SEXy IN A TIME OF CONSENT
As kinksters, we know that to play as hard as we want, we also have to learn how to play safe. In the BDSM community, we have since long known the importance with outspoken, enthusiastically expressed consent. It was many decades ago we carefully and thrillingly started to devour the green, caress the yellow and always stop at the red.
When we play with and explore our sexualities and ourselves through pain, power or humiliation, these teachings are essential to create intense experience of pleasure, and do no harm.
But all sex contains gray zones of pleasure, power and desire, not just the most hardcore encounters. In recent years, the importance of consent for good sex, for respect, for shared joy, have reached mainstream sex: respect, care and pleasure are woven more tightly together. But when we assume outspoken, enthusiastic consent to be a fixed solution to the dangers of sex, the pressure of doing consent correctly can also create insecurities. It can become an obstacle to sexuality, instead of, as it is meant to, capacitate it.
Did she really want it like that? Did I go too hard? Did I ask enough? Did I like it as much as I said I did?
Of course, consent is crucial to any good sex, as well as a corner stone in basic sexual ethics. But consent is not always as easy as a saying yes might seem. It is okay to express insecurities around consent. It is a territory to always keep exploring, it looks and feels different with different partners, and it is work and practice that you have to keep doing.
Affirmative consent – the idea that agree to sex must come by a “yes” and not just an absence of a “no” – was a shift from the 70s feminist movement and the “no means no” slogan, to a pushing back not to frame women’s’ role in sex as a position of refusal. Women can love sex, and still not always know what they want. Consent is a crucial tool in our pursuit of pleasure, and exploration of the self, but it is not enough.
Consent is sexy, consent is romantic. Yes! Yes! Yes! But it isn’t a solution to everything we need in sex, it is not enough to embark on the journey. When it is framed like this, it puts pressure both on knowing everything about your own sexuality and everything about your partner’s. And there’s a first time for everything. How do you say ‘yes’ before trying? How do we make a space where this is possible?
In my teachings, I want you to open yourself up to the vulnerability of the uncertainty of consent, to explore how to practice care, respect and mutual pleasure without foreclosing the unknown of sex, that thing that sends goosebumps all down your partner’s spine, that you never knew felt so good.
When sex is as it’s best, we challenge each other’s limits, merge in and out of each other, dissolve each other. Pleasure cannot be measured, and in sex, we explore the immeasurable together. This can be a dangerous space, vulnerable, but it is also exciting, groundbreaking.
There might not be one single “truth” about our sexualities. Sexuality is an ongoing experiment, in the mess of bodies, desires and fluids meeting.
Tomorrow sex will be good again, wrote the philosopher Michael Foucault, when he made fun of the idea that we can fuck away inequality. Sex will never be equal, not until all of society is equal. But rather than saying “yes” as a way to get over these inequalities, we can say yes to pleasure in face of them, as a way to deal with them. We must also be able to say maybe, to say let’s see together, to say, how can we first create a space of trust.
Enthusiastic consent is crucial, but it is not enough to speak about the messier parts of sexuality: scary and exciting space which is the changing, ongoing and hesitant part of sexuality. Author and theorist Katherine Angel writes in her book which title borrows Foucault’s phrase, Tomorrow sex will be good again: Women and desire in the age of consent, that
“our desire emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing”.
To say yes to sex is not to say no to power. But let’s still say yes to sex, or if you need to, say maybe. The responsibility we hold towards each other in different context of various power relationships is also the condition to an exciting exploration of what yes means, in different settings, with different partners, in different modes.
As Angel writes:
“We must not insist on a sexual desire that is fixed and known in advance, in order to be safe. That would be to hold sexuality hostage to violence”
It is okay if you don’t know exactly what you want. It’s okay if you don’t know beforehand exactly what your partner wants. To be sexy in a time of consent is to create interactions where we explore in what conditions desire is enabled or inhibited, without foreclosing the fact that this might change. This requires not only saying yes, but an ethics of sex which allows for uncertainty, for change, for care in face of not knowing everything.