Help! I’m Kinky? A mini-series of intros into The Lifestyle – Volume 2 : Learning The Ropes – Safety and Consent

 In Featured, General Musings, Help! I'm Kinky?
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Alright, so we’ve discovered that we might not be very vanilla afterall, and we’ve touched on (but certainly not exhausted) the vast array of roles and labels we might find ourselves acting and wearing, and we’re working to handle our newbie frenzy so we don’t come off as rambunctious puppies with no sense about us…. now it’s time to start putting some of these kinks to practice!

Where you get started may look different than where other people start depending on what your specific fetishes are, but there are some basic components that spread across the entire spectrum that we should cover. I’ll break them into Safety and Consent, and then Negotiations and Limits. I think they’re all equally important and work together to form a whole, rather than separately, so don’t mind the order we’re going in – they all matter a whole lot. To keep the length of this manageable I’ll cover the first two in this post, and then the second two in the next.

— I want to quickly address something many of you will likely come across, which is acronyms that are meant to address certain styles that people play in with regards to risk and consent. There are many, but the most popular/common ones are SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual) RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) and PRICK (Personal Responsibility In Consensual Kink). I don’t personally subscribe to any of them, I feel like each has its flaws and more often than not I see them being used to blame victims or demonize certain kinks than to actually help people truly stay safe and properly assess risk. I’m happy to elaborate on that feeling if you want more, but I don’t want to totally derail this post so I’ll leave it at acknowledging they exist and letting you know what those acronyms stand for for now. —

Safety comes into play in many ways, from basic understanding of human anatomy and first-aid skill, to assessing your surroundings and/or equipment for possible risk, to judging the character of the people we’re playing with. The degree to which these come into concrete action depends on what you’re doing – for instance, you need to be a lot more educated in the physiology of the human body if your kink is being choked or hit, than if your kink is hypnosis or tickling or watching someone wear a puffy winter vest. On the other hand, if your kink is blindfolding someone, then maybe you really need to focus on beefing up your risk assessment skills for your surroundings, as you don’t want a blindfolded partner to accidentally fall down the stairs or knock lit candles off the nightstand that you weren’t paying attention to, or if your kink is suspension bondage, you need to both understand the risks to the body you’re tying up, as well as be able to tell if the structure you want to suspend them from will hold their weight and the gear you’re using is strong enough with no weak spots. Luckily, there are oodles of educators out there who write blog posts and books and give presentations and make videos and host workshops about how to do kinks safely, so no matter what it is that you’re into, if there is a risk involved, someone is talking about how to mitigate it.

For some of us, our kinks are pretty darn safe – there’s not a lot of danger in being into watching your partner model a set of sexy lingerie for you. For others there’s a lot of potential danger – like if you’re into flesh hook suspensions. For the latter end of the spectrum, there is rarely a definitively safe way to play, we can only play safer by being well-educated on the risks we’re taking and having the knowledge and training to know how to handle it when a situation turns bad, how to prevent a worst case scenario from happening. This is a risk we agree to take in order to achieve whatever good feels we get out of doing the kink. We each have our own personal threshold we’re willing to play within. Some of us also have kinks that, no matter how much we could do to prepare, just can’t be made safe enough to warrant the risk (physical, emotional, or in regards to things like being caught/outted and having that affect our vanilla lives, family, jobs, etc)

It’s a risk we have to be fully knowledgable of in order to properly consent to. Most people understand that consent is some form of “yes means yes and no means no”, but it also involves the information you give someone when you’re asking them for their consent to do a thing. Think of it like drug companies listing all the possible side effects on the packaging of our medications – no matter how statistically unlikely they are, we still must be told of them in order to get the full picture. If a tylenol pill usually just cures a headache but has at one time EVER harmed someone worse, we have to be told about it so we can decide for ourselves if we want to risk the rare but still possible harm, in order to make our head stop hurting. Most of us would choose to take the pill, and we turn out just fine. If by chance something worse does happen to us though, we cannot say we didn’t know it was a possibility if the manufacturer made sure to warn us about it on the package (and this is 100% why they do it – they’ve been sued for withholding information in the past and someone got hurt.)

Not having informed consent can come in the form of an outright lie – “tylenol can’t do any harm, it never has and never will.”

It can come as omission of pertinent information – the manufacturer doesn’t claim it’s perfectly safe, but also does not list the possible side effects, or maybe only some of them, or maybe only says “some side effects may occur” and does not elaborate on what those could be so you’re left to just….hope…nothing bad happens. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t.

Or it could come in the form of misleading or coercing – “there might be side effects but they’re worth it, they’re not that bad, there is no other possible alternative that achieves similar results without any of the risk this is the one true way, everyone experiences this, etc”

Some people are just bad, and they intentionally keep others from being able to give fully informed consent because it benefits them more. We see this in all parts of life, from medical caregivers who peddle made-up shit to those who are vulnerable, to home repair people who promise they know what they’re doing and then wreck your house worse than it was before they got there… it can happen to anybody, anywhere.

Others don’t necessarily do it maliciously, but still fail to provide their partners with the ability to give informed consent because they themselves don’t have all the information that needs to be given. Here we suggest that BOTH people who want to engage in a certain type of play – regardless of what their role will be – do whatever they can to learn everything they can about that play independently, so as to decrease the chances of relying on bad or incomplete info from just one source. Just because you’re a bottom/sub/slave/the person getting the thing done to them, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or don’t need to know what’s going on. Knowing how something works will help you spot when the person who wants to do the thing to you maybe doesn’t know what they’re doing and is likely to hurt you. Likewise, if you’re the person who is doing the thing to someone else, it’s better when you do not have to be the singular source of information on the subject, but they have gone to the trouble to try to educate themselves on it as well. You are not perfect – you may forget something, or you might assume that some information is obvious when it is not, or you may have learned a part of it one way where they may have learned it differently. This isn’t to say that you cannot play with another newbie, but rather that if you encounter someone who has an interest but doesn’t really know much about it, it’s probably a good idea to say “Hey! That’s awesome that you’re interested! Might I suggest checking out a couple of these resources first so that you get a better understanding of what this is all about before we jump right in?”.

In this same vein, there’s a saying that goes “don’t play above your level” and this essentially means to be honest with yourself and your partner about your capabilities, and to not stretch beyond them. Some kinks don’t require very much of you other than to get consent. Wanna suck on your partner’s toes? If they say yes, go ahead! Some kinks require a little, but not a whole lot of skill. Want to pull your lovers hair? Ask if that’s okay and then learn how they like it done (most people would prefer you gather up all their hair into a ponytail fashion, or grab a full handful close to their scalp instead of mid-way or at the ends.) There are a lot of kinks however that require a degree of skill and/or knowledge to “take things up a notch” and it’s imperative that people know when they do or do not possess that skill/know-how yet so that they don’t go too far. People interested in bondage for instance, should not learn how to tie a simple wrist cuff and then attempt to suspend their partner from the ceiling. There are a TON of in-between steps that need to be met before a person is ready to dangle other people in the air. Things like handling a whip so you don’t hit yourself in the face with it require a lot of practice. Piercing, cutting, electro play, fire play, all forms of impact play, etc etc etc have a learning curve we must follow in order to lessen the risk to ourselves and our partners. It’s tempting to see the incredible pictures and videos on the internet or to witness an expert at our local dungeon party and want to try to do whatever it is they’re doing, it can feel crappy to admit we don’t know how yet or we’re not that good yet… but letting ego and ambition get the better of us means someone can get seriously, seriously hurt. Be honest with your partner about what exactly you are capable of if you are the one doing the thing, and have reasonable expectations of what your partner can achieve with you if you are the one having the thing done to you.

Informed consent can also involve more personal aspects that aren’t necessarily about the play, but about you. This might mean things like disclosing a latex allergy or a medical condition that increases your chance of fainting, or a bad knee that you can’t put weight on in a certain way, or some trauma triggers. There is a balance of personal privacy and fairness to your partner to be struck here, and everyone’s got their own opinions about how that looks. For me personally, I say I only need to know what’s relevant to our specific play – I don’t need to know you’re allergic to mustard because I’m never going to do anything to you that involves mustard anyway. If you want to keep that part private, that’s fine by me. If you’ve got a heart condition that sometimes causes you to pass out without much warning, well…I kinda need to know that so that I don’t freak out if it happens and think I just killed you. I don’t want that kind of thing to just get sprung on me, to me that doesn’t feel fair. Other folks would insist that they need to know absolutely everything possible or they don’t feel comfortable playing with you. Others would say their privacy is paramount and they don’t owe you any information, ever. This is an aspect of compatibility that you just have to suss out with your potential partners, and if you don’t line up…well that’s too bad, you’ll each have to find someone else.

Having a complete picture of the risks involved and what we’re specifically interested in consenting to helps us set our limits, and communicate them effectively when we’re negotiating a scene. We’ll talk about that next!

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