31st July 2026: Postscript on the Subcultures of Consent

So, I’m not sure that a complete abandonment of consent is especially practicable. We can start with this minor concession to the (sub)cultural environment(s) in which we reside. I’d like to revisit this paragraph from the end of my last blog post:

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.

I wrote this under my covers in the throes of sweaty passion (which is how most of my writing gets done) and re-reading it now, I am slightly unsure on that last sentence. At least, I am unsure on the viability of announcing this and then having it become true. Saying “No, sorry, I don’t use consent” in most queer environments is nonsensical at best; certainly, it’s the same type of thing as announcing that you use CRISP over FRIES. Looking so far beyond the discourse as it exists is utopian, which has its value (that is to say I don’t regret the sentiment of the above passage) but is limited insofar as in almost any given queer kink environment I have to contend with the fact that people do care about consent, that it does exist discursively, and that to move beyond it without exploding these subcultural institutions outright, we must still figure out what it means to do something consensually.

Fortunately for you all, I’m not going to spend twenty-something-thousand words answering this as rigorously as I can manage.

After writing the big blog post, I had a nice conversation with a vulpine friend. We talked a lot about the “black hole” (their term, which I dig) that consent revolves around: the consent violation. Consent paradigms can tell us what not to do, but they can’t actually tell us what next when we do it anyway – nor when it is done to us. This is the ethical space which my paradigm of aftercare tries to cover; by centring the duty of repair in all instances, by accepting that harm is something we move through rather than avoid per se, we have developed a new ethics for sex. What then is leftover of consent?

This vulpine friend suggested – and I remember where this was when we were at this bit of the conversation, coming down through the trees on top of the hill in Bellahouston park, way too sunny even through the leaves, that ugly fucking obelisk which I think someone I know graffiti’d just becoming visible – that maybe consent can be a part of sex but just not the most important thing. At least that’s how I heard them.

This has stuck with me, clearly, and it’s the basis on which I’ve developed my “consent preamble” for some kink education workshops I have led / will be co-leading with my flatmate. The gist is that consent is something that exists socially to demarcate what is and isn’t sexual, what is and isn’t permissible by default, and how to ask for something to become permissible. It is not a place where we can coherently locate our ethics (which, as per my last blog post, is in my framework for the aftermath), but it is the paradigm around which revolve the “norms and rules and standards” of kink spaces. I conclude the preamble with a call for people to pay attention to the way that consent is actually socially constructed, the ways it is made material, in darkrooms, playrooms, bars, and wherever else we might find ourselves, but that what makes our sex ethical is not consent in and of itself – it is our commitment to each other.

In the preamble, I call this “good faith” engagement. With a partner (whether this is someone we live with or a stranger in a darkroom), this means creating space for decision making, self expression, and understanding, as well being vulnerable, which is the engagement with the space made for you to make decisions, express yourself, and grasp at an understanding of your partner. Beyond our partners, this is our duty to help repair each other when we cannot recover alone or with a partner from the harm we inevitably go through (whether that is harm we have caused or harm we have endured), as well as our commitment to being in community, not to ostracise others or isolate ourselves. This acting in good faith is the ethics of sex which I try to make clear.

Consent then is a social reality. I do not think potato-based snackronyms adequately cover the nuances of consent as it exists in any space, but even if they did, that would still not be enough to centre them in our sexual ethics. My push here is to get those who attend workshops I co-lead and spaces I facilitate to think about consent in terms of its history and its material existence, rather than casting consent as some kind of timeless, metaphysical object. In doing so, we can more easily recognise how consent functions differently in different spaces to facilitate different kinds of erotic encounters. And by locating our ethics elsewhere, we can figure out what to do when that goes wrong.