THE PILLOW BLOG

 

Cookie Consent
Beate Absalon Beate Absalon

Cookie Consent

Guys! We’re all working hard to foster a culture of consent by reminding each other—in workshops and beyond—that we don’t take physical affection for granted; that we don’t simply assume what the other person wants; that we respect personal boundaries and support one another in self-determinedly figuring out, through collaborative processes, what naughty things we’d like to get up to together; that we can truly let ourselves go, above all, when we create safe spaces of trust; that a “no” isn’t a drama but a valuable guide for navigating the love zone, and so on and so forth. This is all a massive undertaking—indeed, a humanistic educational project, if you will—because there’s much more at stake here than merely securing legal, contract-like protections when becoming intimate with one another to shield oneself from accusations of sexual assault. Rather, this is about deconstructing paternalistic structures and forging new relationships with oneself and the world! It’s about learning to respect ourselves, to respect others…

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An Eclectic Essay on (In)security (work in progress)
Beate Absalon Beate Absalon

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 in and of itself, and safety isn’t good in and of itself—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 therefore simply boring—or, in cases that are fundamentally ambivalent gray areas, failing to do justice to the situation. Sometimes these spaces led to frustration when the very people to whom I could fully open up because of their trusting nature would always back down in the name of safety just as things were getting interesting, so as not to cross “my” boundaries…

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