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 open up because of their trusting nature would always backtrack on safety just when things got interesting, so as not to cross “my” boundaries…