partner says that she wants head (“yes”) and says that you shouldn’t kiss the inside of her thighs (“no”/static gestural limit) cause she doesn’t want anything too ticklish (“no”/dynamic affective limit), it really seems like you’ve negotiated a scene (your intrinsic limits appear to match the extrinsic limits set in the scene). But, after you start, you puts your fingers in her pussy because that’s just part of head to you. She never negotiated that, and she assumed it was out of the question (inclusive limit framework), whereas you were expecting her to specify if she didn’t like it (exclusive limit framework). What’s happened definitely feels like a consent violation but it’s hard to pin down blame. Some communication failed to happen in negotiation and now you are left in the aftermath. Put these thoughts of the aftermath to one side, right next to where we’ve left “consent” and “harm”. Right now, I think it’s worth taking a detour towards negotiation.

Interlude: How I Negotiate

What’s Your Deal?

I’ll start by saying that I’m not walking up to potential partners, handing them a list of all this new terminology, and asking them to express everything in these terms as well as explicate at every point which framework they’re working within. That’s even more unwieldy than a “yes/no/maybe” list, and we have to keep in mind that our goal in scaffolding negotiations isn’t an abstractly perfect system – it’s to let us fuck. If I were really feeling it, I’d advocate for a minimum viable ethics. But I’m not. Maybe later.

My pals and I all say we hate negotiating. In fact, yesterday [from time of writing] I had this conversation in the kitchen with my flatmate and the boyfrench where we were jokingly lamenting a negotiation next week we have to do for this high protocol cigar social. We’re the ones organising it, to be clear, but we also state our displeasure at its necessity with a chorus of “I hate negotiating” over pizza. I want to interrogate why that is. My guess is we all have a similar relationship to limits. I’ll take myself as an example but I know that equivalents roughly map onto my two pals in question.

Firstly, I only have a couple intrinsic limits that I think are worth stating. The main one is “Making me eat anything that stresses me out.” People I play with are either like, “Okay well this just isn’t going to come up at all,” or they know me enough to know what I mean, or I explain that I need an ingredient list for everything or to trust the cook and I reserve the right to say no to any food unless I’m explicitly negotiating beyond that (which, in my terms, means that in any given scene (when we are transferring these intrinsic limits to extrinsic limits) it should be taken as a dynamic limit unless I specify otherwise that it’s static). Secondly, I usually use an exclusive limit framework for play – except for big scenes but we’ll get to that in a bit. I got beat up by my dear friend last year and the setting of extrinsic limits amounted to, “Don’t make me lick the floor, the bottom of the boots, or anything that’s dirty” (static gestural), and “Pinching/biting is a lot for me so you can do it but I might have to ask you to stop that if it gets too much” (dynamic affective). This style of negotiation worked for us and I had a great time getting beat up, but obviously that style of negotiation doesn’t work for everyone. This is because we know ourselves and we know each other, and there’s a lot going on beyond the setting of limits that makes the scene work.

As far as I see it, there are two ways of approaching this minimal negotiation style. Obviously these two ways interact with each other, but they’re worth delineating here. The first way we can do this minimal negotiation style is garnering an understanding of each other’s intentions for a scene, what makes play work for us, and why we do it at all. We can describe this, in a kink context, as “someone’s deal”. This is the starting point for my negotiating. Obviously, there are plenty of contexts where someone’s deal is implicit – someone’s deal in a darkroom for instance is that they’re into casual anonymous sex with non-verbal consent communication (or maybe they don’t but then they really shouldn’t be in the darkroom) – but there are plenty of contexts where some understanding of someone’s deal is essential for making the sex work. For this style, we need a working model of our partner’s deal in order to fuck them (and I use “fuck” very loosely here) in a way that’s conducive to a worthwhile scene. My dear friend knows that I am (or was at the time – less so now) a simpering cuck who would get off on her withholding kisses, degrading me in public, playing with the promise of affection. She understood my deal and tailored her style of play to that.

The other way is to understand, broadcast, and take ownership of your own deal. This is mostly how I top when I do pick-up play. I have a whip. I make clear that I am here to hit you with my whip. It is going to be painful (for you). It isn’t going to be fun (for you). I will respect how hard you want to be hit but the rest of it is going to be on my terms – which excludes degradation, humiliation, any kind of fantasised contract. People sign up for this, and on my end, all I have to do is believe that they’re being honest when they say that’s okay. I don’t really have to understand their deal, what they get out of it, what makes it work; I just have to believe that if it doesn’t hit for them (so to speak), they won’t turn around and say I violated their consent about it.

To complicate things slightly, I want to talk about how these two styles interact and how these deals can be emergent in scenes. (As an aside, these two styles are respectively extremely roughly in conversation with Deleuzian masochism and Deleuzian sadism as explicated in Coldness & Cruelty (pg. 134 for an outline of what I mean), but they don’t really map on exactly so I’m not using the terms. The crucial difference is that the Deleuzian masochist and sadist don’t occur in each other’s dramas, whereas I am arguing for some kind of productive interference between scenes built around a kind of self-satisfying “this is what I am here to do” (centring your own deal) and a satisfaction that is tied to guiding someone else through an experiencing (centring their deal).) I had a scene a few months ago where I had my whip and my pal (girlfriend) wanted to be subject to me in all my awkward glory. I put her on the St Andrew’s cross and put some lines on her back. We were each centring our own deals at the start: her subjecting herself to pain in a test of endurance; me causing her pain beyond any sort of endorphinal pleasure that’s usually the point of these impact scenes. Then we began to understand each other’s investment in the scene, which changed our own investments. She began using Buddhist mindfulness techniques to bear with the pain; I began cracking the whip out of rhythm next to her head so she couldn’t do that. There was some kind of satisfaction we found that encompassed and went beyond both the self-satisfying nature of our own deals and the contingently satisfying nature of each other’s deals. It was hot.

So your deal is part of a scene in a way that covers all the messy stuff not encompassed by limits. If we cast our mind back to the example needle scene, if your top made a lattice of 24g needles on one of your thighs and then called it a scene, they wouldn’t have violated any of your stated limits (10g max; no sobbing breakdowns), but they probably didn’t give you the scene that you wanted which focussed on pain, big needles, and spreading it out over your body. It might bum you out to have someone understand you so little. It might even harm your sense of self to have your experience of the scene treated with such little regard even within consensual limits. Let’s put that idea to one side again; the point I’m trying to make here is that limits can bound a scene but not inform what the scene is supposed to be or why it’s happening. This can take a while to explain if your deal is complicated and your limits are light. Still, it is possible to negotiate scenes. I have done it, in fact.

Practicable Negotiation Tools

Negotiation is what you do to facilitate a good scene, whatever that means for you. Most plainly, we can say that negotiation then has a dual function: firstly to exclude certain things, and secondly to include certain things. While we generally think of the exclusionary function of negotiation as what prevents harm and preserves consent, I will later argue that the inclusionary function does this too. I’ll interrogate this in more detail later, but for now we can take it on faith that both of these functions are necessary to have a good scene.

The key element of the exclusionary function of negotiation – and really all of what I am writing about here – is that we understand where we differ in our language, and we understand that difference as something to overcome rather than preference towards a certain langue or failure from someone to live up to the supposedly true notions of these terms. The language I have presented which delineates between different kinds of limits serves to overcome these differences. When someone says they don’t want any stingy impact toys, do they mean they have an affective limit around the sensation of being stung or a gestural limit around all canes and whips – or a bit of both. We can generally clear this up without using my language (for example by asking “So are canes out entirely or can I just make sure to keep the sting down?”) but we have to keep in mind that “limits” is not enough to get us there. To exclude the things we want to exclude, we have to make clear when we are using an inclusive or exclusive limit framework, whether we expect to have our intrinsic limits predicted or adhere strictly to the extrinsic limits we have set up, whether a limit is static or dynamic, whether a limit is gestural or affective. The consequences of thinking you have made your limits clear without conveying an understanding of what type of limit it is and which framework scaffolds your understanding of it can lead to (the affective experience of) consent violation.

The key element of the inclusionary function of negotiation is that we understand what our investment in a scene is, whether that is our own deal, our partner’s deal, or some synthesis of the two. To some extent, we have to understand what our/others’ deals are, but that can amount to “To see what I/you like!” for an exploratory scene. What makes that understanding mean anything though is understanding that as a particular valence of investment which has to be explicated. It’s not enough to lay out our “yes”-s (say, needles), nor is it enough to lay out our deal (say, getting hurt all over your body), but we have to put that in the context of an approach to the scene (say, whether that hurt is something you want to be subject to for the satisfaction of a top who would appreciate it, whether that hurt is something that is self-satisfying and your top’s investment is tangential, or whether it’s self-satisfying but your top’s investment is still something you want to lean into) or else we end up playing at cross-purposes. Again, the consequences of this are severe in that we can feel as if we have not been understood or that we have not been respected – imagine an impact top who wants a scene where they feel like the bottom is in their total control, but the bottom is in their own head enjoying the scene the whole time; the bottom might say that they were in the top’s control, that they were feeling it with every strike, but because it wasn’t clear the top was expecting their investment to be centred by the bottom, that the bottom’s pleasure should in part arise from giving the top this experience, they still feel as if they haven’t been respected despite their deal being acknowledged on paper.

Another key element of of the inclusionary function of negotiation is figuring out what I will describe as assurances for the scene. These are the things that have to be included to make a scene possible. Generally, people have to have the assurance that there will be aftercare in order to do heavy play. For any scene where I’m naked outside of the sheets, I need it to be warm; this warmth assures that I’m in the bodily space to get things out of play beyond thinking “Fuck I’m cold” (which has happened to me before). This is slightly different than your investment in a scene, though you might want the assurance that your investment in a scene will be understood. Having your limits respected could be seen as another assurance.

When I want to negotiate with someone new, I usually start with a discussion about how they approach negotiation itself. I want us to understand each other, to overcome our differences in our approach to be able to speak the same language about all this. I want to hear about their understandings of safewords, limits, and consent, and then develop a shared understanding of those things that we can use in the context of our play. This is, obviously, exhausting, but I only really play with people I like and like having these sorts of conversations with. I also, on the whole, refuse to play with people who have preferences about their language or think that there is some true notion of a limit, for example. This is different from someone, say, having a preference for scenes using an extrinsic limit framework (a preference which many of my friends have); what I am concerned about instead is someone saying that their sense of the word “limit” is what a limit is to them and meeting my appeals towards disambiguation with “Well that’s not how I use the word”.

Context also informs this negotiation process, as much as the negotiations that are taking place in a given context inform what that space is in and of itself. I tend not to specify my intrinsic static limit about food at the outset when I am cruising because the negotiation process is exclusionary by way of its inclusionary function. Some butch bootblack sees I am flagging piss bottom. We make our way to the bathroom. I drink her piss. We are each already assumed to be in the mood, that our gestural and affective limits are dynamic, that we don’t need to set extrinsic limits because such a narrow range of activities is going to be happening, which is – in a way – an inclusionary limit framework, but that we could negotiate up if I wanted more. Again, there is no contextless negotiation, and there will be assumptions in every kinky space which serve to ease up the weight of individual negotiations. Understanding what those assumptions are is another matter, and in situations where I either don’t feel confident in them myself because they are too reliant on social intuition for my autistic ass, or where I’m not confident in other people’s ability to understand that there are assumptions being made – that this is not just the natural or true form of negotiation (which does not exist in the same way that there is no natural or true form of a screwdriver) – I just don’t engage with the space.

To sum this part up, to feel confident in negotiating, I need to cover these few things. 1) Are we both making the same assumptions about what is already covered in a negotiation? 2) Are we both clear about our deal and the valence of our deal? 3) Are we making clear whether the framework we have for limits is inclusionary or exclusionary? 4) Are we making clear which extrinsic limits we set are approximations of more important intrinsic limits and which take precedent over intrinsic limits? 5) Which limits are gestural/affective, static/dynamic? 6) What assurances do we need? 7) Do we understand and accept the risk profile of the play? 8) Are we using safewords to allow new limits to be set mid-scene?

As I am always want to do, let’s work through a scene I had with canmom at a kink event a little while back. For 1, I wanted to do a full negotiation so nothing was really assumed. 2, she wanted to get her tits tortured and see how that felt for herself whereas I wanted to facilitate that experience for her; I figured I wasn’t going to go very hard so any particularly sadistic enjoyment I got was tangential. 3, I told her I would only use canes and they would only hit her tits, which is an inclusionary framework. 4, I told her to tell me how she was feeling as she went cause I didn’t want to push her too far, meaning that the intrinsic limits preceded the extrinsic limits. 5, I walked her through what I was I was going to do and how, so some of the gestural limits (using canes only) were static, whereas the affective limits were dynamic because the point was to explore how it hurt and I told her I would be showing her different styles of caning, so that gestural limit of what I was actually doing was dynamic too. 6, I was, and am always, committed to doing aftercare. 7, we were both aware of bruising, tissue damage, that I might slip and land a blow elsewhere, as well as there potentially being unpredictable emotional consequences. 8, we were using traffic lights for our safewords-as-action.

It’s worth making clear here that I’m not going up to canmom with an eight step checklist for the scene. Instead, as I pick this apart afterwards, these are the eight things that I think were relevant in our brief discussion. Clearly we are all able to negotiate well enough without going through all this, one question at a time, because we can communicate throughout the scene our limits, what those limits mean, what we want, and why we want it. We can always clarify what we want and establish new limits mid-scene – unless we’re playing without safewords.

Negotiating Scenes Without Safewords

I want to have a bad time. I am invested in having a bad time. When I bottom for my flatmate, I know it’s because he can facilitate me having one of the worst times of my life. I’m going to explain how I negotiate that.

Let’s go over the recent CNCeedle scene again. I was stuck through with needles up from 20g to 12g while tied down in ropes. I was then free tied over the needles which came out in between position changes. The boyf (who is, at time of writing, no longer wearing my collar but is still my boyfriend) was there to feed me Supermix and Lucozade Ice Kick, as well as assist my flatmate with the technical stuff. How did we negotiate that? Let’s go over that in the rough order in which I can just about remember it happening.

8. No safewords outright.

2. I want the satisfaction of being filled with needles. My flatmate wants the satisfaction of filling me with needles. We are each responsible for our respective side of that (and my responsibility looks like negotiating/crafting a scene that I want to do).

1. Full negotiation because we’re not using safewords.

4. Extrinsic limits take precedent except for anything regarding what goes into my mouth.

3. The framework of limits is inclusionary; we’re only here to do needles, rope, and some play with the blood that comes up.

6. I need the room to be warm. I need to get to eat Supermix and drink Lucozade Ice Kick whenever I ask for it. I need to practice a couple times in advance of the scene. I need to understand the rough outline of the scene in advance.

5. My limits are almost all gestural and static: no needles under my toenails; no needles through my genitals; no needle twists. My dynamic gestural limit is play after passing out (gestural because the limit is on play rather than passing out; my flatmate wouldn’t be violating my consent if he made me pass out, which would be the equivalent affective limit). I describe this as still an extrinsic limit because it is reliant on something my body might do on its own, not how I feel. My dynamic affective limit is, as always, anxiety about what’s going into my mouth. This is relevant even within the exclusionary framework because I will be eating things and the rope could be going into my mouth; if someone else reached into the bag of Supermix or took a drink from my Lucozade Ice Kick, I might be anxious about continuing to eat that exact thing in a way I want the option to say no to.

7. We went through the risk and plans for needlestick injuries, for infection, for aftercare of the wounds themselves, for how each of us might feel afterwards. We know about the risks of rope and reiterate that we’ll communicate and keep an eye out for issues with circulation and nerves.

While we were rehearsing the scene, we continued to negotiate. We refined the assurances, limits, our investments, and the actual outline of what was going to happen. We were building up assurances and limits in a gestural sense in order to create avenues of affective experience. I wanted to have a bad time, but that doesn’t mean that I want to have any old bad time. There is, for me, nothing rewarding about having an allergic reaction or feeling anxious about having an allergic reaction. However, there is something rewarding about being overwhelmed by being covered in blood and full of needles, even at the point where the scene crosses my intrinsic affective limits regarding how much pain I can be in, how much blood I can shed.

Can I turn this into general guidance for navigating no safewords scenes, something that I love and think some of y’all will love too. Yes. Obviously. The starting point is to define in negotiation what we mean by safewords (8) and when we say no safewords, do we mean no safewords-as-action, no safewords outright, no safewords for things such as pain but yes safewords for something such as anxiety? Regarding the latter, is this at the discretion of the bottom (as in the style of my ex) or at the discretion of the top (e.g. me saying red without anything near my mouth wouldn’t result in my flatmate doing anything differently in the CNCeedle scene)? After that, we can hit 1–7 in my list. And there, that’s a scene.

Okay, well, I can be a bit more practical with my advice than that. Everything is up for grabs in negotiation, sure, but if you are invested in moving beyond some intrinsic affective limit, but not beyond other limits of different kinds, then there are ways to do that.

1. You will need a full negotiation to make that clear unless you are in the habit already of doing that sort of play with someone. You will also want to do this play with someone who has an interest in playing with you again or otherwise continuing to be your friend/in community with you. This last point isn’t essential, but does do some work to promote engaging with all of this in good faith.

2. This whole thing is easiest if you let go of expectations in terms of your own affective experience. You presumably don’t want to get caught up thinking about whether you’ve gone beyond some intrinsic affective limit rather than actually experiencing that in whatever form it takes. You won’t know how it feels in advance and it will feel incomprehensible at the time. Trust me. In that sense, your deal in the context of the scene needs to be opening yourself up to whatever the top has to offer, and the skill is in choosing a top you like who will heed your limits and assurances, and understand that whatever you’re experiencing, you want it to be too much.

3. An inclusionary framework here is definitely easier than an exclusionary framework. Again, we’re focussing on transgressing intrinsic affective limits, not gestural limits. By using an inclusionary framework, we tend to preclude the possibility of the latter to a large extent.

4. Kind of the whole thing that makes this work is that extrinsic limits take precedent. It is worth being very clear about what intrinsic limits you will need respected because transgressing intrinsic limits by deprioritising them relative to extrinsic limits is the whole point of this type of play (in this instance).

5. Try to go through every gestural limit you can think of in the context of what’s included. Instead of saying “no toenails” for your needle play scene, for example, point out all the bits you’re okay with. Obviously there has to be wiggle room to have an erotic scene at all rather than just going through the motions of a checklist, but by the end of this you should have a very clear idea of where the wiggle room is. Most of your limits should be static also, and the dynamic limits should be kept out of your control (playing after passing out, cramping up, having a panic attack for example) and at the discretion of your dominant.

6. Assurances are very important for not hitting those dynamic limits. Do you need to have your arms down so you don’t pass out? Do you need to sit in a certain way so you won’t cramp up? Do you need enough food and drink so your blood sugar doesn’t crash, giving you a panic attack? Figure out what assurances you need to make sure you can be present and actually focus on your own experience of the scene (warm room? space to be loud?).

7. Work out the risks and accept them in advance. If you cannot accept that a risk might happen, do not do the scene. If you’re doing needle scenes, accept in advance that a needlestick injury might happen. You and your top should still be working to reduce these risks, but if (or rather, if you’re doing this play often, when) they occur, you should be able to stand by your decision making and accept the consequences without blaming yourselves and each other.

This guidance should serve to give you some practical suggestions for how to negotiate a no safeword scene, using limits quite strictly to allow create a vector of experience that is, in a way, without limits. And this is where the opposition to no safewords scenes comes in. When people say that we all have limits, they mean intrinsic limits, and they believe that these have to be respected regardless of the wishes of both top and bottom. The logic of this is there there is some point where I as the bottom will no longer be able to consent to what is happening to me, and without a safeword – without a limit; without a way to make that consent legible – the top will violate my consent with impunity. My contention, conversely, is that my consent hasn’t been violated. I try to be very clear about the frameworks I am using when I do one of these scenes. I am very particular about what limits matter to me and what limits I want transgressed. It is not a consent violation to believe me.

Okay, okay. Bullet, meet teeth. Let’s chew on consent.

Some Consent

Consent 101

So, what is consent? Because I don’t want to spend months writing this essay blog post, I’m not going to be able to have the most comprehensive or historically grounded discussion about this ever. It’s been brought up that I am overly reliant on the UK’s legal definition of consent when I talk about consent (as in my CNC post). I’d argue that my usual working definition, well, works. Here is it: “Consent is an agreement by choice to a form of sex, where the person granting consent has both the freedom and the capacity to make that choice. Furthermore, consent can be withdrawn at any time.” I still kind of think this is a relevant definition because it’s what you’ll be arguing around in court if it comes to that. Still, I did say “this is maybe not the most nuanced definition ever, but we can problematise that in another essay.” While I refuse to call this an essay, I suppose we can problematise it here.

The flaw in my argument for my old working definition in the last paragraph is that the state doesn’t have the omnipresence to come in and arrest you for ever violating (what it considers) someone’s consent. Consent is reified in social settings, through various institutions, events, communities, friend group, and other contexts. If someone accuses you of violating your consent and the one regular queer friendly play event in Glasgow bans you because of that, then consent has been made material for you. What “consent” means for everyone involved in our various social contexts then is important in a way that can’t be flattened into two lines derived from the Sexual Offences Act 2003, regardless of what you’ll be judged in the courtroom by.

So, what is consent? Dossie’s definition (in a kink context) is “an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons involved.” (pg. 9) My flatmate read this over my shoulder and disagreed with my opinion that this definition is useless; he said it was better than most of the other definitions that are around in the scene. I asked him if he considered the scenes he tops with me to be for my benefit, my well-being, and my pleasure. He conceded the point.

Okay, so, Dossie’s definition gestures at something but is useless as a rigorous definition. It’s unclear to me what “benefit” means especially – I’m just not sure how you evaluate that. Oh Joy Sex Toy might have a better definition. Their strip on consent says that “consent is an enthusiastic agreement between people to do something together” and that “consent is a flexible, variable thing”. They also bring up revoking consent but don’t make clear whether this is an essential part of consent, though they do say “if someone’s unconscious, consent is impossible”. This still seems to not actually encompass how a lot of people actually use “consent”. Many of us agree to sex while not enthusiastic in the moment in the hopes that we will warm up to it once it gets going (which it often does). Conversely, I will enthusiastically agree to one of these awful scenes that I bottom, but will be completely unenthused once we’re actually starting – and I know that when I agree initially. Furthermore, their definition doesn’t include any sort of knowledge or intent. I could probably get a teenager to enthusiastically agree to taking a bunch of Tramadol with me (I don’t know why this is my go to, sorry), but we probably wouldn’t regard that as consensual if they didn’t know what Tramadol is. Finally, my pals all like to fuck each other while the other is asleep, which I find baffling, but none of them are having the affective experience of being sexually assaulted over it. It seems strange to insist that’s what’s happening when, to them, it doesn’t feel like it because they’ve agreed to it in advance and know that they’re being fucked by someone they trust.

The Fetlife Kinktionary tells us that “consent means permission or agreement for something to happen”. You can pick this one apart yourself. It works, I suppose, as the most basic starting point for kinksters to build a tonne of acronyms around which explain it in more specifics. We have the FRIES framework, which stands for “Freely Given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, Specific”. My issue with enthusiasm still stands, as with reversibility (obviously one cannot revoke consent while they are asleep). But also, now we have to consider how informed is informed enough for consent (can you know what a ring of needles feels like in your back before you experience it? is it enough to be informed that you can never be fully informed?). Freely given also causes issues since we are beings of imperfect agency, but just put that to one side for now (next to “harm” now that “consent” is actually in play). Other frameworks I have heard come from the discussion in a talk by SelfSadist at Thrive, which are CRISP (considered, reversible, informed, specific, participatory), INVEST (informed, negotiated, voluntary, enthusiastic, specific, timed), and FACTS (unspecified). If it’s not clear by my tone, I do not think any of these are really better than the others.

So, what is consent? That’s what I went to Thrive to find out. (I mean, I went for other reasons too, and I really enjoyed it even if I’m now going to critique half the classes that I attended. No shade to any of the presenters; this is really intended to be a productive disagreement.) Robert McCauley talked about different forms of consent, mainly “affirmative consent”, “negative consent”, and “implied consent”, but mentioned there were other categories of consent that weren’t present in their discussion. To be comprehensive, these were: informed consent, explicit consent, granular consent, general consent, conditional consent, ongoing consent, withdrawable consent. Now, I’m not even going to talk about their definitions of the main three they actually talked about because I think it’s more revealing to talk about this attitude. Overall, they mentioned ten different types of consent. One of them was “withdrawable”. Does this mean that every other type was non-withdrawable? Same with “informed”. Or is this a mix-and-match style buffet of types of consent? You can have informed withdrawable affirmative consent and I’ll use conditional granular implied consent. But what does any of this actually mean? I guess what I’m getting at is that this is a “everybody is right” kind of approach – a “yes and…” for consent discourse – that fails to actually resolve any disagreement or contradiction so neither describes how consent works nor prescribes how consent should work. This is, effectively, the same issue as listing potato-based acronyms and arguing about preferences for consent like they’re flavours of crisp (or do you prefer FRIES?).

Perhaps one of the kink writers I’m clearly biased towards has figured this one out. Vahavta tells us, “Consent is an affirmation. It isn’t an emotion or a personality trait,” and “respecting disabled sexuality means accepting what we tell you is a ‘yes,’ even if that comes with hesitation.” This seems to align with the Fetlife Kinktionary definition, where consent is simply an agreement for something to happen, but Vahavta at least complicates this by noting that “long-term consent can be problematic for some and comes with higher risk. I am especially wary as I have had numerous friends assaulted in those situations.” So, yes means yes then – for some people. I do not want to doubt or diminish that assault happens to people in situations where “long-term consent” has been agreed upon, but I am curious in a rigorous definition of assault in this case, because it doesn’t appear to be a violation of consent (and again, to be very clear, this is not to say that assault didn’t happen, but to ask what is the mechanism that makes it legible as assault). I am also curious as to what about long-term consent is “higher risk”, whether that’s impunity for the perpetrators of assault (and increased risk of assault because of that impunity) or increased chance of assault outwith consequence for the perpetrator? Separately, Vahavta explicitly says herself that “there are times where a ‘yes’ doesn’t mean yes at all and is a fawn response, or does mean yes but is in a context that makes that consent trickier due to pre-existing power dynamics of authority and other forms of privilege.” To get into the second thing first, the idea of consent being “trickier” is unclear to me. Do we mean that conceptually consent is muddied (as in, are there situations that everyone may feel is benefitting them which are not suited by our consent rubrics – as with my pals and their somnophilia)? Or do we mean that the basic mechanisms of an interaction being consensual is harder to navigate (as in, if we take for this example that consent has to be informed, does “trickier” refer in part to how difficult it is to get the relevant information across)? Similar to the listing of a bunch of keyword adjectives plus “consent”, I feel like this is a handwave towards there being situations that are unclear as to whether they are consensual or not which obfuscates the urgency of asking why and what makes them unclear.

First things second, I want to talk about the “fawn response”. This was actually a recurring theme across Thrive. Davis the Reverend noted that fawning leads to over agreement and “can look like consent”. They explained that the “performative yes” based on “urgency, pressure, fear of losing the relationship” and with “no capacity to imagine saying no” means that a “no ends up being a yes”. Something particularly interesting to me in their phrasing was that they said “it [i.e. the negotiation] goes this way [i.e. yes] when it was supposed to be this way [i.e. no]”. I’ll come back to that. DemonaKatatonica used the phrase “no doesn’t sound like no” to describe fawn responses. Robert McCauley also suggested that people with a history of fawning responses should have preemptive discussions to avoid situations of “tricky” (there’s that word again) consent in situations mid-scene where they might be in an “altered state of mind”. So we have this sense from a contingent of the kink community that a yes can be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific (wow look: a potato) and still not actually be a yes. Well, maybe that’s the wrong way of phrasing things. DemonaKatatonica implies that a fawning yes is a no, but Robert McCauley merely regards it as “tricky”. Davis the Reverend implies that it still isn’t consent (“can look like [but isn’t]”), but the “ends up being” seems to imply that the “yes” is a yes, even if it was “supposed to be” a no. This may sound pedantic, but I think these details really matter. When we say a yes was supposed to be a no, do we mean in the sense that the speaker thought “no” and said “yes”, or do we mean that the speaker both said and thought “yes” but if they were in another context they would have answered differently? Rather than arguing with each of these variations on how fawning interacts with consent in turn, the important thing to glean from this paragraph is that everyone seems to be talking at cross purposes. We agree that fawning complicates consent but not on the specifics of how or even what that means. The only thing that kink educators seem to agree on is that accepting a fawning yes at face value causes “harm”. Again, put that to one side; this is still the section on consent.

So, what is consent? This is a 101 and there is the expectation of an answer. Unfortunately, I don’t have one. Every resource that is by and for kinksters has failed me so far. I think part of the issue is that we aren’t agreeing on a standardised language and not trying to translate between different forms of consent (is “presumed consent” really different from “implied consent”, for example), but that’s only part of the issue. The other part of the issue is that we aren’t ever really disagreeing with each other. Obviously this is a kind of weird statement considering that disagreements and discourse happen all the time – for example, people hop into Vahavta’s comments to argue that she is not consenting to the things she is saying she consents to – but what I mean is that the other side of that argument has taken the approach of not disagreeing with itself to present a united front against the puritans. Rigour becomes impossible when the prevailing attitude is to go something like, Your consent is not my consent but your consent is okay. The issue is that we as kinksters struggle to have productive disagreements with each other. On the one hand, puritans seem to argue that half the community are rapists for engaging with kinks they deem non-consensual and seek to act as saviours for lifestyle subs (heavy on the disagreement but this doesn’t actually generate any new knowledge); on the other hand, the kink educator crowd seem to respond to this idiosyncratically, each in their own little discursive bubble without much explicit reference to each other, and certainly not with any sort of explicit disagreement (an attitude which only generates new knowledge within, but not between, these individual bubbles of thought). Fortunately the past few years have brought us some books on consent by the people most willing to extensively and rigorously disagree with each other: feminist theorists.

Can Sex Be Good Again?

Katherine’s book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, is in part about the limitations of consent as a framework for ensuring good sex. (All page references are for my tattered little hardback first edition.) Katherine sets out her mission as embodying a “risky, complex premise: that we shouldn’t have to know ourselves in order to be safe from violence.” (pg. 40) This comes at the end of a section on consent, outlining its development within feminist and popular consciousness over the past fifty years. I’ll get into that in a second, but it’s first worth acknowledging that this book primarily concerns itself with heterosexual sex and couples. It is by and large about cis straight men’s attitude towards cis straight women. This is not, in my estimation, anything wrong with the book; instead, I see this as a reflection of the development and adoption of the discourse of affirmative consent (that is, “discourse” meaning a system of knowledge rather than the online argument meaning of the word) in a broader socio-political context. It’s worth noting here that while queer kink scenes did develop their own discourses of consent, younger kinksters have been immersed in this particular discourse of affirmative consent throughout their education (see: the tea video, which isn’t gendered per se but does carry through heterosexist norms about sex involving an active subject and a passive object), which can lead to issues for contemporary queer kinksters such as ourselves.

What does it mean, then, for consent to be adopted? I think that there is a tendency to not be especially materialist about concepts such as consent. What I mean is that consent has become in the discourse some kind of naturalised facet of human experience that is unmoored from its cultural uptake. A point I will elaborate on later is that when consent doesn’t exist discursively, it makes no sense to describe things as consensual or not. At any rate, we can pick things up in the 1970s when feminists were arguing against a hostile social environment in which men felt entitled to sex with women. Rejections were seen as hurdles to be overcome by a persistent young man, who would be rewarded with a woman’s affections if he could break through her icy exterior. The line at the time was “no means no”, which did work to prevent rape (by making men understand that no actually did mean no and that women shouldn’t have to accept unwanted, persistent advances) but positions sexual desire as entirely towards the object of affection rather than being reciprocal and focusses on the object of affection’s right to refuse (pg. 19). (This was not the language used at the time, but now we would probably call this “negative consent” as per Robert McCauley and that’s how I’ll be referring to it from here on out.)

This changed in the 1990s with a feminist push towards “affirmative consent” (pg. 18). This notion of affirmative consent, that “yes” was required for sex to be permissible, was in large part to take the onus off women in court to prove that they had sufficiently said “no” in order to prove that they had experienced rape; it was now on men to prove that they had a “yes”. Affirmative consent was initially (and, clearly, has continued to be) mocked as something which took the eroticism out of sex and positioned women as victims in waiting (pg. 19–21). The anti-/post-feminist argument against affirmative consent is that young women should be willing to suffer through “bad sex” which is character building and a normal human experience (pg. 23–24). Katherine astutely challenges this notion by asking, “Who pays the price for this dewy-eyed, nostalgic view of teenage fumbling? Who learns what, exactly? For whom is bad sex bad, and in what ways?” (as an aside, can you tell that this book has informed my whole perspective on even thinking about consent, lol. shout out to katherine angel for teaching me to critique my own thinking about consent and saving me from my own bizarre sexual politics embodied in my late-teens/early-twenties.) Katherine elaborates that negative consent paradigms (as which I would categorise this anti-/post-feminist argument) put an unequal emphasis on women (or, to translate this into a queer kink context, subs and bottoms) to manage the risks of bad sex (pg. 26), which can be “frightening, shame-inducing, [and] upsetting… even if it is not, strictly speaking, assault.” (pg. 27)

Affirmative consent seems like a better framework then, except consent doesn’t ensure that sex will be good (pg. 32). This is because – for consent to ensure good sex; for consent to be sexy – we have to “assume a certain kind of partner, one who is fully committed to a woman’s right to have uncertain or changing desires.” (pg. 31) Before the haters in the comments go on to say that this issue is solved through consent being enthusiastic, Katherine pre-emptively disagrees with this notion on multiple grounds, some of which we’ve already covered. The key point she brings up is that enthusiastic consent makes sexual assault less legible by equating a lack of this particular affect with cases where a “no” has been overridden (pg. 30–31). Still, even outwith enthusiasm, to engage in an affirmative consent paradigm, “one has to be able to speak one’s desires out loud and with confidence.” (pg. 35) This presumes an ability to understand one’s own desires and to resolve any internal contradiction that may arise which complicates the speaking of one’s desires. This is further complicated when we consider that some of our desires may be suspect – how, in the case of fawn responses, our desires may still lead to “harm”. Katherine explains the dilemma for us:

“The consent discourse both acknowledges vulnerability and disavows it: you are vulnerable, therefore you must harden yourself; you are violable, therefore you must cast yourself as inviolable. […] Emphatic rhetotic using self-knowledge about desire is problematic not because it depicts women as vulnerable, but because it reveals a horror of vulnerability.” (pg. 36)

Ultimately, both affirmative and negative consent paradigms position sexual violence as something that can be warded off by self-work, which is an attitude that takes rape culture out of the communal sphere and privatises it, making it an issue that can be solved by individual attitudes to men(/tops/doms) (pg. 37). Katherine’s argument is that consent cannot be this catch-all rubric to ensure good sex, but this is underpinned by an understanding that consent is a tool with a history and specific remit: to prevent sexual assault by making it legible, and to allow us to move the burden of proof to perpetrators rather than victims in cases of rape. So, we have Katherine’s answer for what is consent. Still, this section has focussed on heterosexual relationships, and the question remains whether this tool is applicable in a queer kink context.

Sex Beyond Red, or, “Why Quill Kukla is wrong about SM”

Quill’s book, Sex Beyond “Yes”, is mostly really good. I would like to lead with that. Obviously Katherine’s book is an all time favourite of mine, but Quill’s book is worth reading if you want a framework for good sex which goes beyond consent. That said, I am now going to mercilessly critique this thing. (Page references again to my first edition hardback copy.)

Quill’s project is broadly the same as Katherine’s inasmuch as the book is concerned with finding a framework for good sex that includes, but goes beyond, affirmative consent. Quill lays out their definitions pretty clearly for us from the get:

By consensual sex, I mean sex where everyone involved is participating of their own free will and is communicating that to everyone else, whether verbally or through body language, and where everyone would stop if someone ceased to make it clear that they were participating freely. During consensual sex, we demonstrate to our partner that this is what we want to be doing, and our partner makes it clear that they will continue only for as long as we are still showing that we want to continue. (pg. 7–8)

That said, they then introduce the problem of agency. For them, having sexual agency means your actions are “self-determining, self-expressive, and not hijacked by anyone else’s goals or desires or by manipulative social pressures” (pg. 2). For Quill, “both agency and consensuality are ethical prerequisites for sex.” (pg. 8) We’ll get into discussions about agency in just a second, but let’s focus on consent for now, which is an alleged prerequisite for “ethical sex” even if “consensual sex is not the same as good sex.” (pg. 9)

Quill rightly points out that “traditional consent discussions focus on how sex is initiated… but sexual agency requires self-determination throughout a sexual encounter, not just at the start.” (pg. 13) To tease this apart from their conception of consensuality, they note that “giving consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for having consensual sex.” (pg. 9) In other words, “sex might stop being consensual if you stop communicating your willingness to participate” (pg. 9). So for Quill, the key points of consent is that it is ongoing, reversible, and (more-or-less) autonomous. Furthermore, consent is part of what makes sex ethical. While this is grounded in and responding to the discourse of affirmative consent, Quill is positioning consent as a kind of naturalised facet of human experience that is unmoored from its cultural uptake. (you can probably guess how i feel about that already lol.)

The point about sex being (more-or-less) autonomous is expanded upon later in the book. Quill tells us that the “minimum requirement” for autonomy is “(1) they can make a choice that is not directly manipulated, coerced, or extracted by someone else; (2) their own motivations are the source of their choice; and (3) they have enough capacity for reason and self-reflection that they can recognize reasons for and against what they are choosing to do—they are not simply acting on impulse.” (pg. 56) I find something confusing about what is meant by “minimum requirement”. To me, this again reads as a handwave towards the idea that there might be other requirements one might adopt for autonomy in the same vein as choosing between our potato-based acronyms. Quill mostly shies away from this kind of gesture in the book, but the implication of this minimum requirement to me is that sex being ethical or not is gradated rather than binary. This is a confusing notion. What does it mean for something to be halfway ethical? If we hit our minimum requirement for consent, does that mean our sex is just ethical enough? Ethical enough for what? I’m getting ahead of my own critique. To dial it back slightly, their notion of autonomy is also suspect. Regarding 3, is merely being able to recognise reasons an actual indication of autonomy? (A reason that a teenager might take tramadol with me could be that they think the pill might taste good; a reason against is because their mom is cooking dinner at home and they don’t want to fill up on these tasty tasty pills: both things that demonstrate the ability to reason and self-reflect, but clearly not an indication of autonomy – so it’s not just the having reasons that counts but having relevant reasons, but who decides what’s relevant?)

For 1 and 2, I am sceptical of the notion that we as people can ever be so detached from the feelings and motivations of those around us. I am not sure what it would look like to do something based on someone else’s motivation, which may seem like pedantry (because there is clearly a difference between being raped and having sex that isn’t rape), but my question is how can we define when someone else’s motivations make up such a significant amount of why we are doing something as to make our own motivations no longer the “source” of our choice. If my flatmate wants to fuck and does things to get me in the mood for sex without my knowledge (say, I come home and he’s in some skimpy lingerie, mood lighting on, you know how it goes), I am motivated to fuck him based on his motivations to motivate me to fuck him. We understand this as different from sexual assault (say, if I came home and he threatened me with a knife until I fucked him), but the mechanics of his motivations creating my motivations is the same. This is where “uncoerced” comes in, but if he greeted me in the first scenario with a long, warm kiss on my neck where he knows I am sensitive, I feel this still counts as “direct manipulation”.

Perhaps we can clarify these confusing notions of autonomy with a more developed view of sexual agency, which is the other half of what makes sex ethical for Quill. Much of the book involves expanding on what they mean by agency and how it is facilitated. One of their key points (which I agree with fully, to be clear) is that sexual agency is not an individual characteristic that someone can simply possess on their own terms:

People never have sex as an isolated dyad (or triad, or whatever) [sic]. All of us are always embedded in a social ecology that scaffolds some activities, experiences, and choices, and not others. Our sexual agency depends not just on what we and our partners say, but also on a wide range of features of our environment. Scaffolding might take the form of a policy, an educational program, a conversation, a building, or a friend group. The best communicators in the world cannot have sexual agency in a country with maximally restrictive and punitive sexual norms or laws, or when trapped in a brightly lit room in an institution, such as a prison or a hospital, which offers no privacy. These are extreme examples, but none of us exercises our agency in a vacuum. How can good sex—sex that is pleasureful, ethical, and self-determining and self-expressive for everyone involved—be well-scaffolded? (pg. 39–40)

This idea about scaffolding agency has implications for consensuality as well, with Quill stating:

A person with compromised capacities may well be able to have consensual sex with one partner, who holds them in agency well, while being incapable of having consensual sex with a different partner who is less able or willing to scaffold their agency. (pg. 63)

But again, I think we run into the same issues that we did with autonomy. Scaffolding agency is clearly important, but how scaffolded is scaffolded enough? When does an action become self-determined? The handwaving kink educator response would be that that is for each individual kinkster to decide, to pick and choose from a dozen different frameworks each with an acronym less tasty than the last which sets the bar for self-determination. Quill, to their credit, at least gives us some hard lines.

“Never have sex with someone who is actually asleep!” Quill notes, parenthetically (pg. 124). This is because someone who is unconscious is unable to continue communicating consent to sex. They are not in a position of sexual agency, according to Quill. The best scaffolding in the world collapses in dreamland, I suppose. Still, and this is really worth stressing, my pals do this sort of thing to each other and are fine. It seems like an actual violation of sexual agency to say that something should never happen because consent is technically impossible in that scenario, even when the act leads to enrichment of both participants lives. I do not know what my somnophile friends get out of sex during naptime, but I know that it matters to them. I am not going to sacrifice their lived experience on the altar of “ethics”.

(As a brief aside, I can argue the somno point differently, if you want. In this paradigm, consent is required for kisses, touching someone on the body, holding them close for long periods of time. If you don’t have consent to kiss someone on the neck, slide your hand across their chest, and pull yourself closer to them, that’s assault. Except, these are all things we do with our partners (the ones who we share a bed with regularly that is) while we are sleeping or in the morning when one of us has woken up and our partner is not. I don’t know who out there is committed to spending every night in parallel with the love of their life because touching them while they can’t consent would be sexual assault. While there is a difference, of course, between fucking someone and gently kissing them on the neck, it’s a difference of scale when we are coming from the position that both these things require consent. Quill’s assertion that the ability to continue to communicate is a prerequisite for consent falls apart when we acknowledge that consent is accepted to be implied for a range of sexual and intimate activities even through sleep.)

This fixation on an ambiguous ethics is where my biggest criticism of the book comes in, I suppose. Quill has emphasised that sex should be ethical and pleasurable, but neither of these things really mean “good”. Quill clearly has a problem with letting those in sexual situations be their own determiners as to whether the sex they are having is ethical or not (for example, their malignment of M/s dynamics of which Quill is “ethically suspicious” owing to the fact that “when there is no ‘outside’ to the [power exchange] scene, there is no place where the less powerful partner can negotiate on equal terms or call for an adjustment of the dynamic.” (pg. 129) The phrasing of “suspicious” is suspect, but more so is the dismissal of s-types and their desires). They acknowledge that it can be ethical to do something which cannot be backed down from, “after all… we choose to get on amusement park rides that we can’t get off until they end,” but they say that this is “inevitably a compromise of our agency.” (pg. 125) Still, they then admit that “agency is not the only value!” [yeah, with the “!”] and that there are valid reasons to do things that are “physically harmful, terrifying, traumatizing, or panic-inducing” but that “we should be wary of not having a clear exit plan in place.” (pg. 125) Why then can we “never” have sex with someone who is actually asleep?

Quill, right at the end of the book, seems to abandon their hard lines and rigour to lean back on the same kind of handwaving that plagues kink education. By the end of the book, their notion of ethics boils down to the idea that things should be better rather than worse:

Long-time sex columnist Dan Savage [as an aside, lmao] introduced the notion of the “campsite rule”: We should always seek to leave our lovers in better physical and emotional shape—happier, more empowered, more fulfilled and functional—that we found them, especially, but not only, when we have more power than they do. This should be an important principle when considering whether a scene is a good idea or not. I see no reason to restrict the campsite rule to kink sexual contexts. It is a good goal for everyone to build their partners up rather than tear them down through sex. (pg. 126)

I would firstly critique here the artificial distinction between building up and tearing down. As Mikhail put it, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion too.” I think that the campsite rules fails because it is effectively conservative inasmuch as it is literally concerned with the conservation of someone’s identity and their lifestyle in the same way one would conserve a campsite. Sex then, according to Dan and Quill, should not radically restructure us but simply clean out the cobwebs of our being. How are we supposed to handle partners who emphatically want to feel worse, to be made dependent, to be torn down because that allows them to be built anew? It seems like a violation of someone’s agency to insist that this kind of sex should not be permitted when it aligns with both their own and their tops uncoerced, considered motivations.

My second critique is that these notions of “happier, more empowered, more fulfilled and functional” seem to both rest within and beyond the kinksters/campers in question themselves. Quill ignores somnophiles and leatherfolk who tell us that their sex fits the campsite rule because it contradicts their notions of consent and agency, but Quill also leaves it to us to decide what empowerment and functionality is. Again, it seems contradictory to state that these are virtues while denying people the power to have certain types of sex. (this whole dilemma reminds me of catch-22. “he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.” (idk the page soz.) is the goal here to be empowered to do everything except that which might disempower ourselves or each other? or should we just be “wary” of these decisions – as if the affective experience of wariness could make anything meaningfully more ethical, whatever that means.) Quill states that “we should always do our best to create contexts and conversational norms that let everyone negotiate from as close to a position of equality as we can manage” (pg. 128–129) without explaining how close is required for effective equality or whether it's the thought that counts. In the end, their conclusion is that “we need notions of ‘good enough’ consensuality and disclosure that is suited to the actual, imperfect world” (pg. 132), which I agree with fully, holding fast to Matt’s maxim that “good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is” – but what counts as “good enough” is, at the end of the book, left in the hands of the reader, unless they are into somno, leathersex, or play not premised on the conservation of the bottom.

The issue with moving our discussions about sex from the realm of “consensual” to “ethical” is that the latter is entirely up for grabs. I agree with both Katherine and Quill that consent is – and should be in order for us to clarify the discussion about good sex – limited in its purview. However, when this is done through passing the buck to a conversation about “ethics”, we haven’t necessarily answered any of the pressing questions about what we mean by sexual harm. Quill presents us with a rubric for a sexual ethics which excludes people who will emphatically tell you that they aren’t harming each other. I find it difficult to prove that harm has occurred without these kinksters’ corroboration, and I don’t know what the value of an ethical framework is if it constricts the possibility of what we can do together even when we want to – even when we love it, and love each other more for it.

Practical Notes on Limit Consent

Avgi’s book, Sexuality Beyond Consent, is something that you should read. I’m going to talk about it here but really, honestly, if you are this far into this and interested in this kind of stuff, you should buy and read this book. Finish my essay blog post first though. (Page references are for my first edition paperback.)

Anyway, there’s a lot going on here and I am not the person to do the psychoanalytic groundwork necessary to explain those bits of with any sort of veracity. However, there’s a lot to work on with consent. To lay it out briefly, Avgi dismisses affirmative consent pretty succinctly, and then goes on to explain “limit consent”. Limit consent, if you are familiar with the kinds of limits I have been talking about in this essay blog post (which you should be by now), is kind of a misnomer. Rather than a consent revolving around negotiated limits, it is (putting it simply) an internal process of consenting to a “limit experience”. There is a lot of work that goes into developing this one and I’m going to try to explicate it in a way that lets us contrast with Katherine and Quill’s models of consent, but I’m going to have to elide things for the sake of brevity. All you should know at this point is that Avgi is approaching consent as something that is a naturalised facet of human experience, but is also emphasising how consent works as an internal, psychological process.

So what’s Avgi’s issue with affirmative consent? Well, she lays out pretty quickly that “there is no such thing as consent, at least not in the way that affirmative consent paradigms imagine it or in the way it is sold to us as a metric that can subtend ethical relations or inform our sexual politics”, though she notes that “violations of consent are real and deserve our attention” (pg. 3). (Avgi’s book came out a couple years before Quill’s and is not brought up at all in it; I can only wonder why.) This rhetorical whiplash is the kind of on-the-face-of-it contradictory statement that I just eat up in the theory I read, but your mileage may vary. If you need an actual argument against affirmative consent, Avgi gives us this:

The affirmative consent model, however, is insufficiently nuanced: it problematically imagines desire to be autonomous, unconstrained, and possible to separate from social inequalities that, in fact, condition who gets to withhold consent and who does not. […] From a psychoanalytic perspective, then, affirmative consent is revealed to be but a ruse: the discourse on affirmative consent presumes individuals with distinct centers of subjectivity who inform, negotiate, and reach agreements to minimize misunderstanding and manage expectations (Haag, 1999 [Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism]), which overlooks that we cannot know, except after the fact, what we will enjoy or not and how or what will pain or traumatize us versus growthfully challenge us. So while violations of our boundaries and a disrespect of our limits absolutely deserve our attention, affirmative consent is illusory and thus not a useful concept. (pg. 62–63)

She even goes on to tackle how affirmative consent doesn’t account for multitudinous negotiation styles (pg. 63), so clearly we’re not able to solve this lack of nuance by introducing a menu’s worth of acronyms. Part of the explanation here, though, relies on a particular conception of (erotic) desire. Avgi later explains that “erotic desire comes to us unbidden.” (pg. 118) This means that whatever agency we have in a sexual encounter is driven by something prior to that agency, something that is not “unconcerned with being depleted or spent” because it arises from the anarchic unconscious rather than the conservative ego (pg. 118). (I appreciate I’m just throwing “ego” and “unconscious” out there; in short, according to Avgi, the unconsciousness is formed of all the categorically incomprehensible shit that happens to you and the ego is formed of all your categorically incomplete attempts at comprehending it (pg. 40–51 (yes it takes a while to explain)).) Because of this, “Whatever is taken over by the infantile sexual’s polymorphous perversity can afford the extravagance of risk and the squandering of itself without concern for safety, dignity, or respect. It is this that makes it so powerful and dangerous and, therefore, so incommensurate, even at odds, with the logics of safety or self-preservation or ‘good’ politics.” (pg. 118) (Again, Avgi is using “perversity” here in a specific, Freudian sense to mean a sexuality that is dispersed across the body and diffuse in its aims, rather than using the term to denote taboo sexual acts (pg. 29).)

In addition to this suspicion of even the existence of the sorts of autonomy and agency presupposed by affirmative consent paradigms, Avgi is also suspect of notions of equality:

Discourses [such as affirmative consent] that stake the permissibility of perverse desires on equity are oblivious to the effects of social asymmetries issuing from racial difference, class disparities, citizenship standing, disability status, and so on. To demand equality as a precondition for sexual variation to be deemed “benign” is to effectively exclude relations between subjects with intersecting minoritarian identities from the captivating affinities between pleasure, pain, and anguish. (pg. 36)

Part of this dismissal of basing permissibility of desire on equity comes down to inequality being made (psychologically) material within a sexual encounter. Because “aesthetic experience erodes the divide between real and simulated power” (pg. 178), we cannot ever have sexual encounters free from inequality if they are to be impactful, to feel (and as such, be) real. The other part of this dismissal is on the basis of how we are made into subjects, where things such as racism, sexism, and other structural prejudices of the culture in which we come into being “are not pollutants of an otherwise pure psyche but the very materials through which one’s sense of self is constituted—for both majoritarian and minoritarian subjects.” (pg. 49) This is what makes equality an impossible precondition for affirmatively consensual negotiations: so long as these power dynamics are baked into our being (which is not to say that we are always already racist perpetrators or victims of sexist violence, just that racism and misogyny are constitutionally internalised in our sense of self), they will be present no matter how well we scaffold around them.

So affirmative consent is useless, according to Avgi. It is an impossible standard with all the wrong presuppositions about how we are constructed and how we move about the world. Further, it is a paradigm that emphasises maintaining control of a situation (pg. 3), and who wants that during sex? In opposition to affirmative consent, Avgi introduces us to limit consent, which “is more about giving up control.” (pg. 3) This involves a bending of one’s will as giving up control, coming undone, and being changed by it never happens “with the ego’s consent.” (pg. 12) If Quill and Dan’s campsite rule is the conservative ego’s vision of good sex, Avgi is leaving us in the woods with nothing but a hatchet.

Firstly, what is limit experience and why does is matter? (I’ll be kind of mushing this together with Avgi’s concept of “overwhelm” so again, check the references and be wary of me eliding details, which is why I’m putting the page numbers in – not to prove that I’ve read something but so you (yes you!) can check my working if you think I’m off the mark.) Limit experience is the building up of (erotic) energy, the “more and more” (pg. 53) of experience itself, which threatens the ego (pg. 51–53). This overstimulation is unbearable, but when we bear with the unbearable by bending our will, we break apart our stagnant self conceptions and create the room to rebuild our ego anew (pg. 53–54; 69; 101; 154). This can be accessed through touching the wounds of our trauma (pg. 100; 182–184), creating trauma-like experiences (called “traumatisms”) (pg. 101), as well as other extreme adventures such as “BDSM” in general (pg. 102) and sadism in specific (pg. 183). This should matter to us because its consequences are (psychic) life and (psychic) death (pg. 101; 116). Avgi states that “for traumatized subjects, there is no return to a pretraumatic state,” and that we should “become less preoccupied with what to do about trauma… and to consider what to do with [our] trauma.” [Emphasis my own.] (pg. 123). (The argument that underpins this logic is again that “the unconsciousness is constituted through trauma” (pg. 223) and, as such, “trauma is constitutive of our very ontology, not a piece of shrapnel to be removed.” (pg. 134)) Limit experience, then, provides us with a route of doing something with our trauma rather than trying to cure it – which is only really an attempt to adapt us to the repressive, individualistic, neoliberal normalcy in which we are oppressed and exploited (pg. 133).

Secondly, what is limit consent and how do we do it? Rather than controlling a situation, limit consent involves “a loosening of one’s defenses... and it entails the bending of one’s will, the lowering of an internal resistive barrier.” (pg. 104) This is what is meant by working without (or really, against) the ego’s consent. It involves surrendering to something within yourself which enables a limit experience (pg. 60–61). Still, this does not mean that rape and sexual violation can be turned into consensual experiences if only we change our mindset. Avgi emphasises that safety and trust “are the very conditions of possibility for limit consent to come into play in the first place”, and while “both affirmative and limit consent hinge on being negotiated within the protective envelopments of safe relationships, the work of safety is very different in each case.” (pg. 68) In contrast to affirmative consent’s strict following of expressed limits, it is “the relative safety of the relationship” and how if things go wrong “both parties will stick around to process and hold the injury together” that creates safety within limit consent, which is a move away from a consent framework which seeks to preclude harm (as well as litigate whose responsibility that harm was) and towards a consent framework which acknowledges that there is always risk of harm and forces us to confront what must be done in its aftermath (pg. 68).

The acts of facilitating these limit experiences and engaging with limit consent is what Avgi calls “exigent sadism”. She delineates this from “destructive sadism”, which “demands the complete obliteration of the other’s humanity and subjecthood”, as well as from “sensible sadism”, which is merely a simulation of destructive sadism that is ultimately concerned with pleasurable sensations more than transformative experiences (pg. 173). Ultimately, “both of these two sadisms aim towards mastery” and “neither can make a bid for experiences that approximate the limit” because neither engage with the sadist’s own vulnerability (pg. 174). Exigent sadism, then, involves taking a risk with oneself; it is the openness to the true stakes of our sexual relations, that proceeding through this overwhelm, this more and more of experience, means we might lose our grasp on ourselves (though this cannot be the goal, which would be a futile exercise in mastery over vulnerability itself) (pg. 182–184). As Avgi puts it:

From this angle, we can see that exigent sadism requires work and effort and that it also offers care that is not conjugated in the terms we ordinarily understand as care, like "love," "recognition," "safety," or "respect." Such care also involves not using the other to disavow one's erotic vibration, which makes the acknowledgment of the sadist's own vulnerability of critical importance. Exigent sadism requires a radical form of commitment characterized by patience and waiting. Contrary to the destructive sort, it is neither rushed nor impulsive. Its intimacy is very particular. When two individuals appear before each other this way, experiences outside the habitual become possible: two distinct experiences in an intense moment of intimate connection.
The exercise of exigent sadism over another requires that one may first be able to exercise it over oneself. I do not mean this in the empathic sense of "knowing what it feels like." I refer to not allowing oneself to be inhibited by one's morals or even "good" politics in the aesthetic moment, not to wither under the fear of encountering opacity but to take a leap, following not logic but the poetics of being. (pg. 185)

Ultimately, however, the project of a sexuality beyond “consent”, this emphasis on exigent sadism, is still passing the buck for preventing harm from “consent” to “ethics” since consent is something that happens as we play rather than something that informs the play we do. As Avgi puts it, at least, “if consent is not a way to take control, but, within a certain context, a way to let go of it, we cannot rely on the outcome of an encounter (what happened or how someone felt about it) to decide whether the encounter was ethical.” (pg. 3) And, in contrast to Quill, Avgi firmly locates the ethics of her exigent sadism in the aftermath of our undoing, explaining that its “ethical footing” relies on an exigent sadist who “refuses to tell the other what to make of [sovereign (i.e. limit/overwhelmed) experience] and does not try to control how the other will understand it.” (pg. 184) As Avgi explicates:

Part of what makes the disturbance introduced by this type of sadism deeply ethical is that it is also accompanied by some measure of caring support. This support is not of the ordinary kind as when we offer empathic reassurance or validation of the other's pain. Nor is it instrumental, intending to produce a specific effect, as that would be antithetical to the surrender to the unknown required of the exigent sadist. The support, rather, is distributed in the texture of the encounter itself: in the way space is held for the other's experience, in the physical sensorium of the sadist's address, and in her determination to remain in relation to the other come what may. (pg. 183)

We are left with an ethical imperative that at least gives us the room for our undoing and transformation, for better or for worse (whatever that might mean to us). In contrast to Quill, I doubt that Avgi would have an issue with my somnophile friends, trusting them to hold each other come what may (as I have seen them do time and time again). I should also point out that Avgi treats the substantive power dynamics of Master/slave play with more interest and consideration, carving out discursive space for their erotic, liberatory, and ethical potentials (pg. 106 when she brings up Slave Play till the end of the book). It should be clear that I’m a lot more fond of this, but all this comes at the expense of the legibility that affirmative consent offers us for things such as rape, sexual assault, and sexual violation. It is handwavingly asserted that violations of consent are real while providing us no tools to delineate between an experience that is violatory and an experience to which we can surrender ourselves. As has hopefully been made clear by now, this distinction is non-obvious. While Avgi gives us a beautiful, challenging guide on how to have better sex, she doesn’t explain how to not have worse sex. Though affirmative consent may not exist, rape does – and we still need tools to prevent it.

Consent 101 (reprise)

So, what is consent? I don’t know. I am going to be honest with you, I don’t know. The feminists do not have the level of immersion within the kink scene required to answer all of our most pressing questions. Quill takes concerns about negotiating kink seriously but does not give room for substantive, intentional power dynamics or CNC that isn’t just acting (leaving to one side how even simulated power can become real within scene); Avgi gives us answers regarding the ethics and value of heavy play, but only when it is approached from a willingness to be vulnerable from all parties, which is not reflective of the state of the kink community. It seems like it should be possible to synthesise these views without treating disparate frameworks as something one can mix and match to personalise for themselves. We have the challenge of both describing how consent works and creating an ethics around consent that can inform how we might have better sex. The kink educator impulse towards telling people to do whatever works for them individualises and privatises our sexual experiences and diminishes our responsibilities to and within our kink communities. “Well I was using negative consent” is not an excuse for groping a stranger, but nor is “well I was using affirmative consent” an excuse for calling someone who places a hand on your thigh an abuser.

Consent is both interpersonal and communal, and these things interact. My ex-husband and I were talking about consent recently and he told me he didn’t think about the frameworks that much. He pointed out that while he and a partner worked within affirmative consent for early sexual encounters, as they ease into each other’s company, this gives way to implications and expectations about what is available in given circumstances – and all this without explicating that there has been a shift in the framework of consent. There is interplay between this interpersonal sliding of consent frameworks and the communal contexts where consent takes place. We can think of one end of this as someone having private relations in public, where what looks like consent violation in a space which explicates affirmative consent policies is in fact felt as consensual activity between two partners. The implications of this are both that the partner who ought to be affirmatively consenting gains power over their partner through the reification of affirmative consent within the space (say, a kink event which will ban the top if the bottom says that they kissed them without asking; or, conversely, will have to compromise their values of affirmative consent and muddy future litigations), and that other people in the community will see a version of consent being modelled that seems to grant room within the space for consent violations, undermining trust in the space as a whole. On the other end of this is someone having public relations in private, where – when affirmative consent is reified within our communities – the partner who should be affirmatively consenting gains power over the partner who is acting on an implied consent basis because they can simply express the facts of their experience, that it hasn’t been explicitly negotiated, and then their partner is embroiled in online arguments and discussions about banning. In fact, some people can and will do this on behalf of bottoms they see as being abused due to the top not visibly upholding consent to their standards.

So let’s synthesise the feminist frameworks then, except it is unclear what to save and what to jettison. As I have asserted before, “ethics” is entirely up for grabs. We are embroiled in a system of thought that places consent at the centre of good sex, but our attempts to step outside this leave us groundless as to what we even mean by good sex. We cannot pretend that this value judgement is within the grasp of those having the sex – to take such a line would be a disavowal of our communities, our social contexts, of the externalities of our direct relations; it is, in effect, the same normative impulse that traps us within the family that which gives our lives meaning. Unfortunately, we do actually need a way of delineating good from bad sex, a way of delineating discomfort from violation. This is where every kink educator would pipe up with the same sort of thing, probably a thousand variations on it, but all centring around the same single word. Let’s finally talk about “harm”, I guess.

a discursive salvage operation

the discourse of discourse

just to remind you that this realllllly isn’t an essay, that this is a posting on my blog and as such is in actual factual fact, a bloggèd post, the caps are off for this next chunk ad the tone is even more vibesy / less pseudo academic. i’ll get back to a more formal (as in proper; obviously this form is formal-as-in-form) style once we’ve penetrated our way into the conclussy.

was that obnoxious enough to reset the tone? sorry. anyway.

i got into an lovers’ quarrel with my flatmate last night about discourse itself. i was very emphatic that this is a blog post and not an essay. this does not meet the standards of rigour which i think are required of an essay. i use wayyy too many direct quotes; i don’t really have a standardised referencing system; structurally i’m just meandering about rather than setting out the issues and their urgency, explicating my frameworks and the context through which i am critiquing this material, critiquing the material, and then pulling that together into an acutal new point about something. still, i think this blog post has value because i am putting kink educators, introductory resources, and feminist theorists into conversation with each other which creates the possibility for new knowledge. if we imagine productively disagreeing with a friend as transformational sex, this sort of post is the masturbatory equivalent. it’s less fun, but i can still cum about it (i’m not sure what cum is in this metaphor, sorry).

the key thing that this blog post is doing which might make it seem at all academic, at all reaching the watermark of “essay”, is referencing shit. i think referencing shit is important because it makes your arguments traceable and grounded for anyone who is reading, firstly. but secondly, and maybe more importantly, it forces you the writer to actually recollect, engage with, and explicate other people’s ideas. it’s not enough to read something, internalise some parts of it, and vibe it back out when you want to substantively engage with someone else’s thoughts. you will understand the material better through this direct confrontation with it. it’s one thing to be able to explain to a pal what limit consent is based on an initial read of avgi’s book, but you have to understand the material on a deeper level to actually look into the book, find your place, and explain what avgi is saying on this exact page in relation to how this idea is developed throughout the material. the direct quotes are a bit of a cop out here because that’s what i’m doing instead of paraphrasing the material since i can’t phrase it in my own terms so well, certainly not under the timeframe for this post. still, being accountable to what all these different writers have actually said rather than just my ideas about their ideas that i half remember makes a difference in developing my own understanding of what i am trying to write about. plus, if you reference properly then it’s obvious you’re not using ai.

so i would encourage other kinksters, kink writers and educators, to be willing to disagree and to do so with vulnerability; to be willing to stake a claim in relation to something specific someone else has said and invite that same criticism of your own work. (not to say that no one does [INSERT COUNTER-EXAMPLES], but this should be the norm in every post where we are even thinking about someone else’s writing/video/art/whatever.) if someone reads this, thinks i’m full of shit, and writes about how i’m wrong, i’ll consider that a good result. i don’t write to be right (though i try my best sometimes); i mostly just want to be generative. and i realise there may be some backlash to this, that i have internalised my education to the point that it is invisible to me, that someone without a masters degree will struggle to reference properly and break into this mode of writing that i am disavowing as academic even though my sense of it comes from my time within the academy. but! i would argue that there is some middle ground here. referencing at all is better than nothing, and we do not need to all be using harvard style (my bestie) or vancouver style (my worstie) to engage with what is important about writing in explicit conversation with each other. i mean, mostly i’m just throwing out links. i’ve got a lot of tabs open.

hopefully, through having conversations (and valuing them as conversations!), we can start working towards at least acknowledging that we don’t have a shared language, that there are issues that arise from this, that we don’t know what we mean when we talk about the kinds of things we talk about, that we are constantly arguing over definitions, that we have been going in circles, that we have been preoccupied with the act of reading and writing and going to classes and running classes and performing our education from both sides of the keyboard at the expense of actually generating new knowledge, actually identifying the gaps in our understanding, continually pushing away the realisation that we don’t know why we are talking about the things we talk about most.

so, what is consent for?

the kink line that i’ve been putting off till now is that everything we do in our negotiations, our consent frameworks, our conduct our spaces our events our everything whatever – it’s all to prevent “harm”. consent is for preventing harm, i suppose. to be able to say what it is with any certainty, we have to understand what it is for. consensual, in this kink discourse, is not synonymous with “not harmful”. a counter example here would be a scene where the bottom consents to the top cutting the bottom, but really the bottom is just externalising self harm; it’s in the name, see? consensual harm has occurred, which is definitionally bad (again, within this discourse). the flipside though is not symmetrical, with non-consensual play always creating harm. an offhanded comment in a workshop at thrive by Charlie Doll was “hurt is great; harm is not”. the hurt/harm dichotomy looms large within the discourse, and really leads to a lot of clever turns of phrase that are not really arguments.

in the same workshop, Charlie Doll talks about how a consent incident is without intention but where “harm is still caused” because it is experienced as a consent violation by the person experiencing it; on the other hand, consent violations are intentional. this kind of makes some kind of self consistent sense but isn’t really illuminatory. what are we supposed to do here? what does it mean that harm has been caused? what could our consent framework have done to prevent this?

it’s really hard even to find proper sources for this sort of discussion because it’s such a naturalised part of kinksters’ vocabularies. obviously we all know what the difference between hurt and harm is! hurt is when it’s good; harm is when it’s bad. easy. at least Sable on bsky stakes a claim in explicating the difference:

In kink, you need to differentiate between "harm" and "hurt". In kink, "harm" is detractive while "hurt" is constructive. Harm damages your well-being. Hurt induces sensation for an overall positive outcome (even if it causes discomfort or pain).

she also later describes this as “the difference between causing pain and causing damage” which is another thing that sounds right but doesn’t illuminate anything on examination, so let’s focus on the first point. hurt is positive, ideally. i assume she means, like, positive as in good rather than positive as in, like, extant, but she also says its constructive so lets erringly take positive in the latter sense. harm is negative (detractive) then. i assume Sable would vibe with the campsite analogy (though less with dan savage himself). to be clear here dear, i am not trying to argue with [checks her profile] one of my mutuals on bsky. i am appreciate of her staking a claim that i can respond to. i am focussing on this because it feels emblematic of the way hurt and harm are talked about within the kink sphere, and when we are all talking about the necessity of preventing harm, i need a working definition of it to critique the whole premise. so, no shade, genuinely. anyway,

so, if all of these different consent paradigms are to save us from harm (leaving aside limit consent for the moment, which no one is actually talking about in the classes), harm being definitionally negative, then is consent as a whole a conservative project inasmuch as it seeks to shore up the structures of ourselves rather than facilitate their tearing apart? this kind of depends on whether we think negativity and harm are being equated within the discourse or whether harm is negative but also has other qualities which make it, you know, harmful. this is kind of hard to pick apart because i assume most kinksters would like to see the sex they have as transformational, but i don’t know, maybe they’re just not reckoning with the mechanics of being transformed (obligatory yvette ref to lee riddelman: “negativity is unchanging as structure because negativity structures change.” (pg. 121)). the campsite example definitely implies that better means building on the same rather than radically breaking from anything. another way to approach this is by interrogating whether we see kinksters talk about how much they are broken down and how they love that, which we do, but this is usually shored up by saying that they are build back up better or stronger or more in love or whatever – which is a disavowal of negation by insisting on the positivity of the aftermath. (even i’ve kind of used that line in this very post.) so, right now i’d say that the discourse is equating harm and negativity: transformation is only okay if we can close our eyes to our own undoing; our undoing is only okay if we come back the same.

my point is that negativity is a pervasive force. as such, harm is inescapable, even when we like to imagine it as something softer, something that only “hurts”. i can put this all in more concrete terms. when my flatmate puts needles through me, that is causing trauma to my body, that is taking out chunks of my skin, that is in a literal sense detractive to my being. we (plus my boyf) do aftercare, and wound care, and the holes scar over, the blood i’ve lost comes back, and one might say that this makes it “hurt”, but at the point where i am sat on the floor covered in blood half filled with more needles than some people will have in them their entire lives, all i have experienced is harm. getting to “hurt” necessarily involves going through and being vulnerable to “harm”.

in this way, the kink discourse about consent is at odds with itself. it seeks to prevent harm while harm is the thing we are trying to facilitate through all the kink we do. i want to argue that there is still a difference between rape and simulating rape, but when we acknowledge how what is simulated can become real within that experience, we cannot locate this difference in whether harm was caused. similarly, we cannot locate this difference in our models of consent which only guarantee their own ethical value in looking past the encounter, of which we have no assurance in either case as to whether we will grow or be diminished (i am asserting this in my capacity as a victim of sexual assault, but i appreciate that other people may have strong adverse reactions to the sentiment). this is what avgi is contending with and what limit consent as a framework seeks to account for, but her answer for the simulated/rape dichotomy is to handwave that consent violations are obviously real. what if it isn’t obvious to me? can we explain that, or are we admitting defeat on the whole premise of consensuality?

“so is it in the name of a purer consent that you criticise the functioning of consent?”

i think we are doing the noam michel debate forever. we are doing the noam michel debate forever and we are doing the sex wars forever and we are doing leather vs kink forever and we are all so detached from the material conditions that created the cultures which we see ourselves in lineage with and we are all so distracted that we aren’t reading the material that formed the substrate of the discourse which we have come to inherit that when we are writing and talking and educating we are not actually creating a discourse, we are simulating a discourse, we are simulating our idea of what a discourse is which is based on arguments we’ve had online with people who have read nothing but know how to skim wikipedia which is just what we’re doing to keep up. we find ourselves within the simulacra of a discourse. another beautiful day in the desert of the real.

to explain what i mean a little rather than just whinging about it, the noam michel debate kind of climaxes with this: noam spends a while talking about how the state regards something as illegal (such as disrupting a weapons factory) but it is in fact legal because what the state is doing is criminal (such as genocide). michel asks noam (in french) whether he’s criticising justice as it materially exists in the form of cops, courts, and prisons in the name of a purer justice. noam basically says yeah and doesn’t understand michel’s point and then repeatedly tells michel he’s also doing that when michel, like, isn’t. michel makes a later point that basically amounts to this idea that when are appealing to a greater justice, we are still pulling through our sense of justice as it exists. he is not invested in an anti-capitalist project because he believes he is more just; he is waging war against capitalism and its institutions of justice for the sake of power. the oppressed don’t want to overthrow the oppressor based on a well considered notion of what is right or true or just, it’s because we need freedom.

i think that our debates around consent proceed according to these lines. we appeal to a notion of a more pure consent, a tastier potato-based snackronym, in order to critique the forms of consent which fail us. but we always pull through the original conservative premise of consent, that we can and should try to prevent harm. only avgi refuses to do this, and in doing so creates a framework that is legible as consent in name only. she’s right, i think, and she’s actually mostly talking about something else entirely. the “and” there is a bit jarring, i think, but i do mean what i am implying. i am about to argue that what we need to have better sex is a new discourse. i should probably do the groundwork first though.

michel writes (or said, considering it was a lecture, and again it would have been in french i’m pretty sure), “since, as history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.” what this means, in terms of this essay blog post, is that it is the discourse itself of sexual ethics that we need to reckon with, not finding a better version of consent which is centred within this discourse. this is because discourse defines what is comprehensible within our lives and as such creates our realities, our lived experiences. when we apply this to consent, what i mean is that we experience some things as a consent violation to the extent that we are within this discourse of consent. when we push the bounds of consent, simulated rape becoming real for instance, our experiences become discursively illegible. to be clear, the discourse is not an individual mindset but the system of knowledge in which we exist, reified through the institutions we have to navigate in order to live, through the communities that treat this discourse as natural fact. (maybe the right word here is ideology; i genuinely don’t know – my degrees are in worms and gps.) nor do i think that the discourse can ever encapsulate all experience, making everything legible; there will always that which is abject, and to insist on a future where we all agree is to build a fatal necropolis, where thinking has ceased. my serious point here is that we cannot imagine rape and its consequences out of existence even if becomes discursively illegible because “even if our bodies are constituted through discourse, they also exceed it.” (sexuality beyond consent, pg. 51, though avgi is referencing michel here, specifically remarks on marx (1991)) but still, what is at stake is the territory of sexual relation as we know it – as it can be known.

if i were to take the hardest line possible, i would argue for an abandonment of consent. at least, this is how i see the idea of adopting limit consent as our consent framework. it cannot tell us what is violatory; it can only describe how we open ourselves up to the liberatory and transformational potentials of sex. still, we are left with a hole in our discourse. we have lost a tool which seeks to explain how to treat each other, to make it legible when we have treated each other badly. we have embraced the wounding nature of sex, of relation itself, but we are left without a way to tell the difference between the wounds we want and the wounds we don’t; the wounds we ought to inflict on others and the wounds we ought to keep in our fantasies. how then can we make sex ethical without consent?

Aftercare

A Framework for the Aftermath

If we are to develop an ethics for sexual relations, it cannot be an ethics for sex itself, which exceeds ethical and moral considerations. Instead, we have to embrace a duty of repair. In one sense, consent is a disavowal of this duty of repair. If the top gets the checklist, if the bottom isn’t told no, they can say they did their job by keeping it consensual regardless of the outcome. By foregrounding our ethical considerations by imaging an aftermath, we are disavowing the real – always unexpected – aftermath of the sex we have. Centring our duty of repair towards each other rather than preventing the need for it or pretending like it’s not our problem because our partner signed up for it creates an ethics of care without being litigatory. And it gives us the room to throw a party and trash the campsite, so to speak.

We kinksters are already doing this. Aftercare is taught as essential for everyone in a scene. Those of us who are on the ball with (more) risky play will acknowledge that risks will occur and that there is a duty for both the top and bottom to repair when it comes to physical injuries and some emotional injuries. What we are not reckoning with is that, when we emphasise preserving consent, this duty of care becomes an afterthought because harm should have been prevented in the first place – as if impact play would be better if it didn’t leave bruises. Accepting harm as part and parcel of kink means accepting that preserving consent is a meaningless endeavour, that we have to find ethical treatment for each other a deprivatised aftercare, taking it from some snuggles in the quiet room and a call the next day to a communal imperative for rebuilding and repair.

What I mean here is not that hook-ups should necessitate enduring friendship. I’m not asking you to become best mates with the dyke you fondled in the darkroom. In fact, I am more concerned with opposite. As communities, we should view the harm we endure as time for care, compassion, and new understandings of ourselves. Rather than fixating on assigning blame, on vitriol towards perpetrators of harm, we can direct our energies towards those who have come undone and help them through its aftermath. Does it get us anywhere to decide whether the way someone touched us was right or wrong? If they were in the right, we lose our justification for care; if they were in the wrong, the harm can seem insurmountable and our care is tied up in their punishment. It is only ever the present moment, and litigations distract from the ways we can and should care for each other no matter what the reason is.

Of course, within communities, there is also always this duty for aftercare. Not everyone who leaves us undone will be a stranger on Grinder only in the city for a night. In these cases, I believe we need to sit with each other when we feel able to do so, that we need to sit with our friends in the meantime, that we need to be willing to come undone ourselves when we are confronted with the ways we have harmed each other. This is only possible if we let go of litigatory notions of consent, if we give space to admit that harm was caused – to hear that we harmed someone; to say that we have been harmed – without the looming threat of complete social exclusion. I do not believe that we all have to be buddies with our rapists (I have mine blocked), but I do not think that we can repair ourselves when admitting that we were raped comes at the expense of someone else’s life and livelihood (and at the risk of our further undoing should we not be believed or otherwise dismissed). While this culture of blame exists, either we are carceral or we are silent.

This leaves us with a question then of how we guide our negotiations and how we conduct ourselves in our sexual relations. Harm is inevitable, but there is still a difference between real and simulated rape. I think our only rubric can be an inversion of consent’s emphasis on controlling outcomes. If consent makes us ask, “What can I do to prevent harm?”, this framework for the aftermath makes us ask, “When I harm someone, will I be able to face it?” Instead of trying to master the future, we must remember that whatever happens, we will be confronted by the outcomes of our actions. We will not have to stand by them, we will not have to litigate or defend ourselves against a punitive system, we will only have to live with what we have done. This then allows us to finally glean the difference between real and simulated rape: my flatmate can tie me down, stick needles in me, laugh as I tell him red, helped along by my boyfriend, taking photos as my words fall apart, as I stop being able to communicate how any of this feels, as the blood streaks down my body, and then they can laugh with me as I talk about how intense it felt, how annoying it is to chat with A&E, the three of us together, all kisses and giggles the morning after. In the light of day, my rapist was in tears.

This then is how my no safewords, yes limits negotiation framework engages with sexual ethics. It ignores the premise of consent and accepts the inevitability of harm. All of what I have written all those thousand words ago are tools to navigate sexual relations that seem impossible, to communicate what and how you want to be harmed in a way that you and your top can stand behind whatever happens, committing to whatever repair might be needed and accepting that in advance. Similarly, this is how my friends can do somno with each other. They know that whatever happens, they will hold each other through the worst of it, which widens possibility of it being good, unconstrained by the fear that they might never come back together after being undone.

We can still have norms and rules and standards. We can still have darkrooms where we don’t expect to be asked before being touched and playrooms where we find it rude to even be asked by someone about joining our scene. We can still have bars where we can catch what someone’s flagging, nod our head, and drink some piss in the toilet without needing to work it all out from first principles every time. And we can do all this without conservative, prescriptive consent frameworks.

We can fuck at the campsite. It is impossible to say if it will end up better than we left it because “better” is, as ever, up for grabs. The only ethical imperatives we have are to be honest when we were the people to use it last, and to face up to whatever we did there.

Kissing You Goodbye

This essay blog post is incomplete, and it is far too long. I wanted to write about kink at pride as well, and really I think I should have written more about M/s and dynamics outwith scenes. I am open to being disagreed with so long as you reference this post decently enough. But I want you to know, if you made it this far, that I love you. I owe you a kiss. Just go for it whenever; you have my consent x