BDSM Weblog

The idea of informed consent is one of the core principles of BDSM. It’s in the two most common acronyms, SSC (Safe, Sane, and Consensual) and RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink). Without consent, what we do is immoral and illegal — well in many places, what we do is illegal even with consent, but I digress.

Anyone who knows me knows that I do not believe in black and white; I see almost everything as a gradient.  For example, I think that the hetero-/bi-/homo-sexual distinction is very crude and not representative.  I’m a guy, and maybe I would never even be able to recognize another man as attractive. Perhaps I can recognize other men as attractive, but not ever want to kiss one. Maybe I’d want to kiss other men, but only rare men on rare occasions.   Et cetera, all the way down the line to the other extreme.

I also see informed consent as a gradient. Actually I see it as two gradients; a dual-axis system, if you will: how informed one is, and to what extent their consent is valid. The informative axis is easy to understand, I think. If you’re involved in a flogging scene, maybe you know absolutely nothing about it, or maybe you know that it’s bad to get hit in the head or in the kidneys, or maybe you know that and are familiar with the concept of “wrapping” and correct target areas and how fast is appropriate to build up and good/bad physiological responses.

But what about the consent axis? Obviously, if someone is unconscious, then they aren’t able to give consent. If they’re drunk or high on drugs, their consent is not valid. But what about if someone is high on endorphins after a good scene? What if they’ve had a single beer?   Okay, many people will say even one beer isn’t a grey area and is unacceptable, so what about one drop of wine? Two drops? What is the BAC line that you draw, and is it different for different people? What if a submissive is new to the scene and undergoing “sub frenzy?”

In this article about the legal dangers of rough sex, “Steve” (a sadist in the lifestyle) further breaks down consent into three areas: consent before, during, and after.  He says that if he gets two out of three, he’s happy.  I think that’s a little callous, and one should always shoot for three out of three, but I can see his point.  If you’re negotiating a scene, doing everything you should as a top, and during the scene you do everything you should as a top, what happens if the bottom has regrets the next day, or the next week?

To further muddy the waters, various articles and books on BDSM also talk about “seducing” consent.   The book Flogging by Joseph Bean says that even within a scene, the top is constantly seducing consent from the bottom and then “spending” it.   One of the things that gets a lot of tops off is pushing the edges of boundaries.   That’s true of me personally; I think of BDSM as an experience of enlightenment and discovery as well as something viscerally fun, and in my role as a top one of my higher-level goals is to help show the bottom something new about themselves.   To show them that they’re stronger than they thought, or that they like this thing that they were uncertain about, or that crying can be liberating, or… well, you get the picture.   So even on the end of the gradient that most people think of as unquestionably acceptable, we push the edge of consent.

So in what ways is it ethical to manipulate someone into expanding their consent?   What if someone is pretty sure that they won’t like something (or if it’s one of their hard limits), but you convince them to try it?  I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard of bottoms having something as a hard limit, but it later becoming their favorite thing.

Okay, so what’s the point of all of this? The point is, there’s no black and white with consent. Some things we can look at and say with certainty, “That was/wasn’t valid consent.”   Maybe you have a system or heuristic that you could give a solid “consensual/non-consensual” ruling for any given scenario, but I’ll bet you I could throw a few at you that would make you indecisive.

Further, I think a lot of people in the world of BDSM see the idea of consent as a panacea to all questions of the morality of our lifestyle.   What is consent to you might not be consent to me, or to the legal system (and here again I’m resisting the strong urge to go off on a tangent about BDSM in the law in America).   And consent, even if given in a valid way, can always be retracted. My dear friend Clarisse blogged about that very topic.

Filed under: Thoughts by Sammael