Asking for it: BDSM sexual practice and the trouble of consent

Introduction

Consent is the sine qua non of BDSM ¹ practice. Along with trust and risk, consent forms part of a triptych which marks BDSM practice as an expression of desire and distinguishes it from criminal acts (Newmahr, 2011: 149). This article explores the role that consent plays as part of the practice of building BDSM as a community, ² which is distinct from, yet which interacts with, a majoritarian, normative, non-BDSM mainstream. ³ I draw scholarship about sexual consent education into a dialogue with scholarship about consent in BDSM to examine how far these debates (mis)inform each other. I examine how consent is formed within the BDSM encounter, whose consent is heard, whose is silenced, and how. This article posits that the interaction between BDSM and the non-BDSM mainstream infuse each other. This is apparent in cases where consent is not ‘black and white’ but rather, is ‘grey’. I explore different examples of ‘grey’ consent – ones that are experienced as violations and ones that are not – and analyse how the structural dominance of heteronormativity, alongside the neoliberal emphasis on self-determination (or autopoiesis) within some elements of BDSM, constructs, and in turn is constructed by, some of the more problematic politics of consent, against a background of contemporary rape culture.

In 2015, I conducted research with 40 people about their engagement in BDSM practice and how they negotiated consent therein. It was in dialogue with many of these participants that the nuances and complexities of consent, trust, and risk emerged. This complexity was fostered, in part, through the tension between the imperative to be autonomously self-determining in BDSM, and the tolerant, ‘open-minded’ ethic of BDSM as a community that supports and respects a diverse membership. Or at least supposes itself to do this (Newmahr, 2011; Weiss, 2011). Within BDSM, there is an interplay between the way that consent is approached as an explicit utterance, and consent that is negotiated intersubjectively, as a grey area. This article will examine the ethical politics of ‘asking for it’, and will consider the implications of these politics for better understanding – and affecting – how consent works. Deconstructing consent in this way interrogates the tension between what we know, and what we say, and what we can learn, about negotiating consent in the first place. It enables us to see how consent negotiations emerge in practice, and to attend to the particular politics of these encounters. It posits a move towards an ethical sexual praxis in order to counter instances of sexual violence beyond the BDSM encounter, within the mainstream.

Beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’

Much of the work that considers the complexity of consent focuses on the importance of promoting awareness about consent in college campuses in the USA. Whilst there are some exceptions within existing research (Beres and MacDonald, 2016; Beres et al., 2004), the predominant focus of this scholarship is on the experiences of young men as consent violators, and women as those whose consent is violated. The preponderance of this heteronormative analysis skews our understanding of the state of anxieties about consent (see for instance Beres, 2014; Jozkowski, 2015; O’Byrne et al., 2008; Powell, 2008; RAINN, 2014). It sustains the impression in the contemporary imaginary that only young people are affected by consent violations, which only ends up telling us part of the story. Moreover, the scrutiny of this group to the exclusion of others risks nurturing rape myths about who the discursive ‘ideal’ victim of sexual violence is imagined to be (young, female, heterosexual), and to foreclose discussions of the different ways in which consent is negotiated outside of these contexts. In this article, we begin some of this work by analysing the complexities of consent within BDSM practice, which accommodates men and women of different ages, with different backgrounds, and with different experiences of consent violations.

Consent education in contemporary discourses often articulates itself along the lines of acquiring affirmative consent: an enthusiastic ‘yes’ (Jozkowski, 2015). This is a model that suggests that consent should be established explicitly, directly, and enthusiastically. However, these discourses also emerge from post-feminist, neoliberalist sensibilities which suppose the internalization of responsibilization discourses, and of self-policing imperatives which embody ‘sexy’ agency (Burkett and Hamilton, 2012). This belies the possibility that such an affirmative choice might also be a constrained choice: one expressed under the encumbrance of obligation, responsibility, or vulnerability, and thus might not be straightforwardly agentic (see Carmody, 2005; Carmody and Carrington, 2000; Powell, 2008; Rose, 1990). People's different intersectional experiences of ages, class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality, or ability bring something different to bear on their interactions with issues of consent (Crenshaw, 1991).

‘Yes means yes’ assumes that what causes rape is, in part, the much-discredited miscommunication theory. Miscommunication theory sustains contemporary rape culture – the normalization of sexual violence against women in contemporary life – by positing that, in a heteronormative encounter, men overestimate women's interest in sex and believe that women often say ‘no’ before they say ‘yes’. It suggests that if couples communicated better, there would be fewer instances of sexual violence (Beres, 2010; Hickman and Muehlenhard, 1999; Kitzinger and Frith, 1999; O’Byrne et al., 2008). Belief in the myth that only a ‘yes’ can mean ‘yes’ and only a ‘no’ can mean ‘no’ is what sustains miscommunication theory, which can then be used as an alibi to excuse unethical and criminal sexual behaviour, as we shall see in this article (see O’Byrne et al., 2008). As Kitzinger and Frith's (1999: 309) exceptional analysis of the way that (non-sexual) encounters are negotiated demonstrates, interlocutors rarely ‘just say no’ in response to an invitation or request that they want to refuse. Negotiations are made through non-verbal interactions, silences, pace of speech, and sentence structure. They demonstrate that sometimes people will respond ‘yes’ to a question and will mean ‘no’, and will be understood as meaning ‘no’. Indeed, Beres (2014) suggests that given the complexity of talking about and defining consent, that educational approaches might be better served by framing discussions around ethical sexual practice. Moreover, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ models of consent also prevent people from recognizing an event as a rape or sexual assault in cases where, for instance, no ‘no’ was uttered (Beres, 2014: 381; Powell, 2008). What these analyses tell us is that in fact, ‘yes’ can mean ‘no’, and ‘no’ can mean ‘yes’ and, crucially, contra miscommunication theory, they can be understood in this way. Yet, men and women talking about sexual consent still rely on the importance of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, which suggests that miscommunication theory persists in influencing how an encounter is understood and interpreted at a vernacular level, even if we also, analytically, know that miscommunication theory is false. How does this understanding of consent beyond the ‘yes’ and ‘no’, influence people's sexual practice? Where does this leave the negotiation of consent in BDSM sexual encounters where ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are both meaningful and not straightforwardly meaningful?

Consent as community-building

Understanding consent is an intrinsic part of BDSM community citizenship. From the old French consentir, the etymology of ‘consent’ describes feeling (sentir) together (con), or, a ‘coming together to feel’. Marked by an affective quality – this notion of sharing a feeling – it is perhaps not surprising that, as Beres (2014) attests, what we talk about when we are talking about consent can be difficult to pinpoint. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 applicable in England and Wales defines consent as something which is ‘agreed by choice’ by someone who ‘has the freedom and capacity to make that choice’. Elsewhere, in BDSM online community resources, consent is described as something ‘freely given without coercion or distress’ or, in the more complex scenario of consensual non-consent, it is ‘affirmative assent to engage in an activity that he or she will not be able to stop in the middle; it can be thought of as consenting to an activity in such a way that the consent may not be revoked’ (Veaux, 2018: n.p.). Free, chosen, active and affective, the sort of consent that emerges in a BDSM encounter might be a complex and nuanced agreement, but it is also one which is attended by neoliberal values of autonomy, liberty, tolerance and responsibility. The situatedness of consent within this neoliberalism forges part of the way that problems in the ‘grey area’ of consent emerge.

The role that consent plays, and the way consent violations emerge, often depends on the subtlety of the moment, a shift in dynamic between participants, a misarticulated idea or an incompletely executed encounter, or on the person doing the violating (see Langdridge and Barker, 2007; Stiles and Clark, 2011). Alongside this, BDSM remains a marginalized sexual practice even if it is better understood now than it has been in the past (Tomazos et al., 2017). In this context, part of the work of BDSM community-building is the protection of the ‘good name’ of BDSM sexual practice. Doing, and being seen to do, consent education is part of this project (see Lee et al., 2015 as an example of this). Beres and MacDonald (2015: 421) outline how consent education functions as a technique to establish norms, to sanction certain practices or ways of doing things, and to hold people to account for their bad behaviours within BDSM encounters.

Scholars of BDSM – which is a practice which can involve the infliction or reception of pain or injury through whipping, caning, branding, burning, piercing, cutting, for instance, and which can involve exercise of power through subordinating, humiliating, objectifying, diminishing, for instance – emphasize how BDSM is distinct from torture (Weiss, 2009), or from intimate partner violence (Jozifkova, 2013), or from assault (Pitagora, 2013). Parties participate in BDSM for their own (and others’) pleasure. This pleasure emerges through negotiation of the practice that will take place, but also through a ‘testing of limits’ of that negotiation (pushing of the boundaries of what has been agreed) without breaching the limits, unless breaching the limits is also what is desired, or tacitly agreed (Pitagora, 2013: 32). This tension between pushing and respecting limits is an important dynamic in BDSM practice. It is also a fine boundary marked by consent negotiation.

Williams et al. (2014) describe the two best-known frameworks through which consent is negotiated within a BDSM community: ‘Safe, Sane and Consensual’ (SSC) and ‘Risk Aware Consensual Kink’ (RACK). Outlining the genealogies of these, Williams et al. (2014: 3) demonstrate how SSC developed to rebut the pathologization of BDSM practice in the mainstream and to emphasize how it is ‘safe’. Later, in response to BDSM practitioners firstly refusing the imperative to be ‘sane’ – a stigmatized psychological term that has no real bearing on BDSM practice – and rejecting the imperative to be ‘safe’ – after all, a lot of what appeals in BDSM involves sometimes getting into unsafe or risky situations – the framework of RACK was more widely adopted. Being risk-aware, and eschewing the requirement to be sane, with RACK, practitioners escape the imperative to be safe, and are able to take risks, or to do edgework (Lyng, 2005; Newmahr, 2011). Whilst this newer framework abandoned the safe and the sane, the obligation to be consensual remains central.

Williams et al. (2014) propose a third framework through which BDSM might be practised: ‘Consent, Communication, Caring and Caution’ (which they call the 4Cs). Within this formulation, consent is still paramount, alongside the emphasis on well-being (communication, caring) and risk-awareness (caution). In this iteration, Williams et al. (2014: 4–5) also go further than other frameworks to paint a nuanced picture of consent which recognizes that there are problematic limits to understanding consent only through a ‘yes means yes/no means no’ lens. Instead they suggest that consent in BDSM should be thought of through three levels of expression: surface consent (‘yes means yes’), scene consent (what will happen in the BDSM encounter, what the safe word will be, and whether there will be one), and deep consent (what the participants are really going to be able to do, how far they are going to go, whether they in fact want their consent to be violated). These formulations form the background against which BDSM culture can emerge in an interaction with the non-BDSM, majoritarian world. SSC, RACK, even 4Cs, compose part of the public face of BDSM. Consent is at the forefront of it. Yet, as Weiss (2011: 97) notes, and as we shall see in the data presented here, these formalized consent models are not always deployed in BDSM practice, even if that practice nonetheless remains consensual. Instead, these frameworks mark one of the ways in which BDSM interacts with the mainstream. Centralizing actualized, affirmative consent in this way, they also mark part of how BDSM is itself influenced by mainstream discourses around sexuality and appropriate sexual practice.

Trust, risk and autopoiesis as community

That we now see elements of BDSM more represented in films or in advertising, for instance, suggests that some elements of it might have been recuperated into the contemporary mainstream, even if BDSM itself, beyond some narrow representations, remains a marginalized practice (Tomazos et al., 2017; Weiss, 2006; Wilkinson, 2009). But just as selective elements of BDSM have impacted on the non-BDSM world, so too do normative mainstream discourses selectively infuse the way that consent violations within BDSM operate; particularly those discourses which run through normative ways of thinking and talking about consent (see Thornton, 1996). We are beginning to see how BDSM discourses interact both within and outside of the non-BDSM mainstream. Here, community is experienced as a site of companionship, of safety, and is, according to Newmahr (2011: 44), built upon a shared understanding amongst the members of the community that they are outsiders, that they do not belong to the mainstream, and that as outsiders, they belong together. This interaction between the subculture and mainstream informs BDSM community practice even as BDSM practitioners try to carve out spaces for themselves apart from the mainstream, as part of this community-building.

Alongside this, trust and risk-taking are two concepts that underpin the consent negotiation within the practice of community-building. BDSM practice is usually ‘risky’ (Newmahr, 2011). Emphasis on the expertise and skill required both to actually manipulate the tools (the ropes, the whips, the blade) with which to play, and to judge the true limit of the encounter, appears again and again in analyses of how BDSM ‘works’. Risk-taking is a form of autopoeisis (a means of creating the self through self-(re)production), here. But, in this case, the autopoetic subject is also a neoliberal subject. Gaining the skills to appropriately take these risks within BDSM becomes a project of the self – a project of self-realization – which, in part, characterizes this practice as edgework (Lupton; 1999; Lyng, 2005; Newmahr, 2011). It also constitutes the community; the project of the self becomes a project of the community (Luhmann, 1986).

Thus, the interplay between risk and trust is dialectical: deciding to take a risk requires an element of trust and trust is a way to accept riskiness (Giddens, 1990). Trust creates ontological security (a fundamental belief that the self will survive the risk) in the face of danger. Trust is foundational to BDSM as a practice of doing edgework. Moreover, the presence of trust suggests an intimacy. It is sometimes difficult to explain why we trust something, or someone, we just know that we do (Luhmann, 1979). Thus, trust is intrinsic to how consent is negotiated.

Risk is similarly contingent. For the purposes of this article, following Douglas (1992: 15), we can understand risk as culturally constructed – ‘custom-made’ – and also as operating as a mechanism of victim-blaming. To run the risk is also to accept the responsibility if anything goes wrong. This vision of risk-taking relies on an autonomous and self-actualizing, autopoetic subject which, in the context of BDSM, begins to point to the implications that this vision of risk has for our understanding of consent.

Values of self-determination and self-improvement saturate the structure of how some BDSM communities work (Newmahr, 2011). Emphasis on becoming competent, being responsible, and gaining and maintaining a good reputation, situate BDSM within a neo-liberal and hierarchical framework alongside the community's professed commitment to tolerance, openness and the notion of ‘community’ itself (Weiss, 2011: 146). In this respect, the community becomes as an arena in which the ability to judge where the boundaries of consent might be, where to push in an encounter, and how far, are played out. The reality of how consent operates in these encounters compared to how it is said to operate – the relationship between the explicit and the implicit of consent – reveals this important disjuncture. In what follows, we see some of the ways that this emerges, including how somewhat normative values of mainstream sexual ethics – and miscommunication theory – runs though some of what practitioners say about consent.

Asking consent questions

Data presented here are from interviews conducted in the UK and the USA. Participation was secured through opportunity sampling and snowballing of people who responded to an advertisement for participation that I posted on a popular BDSM social media site. The interviewees comprised 22 women and 18 men aged between 19 and 63. Of those who agreed to reply to demographic questions about themselves (24), all but four said that they were white, all but three identified as middle class, all but three were university educated, all were cisgender. All but one of the men were heterosexual; of the women, only three identified as heterosexual, with the rest identifying along the queer spectrum or refusing to identify their sexuality. Two participants had a disability. Half were in relationships (monogamous or non-monogamous) and half were single. The sample was relatively diverse, though of course it reflects the profile of people who know each other within certain parts of the community, and is dominated by men and women who already enjoy fairly substantial intersectional privileges (according to class, ethnicity, education, ability and so on). Occupying these intersectional positions of power will influence the ways that some of these participants talk about negotiating consent, particularly because of the way that BDSM discourses interact with non-BDSM ones. Mainstream elements of rape culture will, inevitably, infuse some of the ways in which consent and consent violations are manifested and spoken about.

The majority of this sample identified with being ‘in’ a BDSM community (and would go to clubs and ‘munches’ ⁴ and would meet each other socially). Whilst all participants were BDSM practitioners, six did not identify as being part of the community in the towns in which they lived, unlike the rest, who did consider themselves to be community members. ⁵ Data presented here are drawn from the accounts of individuals who identified as being ‘in the community’. ⁶

Interviews, lasting between one and three hours, were recorded with permission and transcribed verbatim. Most interviews were conducted individually. Twice, couples or friends wanted to speak to me together, and did so. Participants then had the opportunity to read and comment on their anonymized transcripts, and a third of them did this. Transcripts were then analysed in Nvivo using a discourse analysis method to isolate key overarching themes, and to develop more specific and narrower codes at a fine-grain level. The themes that emerged reflect the concerns and interests of the participants. Discourse analysis helps to garner an understanding of the power structures, assumptions, or forms of knowledge which underpin statements, or indeed, omissions (Fanghanel and Lim, 2016; Waitt, 2010).

This research was approved by a university ethics board. Asking people about their sexual practice can be considered to be a difficult subject for research. However, one of my initial observations about this group is that those who are happy to participate in such a study enjoyed talking about this topic and did not have particularly great concerns about anonymity and confidentiality. I recruited participants with relative ease. Many indicated that they obtained a pseudo-therapeutic benefit from talking about these issues (though they were clear that I am not a therapist of any sort). Notwithstanding this predominantly relaxed attitude of the participants, the usual ethical precautions regarding confidentiality, anonymity, informed consent, and avoidance of harm, were followed.

Participants were asked about the BDSM community, how its norms and rules were established and shared, how transgressions were dealt with, and how intersectional power relations played out in the community. It was during these discussions that the importance of, and the problems with, consent and its interaction with mainstream discourses of consent emerged. These are the themes that I focus on here. Of course, as is common with qualitative data, this study generated data that exceed the parameters of this article. I explore other elements elsewhere (Fanghanel, 2019). From the 40 interviews conducted, I focus here on some which had at their core explicit discussions of consent as a practice of community-building and which spoke most specifically about this. Their articulation of consent illustrated the ways in which it emerged in a complex, and sometimes agonistic manner in interaction with what we know about consent beyond BDSM contexts. The themes of consent spoken about by these participants are reflected in the voices of all the other 40 participants: ‘consent issues’ and ‘politics of consent’ were coded hundreds of times over all of the interviews.

I begin by exploring how consent is figured as part of the practice of community. I continue by examining the problems posed by consent as grey area, firstly when it is experienced as abusive, and then when it is not. The analysis contributes to debates about reframing discussions about consent as discussion of ethical sexual praxis (Beres, 2014) and demonstrates the interplay between BDSM and the broader socio-cultural context from which it emerges.

Clashes of consent

I felt it [BDSM] was almost on the progressive end, it was modern or postmodern way of looking at it [sex] which is not about the morality, [instead of] ‘this person looks like a slut, therefore what you can do is different’, it was actually, it's what this person consents to, that's the only thing that really matters. I thought that was nice, it's sharp, it's good, if people accept that then it's really good for communicating and so now I find that that's not exactly what's [been happening]. (Anton ⁷ )

The next two sections outline what happens when non-consensual encounters happen. I examine how they are interpreted and accounted for by the community and by the participants. I discuss one case where the consent violation was experienced as abusive and another where the encounter was less straightforwardly abusive: even experienced positively. The role that a majoritarian discourse of miscommunication theory plays within them, coupled with the different positionalities of the actors, also becomes apparent.

Violating shades of grey

It's kind of odd, I’ve seen a lot of casual consent violations where a triangle of friends, so very simple, a girl fancies me, a guy fancies her, I don't fancy her, she doesn't fancy him, so it's the perfect triangle. We all play together and then just chatting, she says; ‘he kind of annoyed me’ I say; ‘you guys looked like you had a good time, he was tying you up’, ‘Yeah, but he keeps on hitting me’ and I said ‘well yeah’ and she goes, ‘I told him it's a consent violation’ because we’ve been discussing things, she goes ‘because he sees you hitting me and me enjoying it, I said to him, “rope and only rope, consensual and nothing like that”,’ and because he's trying to get her attention, he has somehow thought, ‘it doesn't matter what she says, this is what she enjoys.’ … But that's the nature of a lot of consent violations also, it's very clumsy, people don't see themselves as being a problem and I think you’ve had to have been there when somebody is in tears and say, ‘I'm going to go to the police’ and they go like ‘whoa, now I see there's a problem’, otherwise it's somewhat hard to perceive. (Jared)

Another analysis of what happens in this encounter is not that the friend is haplessly trying to seduce the female participant by giving her what he thinks she wants – his reliance in miscommunication theory – but that he is taking advantage of this possible reading of the dynamic, to ‘punish’ her for not finding him attractive in return, or for going further into play with Jared than she will let him go with her. The fact that consent is complicated and contingent demonstrates the importance of conceiving it as a grey area. We need to recognize the intertwining of both explicit and implicit consent to understand how the friend gets away with this consent violation and how the female participant's experience of this as violent, is silenced. Whether deliberately or not, misreading consent is borne out of, and promotes, the normalization of violence against women. More than a ‘clumsy’ act then, where the friend might believe that she said ‘no’ before saying ‘yes’, this ‘casual’ consent violation could also be seen as intentionally non-consensual and abusive, with miscommunication theory as the alibi. The friend does not have her consent and he knows that he does not have it, but Jared's analysis allows him to hide behind the possibility that he could have had it – that the female participant had miscommunicated her desires – to violate her (see O’Byrne et al., 2008). Jared's analysis is one which is enabled, in part, both by the fact of his positionality within the encounter, and the way in which this encounter interacts with rape culture. Underpinned by a heteropatriarchal dynamic, rape culture, which normalizes violence against women, is also complicit in silencing women. This intersubjective dynamic between Jared, his male friend, and his female friend makes it harder (as we can see) for the female's consent violation to be seen, and her voice to be heard.

In this context, it is also notable that Jared is also apparently present when the female participant is hit, and does not intervene in response to this violation, leaving her to negotiate it alone. He has already told us that he ‘doesn't fancy her’, so she holds little in the way of sexual interest for him. As an encounter informed by heteronormative dynamics and by neoliberal imperatives where everybody is autonomous, he has no stake in her safety and no sense of responsibility for her. This sort of ‘play’ assumes people who can stand on their own, who can self-determine, and take responsibility (take the blame) for the risks that they run (Douglas, 1992). Because she did not seem to advocate well enough for herself, the absence of a clear ‘no’ which is understood as ‘no’ in this case is also infused with this sentiment of self-determining responsibility, which brings us back to the problems we encounter when thinking about consent as an a priori verbal articulation. If we assume that consent, when it is given, is always given freely (‘yes means yes’), we obscure the socio-cultural constraints of class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, disability and so on, which lace all social and sexual encounters, including this one (Fanghanel, 2019). Jared's account has shown us how grey areas of consent can lead to situations that are interpreted as abusive. I also want to spend some time complexifying this interpretation.

‘Hot’ shades of grey

The last two times I’ve seen this guy, he would probably consider me a vague acquaintance, he's hurt me in ways I didn't consent to. Now, I have my own complicated attitude to consent and in many situations, I actually don't particularly care about it … Actually, if I have some chemistry with someone, if they hurt me without my consent, I actually tend not to care … What I am saying essentially is that what this guy has done to me is very, very not OK … but he picked the right person, right?! But it's not okay and I'm not someone who can ever do, ‘well I thought it was kinda hot so therefore no-one else should have a problem with it, and they shouldn't be complaining, and actually it's okay because it was kinda negotiated …’ All that stuff is bullshit as far as I’m concerned. (Samantha)

It is worth noting the context of this comment, too. Samantha is describing an act that was perpetrated by a man who was well known within a community that privileges self-determination and self-mastery. She prides herself on being ‘edgy’, on being a taker of risks. She did not want the encounter to happen, but once it had happened, she did not not want it. Casting herself as an example of consent exceptionalism, Samantha's story accommodates the complexity of saying ‘no’, meaning ‘no’, whilst at the same time ‘not caring’ about having her consent violated. Enjoying it, even. At the same time, given that this unfolds against a background of contemporary rape culture in which heteronormative dynamics prevail, it is clear that the differential power relations between Samantha and the ‘guy’, which she refers to also play part here. Like Jared's female friend in the previous encounter, Samantha is potentially positioned as victim here, even if she is clear that this is not how she experiences this non-consensual encounter.

Attendant to this, she is also clear that just because this works for her, it should not be normalized. Indeed, the exceptionalism of her desire might also be part of the appeal for her. The interplay between her interpretation of this encounter – as consent in a grey area, the violation of which she enjoyed – and the normative expectations of a community which does not condone consent violations, illustrates some of the interactions that this form of subcultural desire has with mainstream consent concerns. Indeed, Samantha is clear that she ‘enjoyed’ the consent violation, but finds ‘bullshit’ the suggestion that the consent violation itself had not been wrong as part of a broader narrative within the BDSM community. Whilst this encounter complexifies our understanding of consent, it leaves open the problem of what to do about the acquaintance that hurt her in a way that she ‘did not consent to’, if anything were to be done at all. Whilst it is possible to turn such an encounter into a productive and critical discussion about power, normativity, desire and permissiveness, there remains a squeamishness, within the community, about dealing with a complicated consent question such as this one, preferring instead outright condemnation (Gemma, quoted earlier) or to ignore it entirely (Jared). This squeamishness endures despite the fact that the form of complicated consent that Samantha encounters is not necessarily unheard of within BDSM communities. The complexity of this demonstrates the need for an ethical rethinking of consent praxis, even beyond BDSM contexts.

The trouble with asking for it

Without a clear assent – a ‘yes’ that means ‘yes’ – or a dissent – a ‘no’ which means ‘no’ – how is somebody who experiences a sexual encounter as violent, degrading, dangerous – something that they did not consent to – to navigate the terrain of consent? How might an unwitting potential perpetrator of sexual violence protect him- or herself from committing consent violations without dealing in absolutes like ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Especially if it turns out that taking a risk might be something that someone subsequently finds ‘hot’? And given these complexities, what does this mean for a practice like BDSM, where doing consent and doing risk is part of ‘doing’ community?

The dialectical relationship between BDSM practice as a subculture and dominant, majoritarian articulations of consent means that similar issues surrounding the politics of ‘asking for it’ are apparent elsewhere. The appeal of absolutes is evident. As Deckha (2007: 425) highlights, feminist contestation about whether only ‘active’ consent as opposed to ‘constructive or implied’ consent will do in any sexual encounter, demonstrates the political problems at stake when thinking about consent as not ‘black and white’. On the one hand, recognizing that consent is a grey area reflects the reality of how consent, more often than not, is negotiated, and gives voice to consent violations which may otherwise be overlooked (Beres, 2014; see Hickman and Muehlenhard, 1999 for non-BDSM contexts). On the other hand, some scholars, quite rightly, have worried that understanding consent as implicit would enable the law to ‘construe consent from conduct where none existed’ (Deckha, 2007: 425). Nonetheless, the risk-averse construction of consent as explicit, as affirmative, where only ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and which does not recognize that this is simply not how consent is often navigated, also harbours political problems. Not least of which is the spectre of miscommunication theory, which looms large and unchallenged in some of the debates about consent violations that we have seen here.

If we return to the triptych of consent, trust and risk, and to contextual and contingent qualities they possess, we see some of the problems and the possibilities of this dynamic. Consent cannot be thought of as an explicit utterance, alone. This is the case within BDSM practice and outside of it. Consent is underpinned by a negotiation between risk and trust. If, following Douglas (1992) we understand risk as culturally constructed, but also atomizing (if I take the risk and also the responsibility), this individualization as part of the project of the self has significant implications for analysing sexual practice and understanding how better to formulate debates around consent both within BDSM and beyond it.

It is here in BDSM that we see the conflict between the individual imperative for autopoesis, to self-determine, and to nurture a community ethic. Throughout the encounters which participants described to me, this tension between being free and being loyal to the community clashed again and again; a clash which becomes part of how the community is forged. We saw it in Jared's analysis of a consent violation that he witnessed. We saw in Gemma's positioning against consent violators. We see it in Samantha's analysis of a consent violation that she ended up experiencing as ‘hot’, but also condemning, more broadly.

Despite its claim for inclusivity, BDSM practice is nonetheless saturated with the effects of prevailing power dynamics of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality to name only a few. We saw how some of this inflected the accounts of some participants’ experiences of consent negotiations. The way that miscommunication theory is brought in to account for how consent violations occur also betrays this. At the same time, given the centrality of consent to the triptych of BDSM activity, practitioners are able to conduct non-abusive BDSM practice outside of normative approaches to dealing with consent. It is here that Beres's (2014) proposition that consent be thought as a practice of sexual ethics becomes compelling. Moving away from the language of consent along the lines of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, moving towards a recognition of the affective of consent (feeling together) and proposing a work of ethical consent praxis, both within and outside of the BDSM context, harbours the potentiality to transform the way in which consent might be encountered.

What might this praxis look like? We saw this, perhaps, in Yvette's assertion that consent, and going too far, was something that could be ‘just known’ through intimacy. We see this too in Samantha's assertions, which reinterpret a potentially problematic encounter as a potentially enjoyable one. Though they are imperfect praxes, they demonstrate some ways through the problems posed by the dominance of miscommunication theory. Elsewhere, attending to the capacity of sexual practice to take many forms; to elicit and be elicited by innumerable desires; to be untidy; to be complex; to be obscure; to alter; we might begin some of this work of talking about consent, and building sexual communities around consent, which accommodate these differences, ethically. By attending to the politics of who is speaking about a consent violation that they have experienced, and to the intersectional power dynamics that are at play within this encounter, we build a picture of consent as a community practice which contests some of the exclusions enacted by the neoliberal principles which underpin the BDSM community in which I conducted this research.

Many BDSM practitioners, like Anton, believe that transgressive sexual practice has the capacity to redefine justice issues (Califia, 1994). Of course this is an appealing idea. Yet, this is troubled by conservative sexual violence, which some areas of BDSM communities are themselves complicit in enacting. An analysis of sexual practice that takes account of the complexity of ways in which this violence emerges through its relationship to consent helps us to see this happen. This is particularly significant in the post-industrialist, capitalist setting in which these stories have unfolded. Contemporary rape culture, which continues to thrive in the UK and the USA and elsewhere, enables and is enabled by intersectional power relations which are cut along gendered and sexualized lines. We have seen some of that at play here in echoes of how miscommunication theory continues to influence some understandings of consent. An ethical consent praxis, which understands consent as a flow of implicit, explicit, intersubjective negotiation, helps us to perceive the power structures at play in the encounter. It opens up the possibility of enacting different ways of engaging with these politics, and of talking about (and not talking about) consent.