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Peter Masters
--- BDSM --- | 
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| Welcome to the website of Peter Masters.
Please feel free to explore and linger. |
Consent
From PeterMastersWiki
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This article is a Work-In-Progress. For more information, see about this site. |
A central rationale in the doctrine of informed consent is that the recipient or target of services has sufficient information in regard to the pending procedures, including the associated potential benefits and hazards, to exercise a meaningful or illuminated choice about whether to participate. Arguably, the necessity and extent of informed consent disclosures increase with the potential severity of adverse repercussions.[1]
For many people, consent is a fundamental principle in BDSM and is embodied in two of the common mottoes many practitioners live by: SSC (safe, sane and consensual) and RACK (risk-aware consensual kink).
Consent is ensuring that your partner has agreed to some activity before engaging in it, or before being compelled to engage in it in the case that your partner is unable to resist or communicate (such as when they are bound, chained, or gagged).
It is important that agreement is reached before engaging in play because once play has begun, an altered state of mind (e.g., due to subspace) or neurochemicals (e.g., endorphins) may mean that clear thought isn't possible, and therefore the person can't actually consent.
In some legal jurisdictions you can't consent to abuse.
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Out of bounds
There is an interesting philosophical question to do with consent. Many of the phenomena and feelings associated with BDSM have no equivalent outside of BDSM. Therefore, how can you consent to them if you have no idea of how they feel or how they will affect you?
For example, how can you consent to something that will cause subspace before you've ever experienced it or know what it's like?
Virgins (mostly the female ones) are in a similar position before their first sexual intercourse.
Similarly, consent has to do with expectations. Someone consents to something they expect may or will happen. They don't consent to something they don't expect to be a consequence of their activities.
Consent to be educated or enlightened
Consent also enters into the realm of education. When we look at what happens when people consent, it's clear that they consent to something that they are expecting.
Consider the "enlightening" pictures and warnings some countries require be placed on packets of cigarette. Perhaps sending the buyer straight away into denial.
Identity, and risk to identity
The risk is that if, via education, we remove a pillar of someone's identity, that same process will not replace it with something viable, and an aspect of that person's identity will crumble and/or fail with dire consequences to that individual, and to people around them.
The diagram to the right can help explain this.
When someone constructs an important aspect of their identity, such as being heterosexual (the Mighty skyscraper in the diagram), on something like their gender (a part of the Foundation in the diagram) then this is fine and dandy. Gender is generally reliable and robust, and other people can depend on this.
However, if someone constructs what they think to be a further foundation, such as someone who---in an isolated community (geographical or otherwise)---learns to play many musical instruments and concludes that they are a fine musician (the platform on the columns in the diagram) and therefore will be a fine music teacher (the Mini-temple in the diagram), then others may come to worship in that structure (e.g., music students).
The consequences for the individual, and for the others who worship in their mini-temple, are dire should the less-than-solid foundation fail due, for example, to the arrival of a genuinely excellent music teacher who reveals possibly flaws in the methods of the local music teacher.
For more on this topic, see identity.
The question arises, therefore, of would everyone be better off if the education or enlightenment which caused the identity collapse never have occurred in the first place?
As has been noted elsewhere on this site, many people see BDSM exclusively in terms of sex.
This is not a bad thing in itself. But with such a widespread belief, is it fair or reasonable to compel someone to see BDSM (and their own experience of it) in all its glory or leave them to see it how they (and their identity structures) need to see it?
If we consider the information presented on this website as an example, people can turn away at any time and perhaps visit a "safer" news site reporting on terrorism, wars, economic problems, and poverty. This is a choice they may make consciously or unconsciously, perhaps "realising" that it's late and they have other things to do, or "realising" that the site is "boring and tedious". "Terrorism, wars, economic problems, and poverty" may be easier topics to deal with than being compelled to face the fact that what they do is not just about sex, and that it's about something perhaps darker and the admission of this would dent their idea of their own identity.
On the other hand, it's not so easy to turn away when you are attending a workshop---perhaps with people you know---and there is no easy way to turn away or leave.
