How to Practice Consent within BDSM, Kink, and Submission

What I learned about consent in my first forays into kinky play

Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash

by Sonnet

Consent

When my partner Max and I were beginning our adventures into the world of kink, in the 2000s, the mainstream media and social media had apparently yet to learn the word ‘consent’. You would not hear the concept even expressed in normal conversation. In the kink universe, however, both the word and what it really means were one of the main topics of conversation. Whereas heteronormative, regular dating culture had yet to see that lunging in for an unasked-for snog or butt-grab may be assault, the kink universe had become more aware precisely because some of the practices look, from the outside, like things mainstream culture already considered problematic. The irony is that consensual flogging, for example, might look more like assault than non-consensual groping, which actually is assault. Because of the extreme nature of some of these practices, it was more obvious, maybe, that clear consent needed to be granted, and people had thought a lot about how to ensure this was happening.

In many ways, consent is easier to navigate when you are in a codified space, especially one geared towards sexual and fetish play. If you are at a ticketed event, you will have signed up to a code of conduct, and in order to get their licence, the venue will have to have put in place strict rules, and anyone flouting them has to be ejected. This is not the case in regular clubs or bars – even today (it should be!). If you are making one-on-one arrangements, you have to discuss what you are planning to do in advance – when does this ever happen on ‘regular’ hook- ups or dates? The honesty that’s required to say, ‘Yes, I do like water sports, but I do not like scat play,’ tends to put you in a place of clear communication from the outset.

However, I wondered, as I went to meet more doms, and the activities began to involve more restraint and more pain, how would I, in the moment, communicate if something was wrong? What if suddenly it all got too much? How would they know the difference between role-play submission and me really feeling like I needed an out? How could I trust them? Sometimes, at first, doms would give me safe words. One, I remember, said it had to be my mother’s name, which I suspect was more his ‘thing’ than mine, but was amusing – kinkifying the safe-word process. But now, I tend to feel that if we need a safe word, we do not have the appropriate level of communication on all levels to be doing what we are doing. I only want to surrender to people I trust so entirely, that if I said simply and seriously, ‘Actually, can we stop now?’, they would.

One dom partner, Anthony, laughed once when we were discussing this. ‘Consent? That doesn’t even begin to cover it. I do not need only consent, or even “enthusiastic positive consent”; I need to know that the submissive is going to have a fully transcendental experience, that this experience is deeply important, that their trust is absolute, and that we have an intimacy and connection. Of course, if anything changed second by second, and they were no longer happy to do what we were doing, we would stop. But we would stop long before that if it wasn’t amazing, too. The aim is not for the sub to be just “OK”.’

I am not suggesting that the kink universe and BDSM culture is a utopia free from all misunderstanding, harassment, prejudice, and sexual assault. I have certainly heard stories about submissives using masochism as self-harm, and I have heard about an alleged rape at a sex party. There must be predators posing as doms. And there must be uneducated, misogynistic, transphobic or homophobic people in these communities, as elsewhere. I have personally witnessed a person at a small party paying just too much attention to another, when it was clearly unwanted. He was kicked out. Apps and websites aimed at the kink world are as likely to have idiots, trolls, and fakers as the internet all round.

But whereas I have frequently experienced non-consensual touch and have been made to feel uncomfortable at work events, in bars, at clubs, and at house parties, and have experienced unwelcome attention from strangers, professional contacts, acquaintances, and even friends, I have never encountered this in the context of a kink event. Ordinary public space often doesn’t feel safe, and I am a cis, white, middle-class woman living in a reasonably liberal Western city; ordinary public space must feel – and is – even less safe for members of marginalised communities, and in other places. For its participants, I think the kink world can often provide a way to be yourself free from the fear sadly present in the everyday world.

In fact, long before ‘everyone was talking about it’, I would look at things happening at a ‘vanilla’ party – or, indeed, on the Tube – and be very aware of threatening, predatory behaviour making people uncomfortable, and yet still being accepted as the norm. I think this was because I was having to think about it in so much detail, and having so many conversations about it. Many other people who are into BDSM have said the same. I hope that today the kind of discussions on consent I was having in my late twenties because I was trying to find out if I would like to be suspended from the ceiling and flogged, are now happening in primary schools as basic sex education.

I have never stopped proceedings because of the intended pain – I like playing with the edge too much, and I think the doms are usually more worried about me than I am – but I have had to because of physical discomfort: a cramping leg, a too-numb hand, feeling slightly too dizzy from something around my neck. I think this mirrors the emotional reasons I have ever called a halt, too – I have never done so from feeling threatened or unsafe, but I have if I’m feeling a bit bored, or just not aroused. Someone once told me, ‘Life is too short for a bad French fry.’ When there are such excellent French fries out there, why keep eating any that are just OK?

You can stop, at any moment, for any reason whatsoever, and so can whoever you are playing with, in whatever role. No explanation is needed, and no offence should be taken. If I have any doubts at all about that being the case, I do not proceed.

Excerpted from SUBMIT: A Memoir ©2024 Sonnet and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group.

Sonnet is the pseudonym of a businesswoman based in London and New York.