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…