Consent workshop part one million

This week's creative project

Hey, K, whatcha makin?

Is the question I want to keep asking myself, and hoping people start asking me. I’d like to be able to show up here and on the Patreon every week and say, hey, look, here’s what I’m working on, here’s the art I’m putting into the world today.

It requires a certain amount of. Hm. Chutzpah, is maybe a good word? Courage and conviction, as Ask Polly said to the deeply traumatized letter-writer. Getting out there and showing willing. Crawling through the muck.

And then keeping on doing it. That’s the hard part, innit. But here we go.

Content note: discussion of alternative sexuality spaces, CSA, and the persistence of rape culture below

One of the things I make is consent workshops

Back in the dark ages pre-pandemic times, I designed and ran a few classes on the idea of embodied consent. (Looking back on those posts, I may need to revise and re-launch them as a series here.) I’ve been what I’d call a consent geek for a long time, and the evolution and expansion of thinking on the concept in the last, oh, 30 years is still of great interest to me. I’ve been a passionate advocate about consent and combating rape culture since…oh, I don’t know if I could name the moment, but the earliest thing that comes to mind is standing outside the frattiest dorm hall on my college campus with a bunch of other women in maybe 1993, singing Tori Amos’ “Me and a Gun” while the men inside hooted and shouted “show us your tits!”

Probably the Virgin Mary, facepalming. This shit has been going on for a long time.

I can’t say it’s gotten much better.

Later in my 20s I started to be more interested in consent as it operated in alternative relationship and sexuality communities, particularly in polyamory and kink. In both of these spaces, consent is talked about very explicitly and with more detail and less elision than in much of the mainstream. Still, as with so many things that operate outside the mainstream, predators tended (and tend) to take advantage of the false sense of security created by that openness and emphasis on consent talk to get what they want.

At the same time, I found both in myself and others that consent can be especially tricky to navigate when everyone around you is assumed to be looking for something. That, and the desire to be daring, to be cool, to try more and more outré things, can make it hard to truly know yourself and your actual desires.

So I started taking the somatic therapy stuff I’d learned and mashing it up with the consent stuff, and I ended up with some exercises for getting to know your own yes, no, and maybe in your own body. I taught them at kink conferences and I did pretty okay at it. Teaching has always been pretty scary for me — nervewracking and not a natural fit. I always want so desperately for my students to like me and think I’m smart, and that’s not a great place to be coming from if you actually want to impart good information or get people to think. It’s hard to overcome all the old school trauma. But still: it felt like something I could offer, and I’ve even had a few people tell me how much it helped them.

This town has seen some shit

I haven’t talked about it here yet, but last summer, the city I now live in had a fairly massive #MeToo moment in the alt-sex community. A newer leader in the scene, who had spent a few years building up a following by organizing parties, munches, events, and a sizable kink conference was revealed to have a criminal record for sexually assaulting minor teenagers in his care. As these things so often shake out, once this was made public, young women in the community also started speaking up about the ways he had treated them during his little reign, and all the usual shaming and silencing reasons why they hadn’t spoken up before.

As usual: being charismatic, seeming like a “good guy,” creating spaces for people to get their freak on, and paying lip service to the ideas of consent and holding predators accountable was a great way for a stealth predator to get lots of sexual power and attention before the whole thing came crashing down. It was especially devastating for people who had been in the scene around here for a long time, because there was definitely precedent for this kind of horseshit. This person had taken full advantage of a small community’s hunger for trust and safety, after previous “leaders” had proven untrustworthy in the extreme just a few years prior.

For me, coming from a larger town with its own share of this kind of horseshit, but where I’d been involved with communities who tended to do a bit better at it, I realized I could be of some help in this situation. Meanwhile, some other folks pretty quickly began to organize new events, mostly women and GNC folks. A particular group started up that had a focus on safer parties and care for neurodivergent needs. For the first time since I’d moved here, I had the sense that I could be a part of creating a space that felt good to me, and maybe even start to cultivate the idea of a culture of consent, from the ground up.

So last weekend I did a little consent talk

We threw our first event last weekend, and while it was a bit seat-of-your-pants it also was headed up by someone with intense organizational skills and hyperfocus. As part of the planning crew I took on some of the organizing duties, but most of what I did was more in my strengths department: advising, bringing the ideas and dare-I-say wisdom that comes from a lot of experience, being a monitor during the event itself, and preparing the “consent refresh” that we did at the top.

One of my weaknesses as a presenter is that I like to know exactly what I’m going to say, for the most part. As a theatrical person I’ve also always been way less about improv and more about scripting. As a director I love to craft and shape particular moments, get the synergy between the words and actions and the performers to really pop. I’m a slow-wave person, I like to say, generally: built for power, not speed. I can be quick-witted from time to time, but mostly I feel bound to rely on my preparation for a thing.

So when I was asked to write a maybe 15-minute workshop, the first draft was four single-spaced pages. (Facepalm Mary emoji.)

Still, I whittled it down a bit. In the end, I managed to do it in about 15 minutes anyway, and hopefully not too many people were rolling their eyes over my should-be-obvious material, largely read off the page, though I like to think engagingly. (I do have a theatre degree too, remember.) I was proud of it, and a few people complimented me afterward and said how important it was. (Next time, it’ll be part of icebreaker games, I think.)

A few takeaways

Since I’m sharing this, in part, as the creation I brought into the world this week, I figured I’d share a few highlights of the document. These were parts that I was fairly proud of, and that said some things that, while perhaps obvious to some, don’t seem to be said enough in the circles where it matters most.

A culture of consent goes well beyond following a party host’s rules. My ideal is that we’re conscious all the time about what enthusiastic, ongoing consent looks like, seek to cultivate it in ourselves, and encourage that consciousness in others.

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Attending an event like this is not in itself consent. Don’t do things with people or to people that you haven’t negotiated with them! That includes verbal comments on activities you’ve not been invited to participate in.

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If you’re new-ish, err on the side of caution. The goal is to create scenes you can feel good about after, even if they’re not the most extreme or intense things ever. The best scene is the one that leaves you both wanting more next time.

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It’s okay not to know things. None of us knows everything about this stuff, and the more you admit what you don’t know, the safer you can be. Decide whether to try something new tonight, or to stick with your comfort zone. If in doubt, leave it out. There’s plenty you can do without pushing anybody’s limits.

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Don’t do or ask for anything during the scene that you haven’t negotiated in advance. However hot to trot you may be, stick with what you’ve agreed to do rather than up-negotiating while in an altered state.

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In my experience, the kink scenes that have the best, most conscientious, most thorough and most open cultures of consent are ALSO the ones where people do the most outrageous, radical, beautiful kinky nonsense imaginable. Why? Because they feel enough trust in the container created by the people involved to go farther, risk more, and be more accountable to one another.

It was a pretty good night

Now, I’m still exhausted. We got to the house where a lot of the equipment was, around 40 minutes from our home, at close to 4pm when the space we were using became available to us. We opened the doors at 7:30. I was on my feet most of the night, and drove home around 2am. In the morning, I woke up at 9:30 per usual. I’ve been pretty beat and off since then, having picked up some kind of little bug in spite of the care we took. So after all that, I’ve done a bit less this week than I might’ve hoped.

Feels good, though. And from what I hear, more to come. The quest continues: superseding rape culture with consent culture, one little group of people at a time.