Consent, Non-consent, and “Get The Hell Away From Me!”

Kinky people tend to have, or say they have, a profound belief in consent. When playing with fire (hard limit, no thank you), a nuanced understanding of how people agree to things is reassuring. Exploitation and coercion occur even when people seem to enthusiastically say “yes,” but consent’s a good starting point. When you’re seeing people tied up and beaten, and feeling reluctant to intervene, that’s valuable.

As a group, we’ve generally agreed that consent is an ongoing action, and might cease at any time. This destroys the, “she was wearing a miniskirt,” defence, but raises some difficulties. You can’t withdraw your consent to be on an aeroplane mid-flight, but you can mid-kiss or mid-beating. In the fetish community practices like safewords are encouraged so that withdrawal can be communicated. I know a man who likes to gag people, but always gives them little cymbals to drop if they want the scene to end. Then, what if you enjoy being pushed beyond the point at which you seriously say, “no”?*

At this point you’re sure to encounter a self-appointed member of the consent police. He admonishes those who dare to play without safewords (I find them useless, because by the time I need to use them I’m too far gone to speak), and reprimands those who don’t hide their kink well enough, for involving unconsenting members of the public (he’d probably outlaw kissing on buses). I prefer him, though, to the hardened criminals: those who believe that explicit consent provides a license to do anything. Beaten to within an inch of your life? Well, you said it was ok beforehand! People don’t always act in their own self-interest, experience certainly shows that I don’t, although I intend to in future. All of this means that the precise boundaries of consent are constantly debated in fetish forums, usually by people who aren’t going to do anything more dangerous to life than tap each other with sticks while looking menacing. It’s an academic squabble after we’ve agreed the central points.

Sometimes, being mostly surrounded by people who have a nuanced view, I struggle with people who don’t. I forget that there was a time when I felt that if sex began, I had to see it through to the end, and that I had a tendency to swallow because I thought it would be rude not to. I begin to believe so thoroughly in my way of doing things that I can’t see it from another perspective.

I’ve had to confront that other perspective twice recently. The wanking man didn’t touch me, but he still left me feeling abused. Another man provoked a similar feeling, this time with lips. We’d kissed, and I’d told him I wasn’t going to screw him. I said I’d like to use the bathroom before I left his house. As I washed my hands, he lurked silently on the other side of the door. When I emerged he wrapped his arms around me and dragged me to the bedroom. I put up mild resistance, surprised and confused—until we reached the doorway—about what was going on. He toppled me down on the bed, lay heavily on top of me and kissed my neck. This time I resisted wholeheartedly, pushing as hard as I could against the weight of his body and repeating, at increasing volume, “Stop! I’m serious, stop,” but I couldn’t shift him. When he stopped of his own accord, I scrambled to the edge of the bed and berated him for his behaviour. “I wasn’t hurting you!” he objected.

“That’s not the point.” I told him.

Aside: If you’re thinking, “that bloke had a sexual abuse problem, not a differing understanding of consent,” stick with me, we’ll get to the point. If you’re thinking, “sheesh! Bloody women with her mixed signals, she deserves all she gets,” you’re in the wrong room, you want, Not Becoming a Rapist 101, down the hall.

A couple of days later the lover came to call. When he kissed my neck I felt I was back in that bedroom with peeling paper, under the weight of the man who wouldn’t stop. I told him I was going to ask him to do something, and I’d prefer he asked no questions. I said I didn’t want him to kiss my neck. “I’d already decided not to,” he replied, “I felt your reaction.” Before bed he gave me a hug and said, affectionately, “I’m going to rape you in the morning.”

The lover and I play with non-consent a lot, it’s a central kink for both of us. A recent highlight was the day I sent him a text message simply saying, “the door’s on latch.” The grazes have now healed and I’ve resolved to hoover the hallway before trying anything like that again. We both know it’s only a game, but it isn’t pretty. When it’s happening, my fear and pain are real.

Rape in the morning is a slightly different matter. I don’t say, “oh, yes please, I’m looking forward to it,” because I’m not, and because we both consider that I can’t give consent eight hours before, for an act to be performed on me while I’m unconscious.** My reaction varies, from sleepy acquiescence to squirming away in pain, but even at its worst, on the day I had a migraine, thrown down so that my head was split by a square of sunshine on the pillow and I could not imagine, on any level, deriving sexual satisfaction, it did not occur to me to reprimand him. This is who we are, this is what we do.

My question to myself is this: Why am I angry with the man who didn’t get my consent to kiss my neck, and not with the one who rapes me? Why do I think of that man’s lips on my neck with such disgust, but look back on many mornings of actual pain with, if anything, affection? The only answer I can think of is that the lover, unlike the other man, knows that consent is important. He never would (never could) justify doing something by saying it didn’t hurt me. And he knows that there’s something beyond explicit consent, where he has to be extra-specially careful, and read my expression, my eyes and my breathing, for all the things I can’t tell him. He knows the rules, so he’s allowed to break them. That is pretty close to an incoherent position.

I’m curious about how other people resolve the inconsistencies of desire and consent, because it seems like a tangle. And how, from the kinky perspective which so privileges consent, does one deal with the heavy-handed tactics of the vanilla world?

*There’s an interesting meditation on no limits play at SpankingCast. http://spankingcast.com/spankingcast-episode-14-no-limits

**Yes, this means that many medical procedures are non-consensual. I don’t think we should give up surgery, and I do find the inconsistencies in my system mildly troubling.