In my 15 years of being a self identified feminist, the mainstream conversation around consent has barely made any progress. Very little nuance, no understanding of how complex sex actually is. It’s not really a matter of if a breach of autonomy of consent will happen, but when.

This is why we have so many inter community arguments about consent violations and abusers. Consent is rarely straightforward and is negotiated constantly during the act. You may check in with someone many times and they could still feel weird about what happened.

I meant *intra community. This is hazard of having sex. And we still have 0 idea of how to talk about this, myself included. This is why the preachy language around kink and consent drives me nuts. It’s just not that linear.

The idea of constant enthusiastic consent is nice, but what does that actually look like? Not everyone even knows what they want to consent to, most people are not in touch with their sexuality because we live in a white supremacist Hetero patriarchy.

Especially in kink. This attempt to sanitize the practice of kink by saying that leather people are THE MOST concerned with consent 1. Isn’t true and 2. Puts an inordinate amount of pressure on people to perform sex according to a standardized set of rules that don’t exist

In kink, often people are doing shit they’ve only fantasized about. These are not mainstream sex practices and they’re dark sometimes. How can you possibly know how you’re going to feel about it afterwards or during? Again, it’s not a matter of if this will happen but when!

I also wish people would be honest about how checking in with every single act definitely destroys the eroticism of the moment for MANY people. Talking beforehand might mitigate that, but not every single sexual act can be pre negotiated. Idk what the solution is!

If I’m negotiating a scene with someone and they’ve explicitly told me to do as I will without asking them, just for example. That is not a contractual guarantee that this person will never feel that their consent was breached! I have to decide if I want that risk, as do they.