An Eclectic Essay on (In)security (work in progress)
risk, safety, conflict, consent—what drives sex-positive communities usually has something to do with these key concepts. It’s complicated. Uncertainty isn’t bad per se, and safety isn’t good per se—and vice versa. From my personal experience, I’ve found spaces that strongly emphasize consent to be both empowering and enriching, as well as restrictive, school-like, or tamed—and thus simply boring—or failing to do justice to situations that are fundamentally ambivalent gray areas. Sometimes these spaces led to frustration when the very people to whom I could fully surrender myself because of their trusting nature would always backtrack on safety just when things got interesting, so as not to cross “my” boundaries. Sometimes the frustration also stemmed from the fact that the exercises intended to test consensus had long since created a power dynamic within themselves, for example when, in group warm-up exercises, a partner is chosen at random and then you’re supposed to tell each other what you’d like to do with the other person, and the other person is then allowed to answer with “yes” or “no”— — but that implies a specific kind of gaze: a kind of checking out that a friend very aptly described as “creepy.” And what are you supposed to answer on the spot? Most of the time, I don’t want to say either “yes” or “no” to every offer, but rather: Let’s see! Let’s get to know each other first. Or I’ll observe how you act in the playspace and see if that attracts me or not. Even the exercises where the goal is explicitly to provoke a “No” from the other person—a very direct exploration of boundaries—may make sense didactically, but they’re problematic in terms of embodiment, because my body cells remember that someone (usually someone I don’t really know yet) wants to do something to me that I don’t like. How am I supposed to want to interact with that person afterward, even if I know intellectually that it was just the exercise’s objective—my body can’t distinguish between the two.
This goes beyond the idea that “safety is a construct, and that’s why we no longer say ‘safe’ but ‘risk-aware.’” After all, BDSM practices in particular seek to tap into valuable aspects of the source of uncertainty, rather than simply viewing risk as an annoying side effect. It’s the thrill that makes it exciting. Or rather: it’s taken seriously that sex itself belongs to the realm of the uncertain. Just like adventure. On the other hand, however, it’s not a causal structure—more uncertainty doesn’t automatically make a game more exciting. Swimming in a shark tank + a thunderstorm doesn’t necessarily equal sexy. And certain safety-providing social norms aren’t even up for debate here, such as mutual respect, respect for setting boundaries, informed and responsible behavior, open communication, the greatest possible protection against unintended injuries or illnesses, etc. Which is why the concept of “Safe Spaces” is also expanded to include “Brave Spaces”—not “Rapy Spaces.” Sure, when it comes to the basics, the matter is so simple that you cancompareitto offering a cup of tea—but Emily Nagofski describes very vividly why it’s actually more complicated:
“‘This is how you know you have consent’ doesn’t teach people to recognize what someone really wants when they say yes—and it certainly doesn’t teach either partner how to clarify. And it just… it feels dismissive of the experience of the person being asked for consent, to say it’s as simple as wanting tea or not wanting tea, like it’s an on-off switch.”
Embracing uncertainty and confusion depends, not least, on mywillingness to allow myself to feel uncertain. Taking a stand for uncertainty is, of course, not in itself a free pass to always be pushy—or even to have to be! But once you feel ready to do so, the following is intended to offer suggestions on how, despite the importance of a safe framework, to dare to push boundaries and take risks when it feels right for everyone involved.
So, in order to tentatively explore my affinity for uncertainty (or a very specific form of it—it’s as if the right terms are missing → a friend suggested “ambiguity tolerance” or “incompetence competence”) and to be able to share with others what might be promising about it, I’ve started collecting quotes. Because I usually learn more when I look beyond the immediate topic that’s on my mind (in other words, when it’s not just about kink or sex), the quotes come from various sources and disciplines (such as Critical Race Theory or Black Studies, among others, because I consider them to be among the most exciting, avant-garde, and well-thought-out disciplines in cultural studies today—fully aware that the theories cannot be transferred 1:1 to other fields, but rather require a process of adaptation).
I’m sharing my collection here in a collage-like, free-form manner—without any specific thesis—simply to spark some inspiration (and I’ll continue to add to it over time).
“On Consent.
A word for all. What could be more precious than a person’s consent; what could be more reassuring to the other? For in this situation there are always two people: the one who consents, and the one to whom something is granted. Consent is an intimate, yet never isolated, act. It implies a relationship, a movement toward another or toward one another. […] Nevertheless, consent is not always unclouded; it is darkened by all manner of shadows that fall upon its freedom; for consent can be coerced, can arise from an implicit or explicit relationship of power.”
“Certainly, someone gives their consent; yet someone else receives it—even snatches it away from the other. Consent is something that circulates from one person to another; a strange object that can be both domination and theft. From the innermost depths of one’s own self to the very outer limits; from the inwardness of the self to the relationship with the other. … So is this a matter of pure freedom, or an inevitable balance of power?”
“Between accepting and allowing, agreeing to something and conceding something—how can one ever achieve clarity in such situations?”
Geneviève Fraisse: “Consent: On the Subject of a Political Concept,” 2018.
“When working with white students to address racism, one of the principles we strive to embody is the value of taking risks—recognizing that we may learn and grow in situations where we do not feel safe, and that the presence of conflict is not necessarily negative; rather, its meaning is determined by how we cope with that conflict. Trusting our ability to cope in situations where racialized conflict arises is far more fruitful than insisting that safety is always the best or only basis for bonding.”
bell hooks: “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope,” 2003.
“Our era is defined by risk: probability calculations, surveys, worst-case scenarios, assessments of psychological resilience, prevention […]—no aspect of political or ethical discourse escapes this process. The precautionary principle has become the norm. When it comes to human lives, accidents, terrorism, or social demands, it resembles a cursor that is shifted according to the needs of collective mobilization and profiteering. It remains unquestioned.
The expression “risking one’s life” is among the most beautiful in our language. Does it necessarily mean facing death—and surviving? Or does life itself contain a secret mechanism, a music capable, in and of itself, of shifting existence onto that front line called desire? For risk ventures into an unknown space. How can we, as living beings, conceive of it in terms of life rather than death? At the moment of decision, it puts our innermost relationship to time to the test. Risk is a battle in which we do not know the opponent, a desire of which we ourselves are unaware, a love whose face remains hidden from us, a pure event.”
“In a wondrous way, risk would thus be the opposite of neurosis, whose hallmark is to monopolize the future in such a way that it shapes our present according to the pattern of past experiences, leaving no room for the intrusion of the unknown, for the slightest shift in a changed horizon.”
Anne Dufourmantelles: “In Praise of Risk,” 2018.
“Today, however, we take the sting out of most pleasures: bars without tobacco, beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, whipped cream without fat, virtual sex without physical contact. Things that give us pleasure always come with a problem. They are expensive like champagne, fatty like cream cake, toxic like cigarettes. This problematic pleasure defies the economic logic of thrift—the rationality of managing our resources today so that we still have some left tomorrow. This irrational indulgence brings us a triumph.”
Robert Pfaller: “We Enjoy Defiantly,” 2011.
“We believe that if you never have a scene go haywire, with unexpected physical or emotional consequences, you may not be taking enough risks. After all, the reason most of us engage in S&M is to explore territories that we find a little risky and challenging; if you’re sticking so close to the center of the trail that you never get lost in the woods, you may want to reconsider your path.”
Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy: *The New Topping Book*, 2003.
“How does our focus on consent limit us? Here are a few ways:
Much of our actual sexual communication isn’t about asking for sex or agreeing to it. When communicating about sex, I might start by describing a fantasy, suggest something I think the other person might enjoy, ask how the other person feels about a particular activity or role, or seek guidance in exploring my own feelings about it, for example. Good sexual negotiation often involves active, collaborative discussion about what would be fun to do. It also often includes conversations about limits, constraints, and exit conditions. None of this fits neatly into a request-and-consent-or-refuse model of sexual negotiation.
Autonomous, willing participation is necessary for ethical sex, but it is not sufficient. We can autonomously consent to all sorts of bad sex, for terrible reasons. I might agree to do something that I find degrading or unpleasantly painful, for instance, perhaps because I would rather have bad sex than no sex at all, or because my partner isn’t interested in finding out what would give me pleasure.
“One person asking for sex and the other agreeing to it is not the most common—and almost never the ideal—way to initiate sex. So what are some other ways we can use language to initiate sex, and, more importantly, how can we do it well? I’ll focus on two: invitationsandoffersof gifts.”
Rebecca Kukla: “Sex talks. The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex,” 2019.
“Tightrope walkers live dangerously. They are constantly in danger of falling. […] The most dangerous state for them is one of maximum stability. If they were to reach that state, they would fall off the rope like a potato. Tightrope walkers must keep their balancing pole in motion. Through constant movement and counter-movement, they outwit the law of gravity. Only by shifting their center of gravity step by step forward from their body—that is, by walking—do they secure their existence. Tightrope walkers are condemned to movement, indeed to elegant movement. The security of a fixed position is taboo for them. It would be their end. They escape the danger of falling solely through instability.”
Reinhard Kahl: “In Praise of the Tightrope Walker,” 1995. Quoted in Annita Kalpaka: “‘Parallel Societies’ in Educational Work – Opportunities and Dilemmas of Pedagogical Action in ‘Protected’ Spaces,” 2009.
Thanks toKatharina Debusfor sharing the quote!
“When, in a romantic relationship, someone has sex and then says to their partner, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means there has been an emotional compensation to counteract how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun even though I’m not actually safe, even though I’m too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. But some situations are riskier than others, as the meanings of unsafe sex change depending on who’s having the sex. That’s where the politics comes in.”
“Among the things to which sex refers is the prospect of an encounter with something much closer to the sublime than to the beautiful—which does not, as most of us know to our sorrow, mean that sex is always sublime, nor that it cannot be conceptualized as beautiful, but rather that it operates within an economy of danger where shifts in scale can at any moment reorganize value or render it meaningless, articulate new meanings, or dislocate the subject of meaning altogether.”
“The adorable, which almost seems to have wrested this privilege from the beautiful, can tame the risk inherent in sexual encounters (…) and thus, as Lauren has put it, can work to ‘neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject’ sex can be.”
Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman: “Sex, or the Unbearable,” 2013
“Text of Pleasure: that which satisfies, fulfills, and induces euphoria; that which stems from culture, does not break with it, and is bound to a comfortablepractice of reading.
“Text of Lust: that which transports one into a state of self-forgetfulness, that which triggers unease (perhaps even to the point of a certain weariness), that which shakes the reader’s historical, cultural, and psychological foundations, the consistency of their preferences, values, and memories, and plunges their relationship with language into crisis.”
Roland Barthes: “The Pleasure of the Text,” 1973.
“to consent not to be a solitary being”
Fred Moten, quoting Édouard Glissant, 2010
“O you sad, square, alcohol-free modern age, you wretched era of aviation and world travel, you see now how much the adventure-hungry lovers suffer under you. Oskar and Emma’s love gradually withered away, and why? Yes, for lack of danger. (…) Where activities are permitted so readily and quite blindly, they soon become boring and eventually fade away. That is the appalling irony of the times (…) where everything is so shamelessly permitted. (…) Oskar and Emma wanted to create a romance, but it didn’t work out; it fell apart. (…) Danger is, after all, the lifeblood, and the obstacle is, after all, the life of a novella. And there are no more obstacles in this characterless, unproud world, which is incapable of any noble prejudice. (…) Oskar and Emma knew this, and an indescribable anxiety took hold of their young hearts. Their parents were people without prejudice—oh, what a pity.”
Robert Walser, Note, 1913.
“Above all, however, it was Artaud who explicitly formulated the principle of contagion as a model of artistic communication […]. The performance spreads to the viewer like a contagious disease. Beyond active reception, it is meant to affect the viewer and take possession of him. The contagion—not merely physical, but above all psychological—to which Artaud directs his attention will above all help unanticipated passions to break through. […] Artaud’s conception thus differs markedly from classical aesthetics, which had subjected the passions to the measure of cathartic purification. If, according to Aristotle’s well-known formulation, art, through the depiction of passions, “evokes pity and horror in the viewer and thereby brings about a purification from such states of agitation,” then traditional aesthetics defines art as a principle of inoculation intended to prevent actual infection by passions. In contrast, since Artaud, contemporary art has often intended an uncontrolled contagion to help the “slumbering conflicts” within the viewer erupt. Instead of restoring the integrity of the person threatened by passionate agitation, the “calm of the senses” is disrupted and the “compressed unconscious” is released with a dissociative effect. In contrast to cathartic purification or the expulsion of passions, but also in contrast to the ideal of the proper balance of affects, contagion aims to create a precarious state and to ignite a “crisis.” Instead of moderation and homeostasis, the focus is on “destabilization,” uncertainty, and alienation. In this function of triggering a “crisis”—given the dual nature of contagion and catharsis in the history of the aesthetics of the passions—the concept of contagion is the more significant one for contemporary arts.”
Kathrin Busch: „Ansteckung und Widerfahrnis. Für eine Ästhetik des Pathischen.“ in Kathrin Busch & Iris Därmann: „>pathos<. Konturen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs“, 2007
“Critical race pedagogy is inherently risky, uncomfortable, and fundamentally unsafe […] This does not mean creating a hostile environment, but rather acknowledging that pedagogies that address racial power will be most uncomfortable for those who benefit from that power.”
“A subtle yet fundamental form of violence is perpetuated in discourses on race that present themselves as safe, and this must be challenged through a pedagogy of disruption—itself a form of violence, but one that is humanizing rather than repressive. […] We pedagogically reframe the racial predicament by promoting a ‘risk’ discourse on race, one that does not assume safety but rather contradiction and tension.”
Zeus Leonardo & Ronald K. Porter: “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue,” 2010
South Park, 2015
“There are many reasons to reject consent as the guiding principle for sex. These include the following:
Consent primarily serves to protect those accused of sexual assault. Consent allows an accused person to say, “Well, she consented to X, so nothing bad happened.” Even the expanded concepts of “enthusiastic” consent and “affirmative” consent do not significantly deviate from this function.
Consent is based on a proprietary conception of selfhood derived from social contract theory. It legally implies that humans “own” their bodies and can relinquish that ownership through a statement of consent. As Ann Cahill suggests, consent may imply that the consenting party owes the activity to the recipient of consent, and thus that the recipient can claim harm if the consenting party does not ‘deliver.’
Consent reinforces the idea that men ask for sex and women respond, as Pateman and Alcoff point out. In heterosexual contexts, sex is portrayed as something men are always seeking, placing the burden on women to decide how far things will go.
Consent fails to capture the unfolding nature of sexual encounters over time. It artificially divides sex into discrete segments, failing to account for the way in which desires may emerge intersubjectively during the course of an encounter.
Consent does not capture the ambiguity of many sexual encounters, including what is referred to as “gray rape.” In *Screw Consent*, Fischel addresses the backlash against the #MeToo movement, which claimed that it implied “all bad sex is rape!” For Fischel, the alternative to this slippery-slope reasoning is to investigate just how bad bad sex can be. Although bad sex is different from sexual assault, bad sex is often bad in a way that perpetuates broader social scripts operative in sexual assault—and this “bad sex” has serious detrimental effects on the parties involved.
Consent may prevent people from putting in the effort to develop a nuanced awareness of their sexual partners’ desires. Consent makes it seem as though all one needs is a red light or a green light, without also having to learn the many rules of the road. Heterosexual cultures generally lead to women putting in the effort to try to understand men’s desires, whereas the opposite is not expected of men. Peggy Orenstein depicts the chilling consequences of this in her book Girls and Sex.
Consent assumes a level of self-awareness that individuals often lack. Many of us are often unaware of our own desires, so suggesting that we can know what we want the moment we are asked overlooks historically conditioned patterns of behavior, the effects of past experiences, and the relative power of different social positions.
Ellie Anderson: “Women in Philosophy: The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics,” 2019.
“The Vampires’ Castle specializes in fostering guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be part of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if […] one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, and heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements […]: it pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity,’ while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold. Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive-aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear—the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned. […]
The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. […] Since the desires driving the VC are largely the priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there must be a sharp distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark or behaved in a particular way—these remarks or this behavior might be construed as transphobic, sexist, etc. So far, so good. But it’s the next move that’s the kicker. X is then defined as a transphobe/sexist, etc. Their entire identity is defined by a single ill-judged remark or slip in behavior. […]
What must be done?
[…] Capital subdued the organized working class by decomposing class consciousness, viciously subjugating trade unions while seducing ‘hardworking families’ into identifying with their own narrowly defined interests instead of the interests of the wider class; but why would capital be concerned about a ‘left’ that replaces class politics with a moralizing individualism, and that, far from building solidarity, spreads fear and insecurity? […] We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree—on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.”
Mark Fisher: “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” 2013.
“The problem with the traditional view of consent is not that it overcomplicates sexual encounters, but rather that it underestimates the way our feelings exist in relation to social scripts, power relations, and the like. It assumes that people are rational agents with transparent desires that they can freely communicate to others. By conceptualizing sexual ethics on the basis of the heterogeneous self, we may better account for its complex intersubjective character. We may envision modes of self-fashioning that deepen our relations to others by recognizing that we are others to ourselves. This project takes us into still-uncharted territory, but I think it holds more promise than continuing to try to build sexual ethics around a notion of selfhood inherited from social contract theory that feminist theory has proven wrong.”
Ellie Anderson: “Women in Philosophy: The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics,” 2019.
“I think there is a very good reason for this first agreement: YOU AGREE TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NATURE OF YOUR EXPERIENCE. Because you are. It’s part of the privilege of being an adult; you enjoy freedom of choice—you are not a child. And, yes, of course, we all get triggered sometimes; we lose control; there are moments when we are unable to take responsibility. But still: we are nevertheless responsible for what we do and what happens to us. If you drink too much alcohol and fall flat on your face, if you lose your temper and start throwing objects, you are still responsible for the damage you cause. If you enter a space (Berghain??) or an event (Kinky Power Xplosion?) that you can’t handle, you are responsible for your reactions. (Of course, I’m not talking about violence or assaults against you here, just the intense emotional reactions that kink and s+ spaces can trigger.) You can only train your capacity; you can learn to sense when you’re in that danger; you can study your triggers; you can better understand your limits. It’s called growing up. But this should happen somewhere else (therapy, counseling) rather than in S&M spaces. Kink and S&M spaces are not therapy. They are spaces for exploration, experience, and controlled risk-taking. I think a major problem lies in the promotion and marketing of these spaces. There’s too much talk about empowerment, liberation, and healing. Even enlightenment is promised. Of course, this attracts the powerless, the unfree, the fragile, and the lost. Where is consent in your marketing? Where is the practice of clear communication and radical honesty? Watch your language. Watch your blind spots. If you get a kick out of treating people like children, if you like to see yourself as a caretaker, then of course shit is more likely to happen. Your role, systemically, will need justification. I think as a facilitator you have to make it very clear that there is potential risk in your space. You don’t pretend that you can take responsibility for people. You don’t pretend that you can provide a safe space. I also don’t think there is a fine line between taking responsibility and codependency. I think the line is rather clear. If you give false information about your space and your capacities, if you infantilize people by believing they need education and guidance, if you are seeking power and recognition for your facilitator persona, then you run the risk of making people dependent. To put it very bluntly: The less you care about people’s opinions, the safer your space is likely to be.
Felix Ruckert in a Facebook comment thread, 2019.
Photo: Banu Cennetoğlu, *BEINGSAFEISSCARY* (2017) for documenta14
(Ten aluminum letters borrowed from the Fridericianum in Kassel and six letters cast in brass based on the existing ones, inspired by graffiti on a wall at the National Technical University of Athens as of April 6, 2017)
