The Shattered Edges of My Consent

“No means no,” I tell the faces gathered around me at the discussion I am leading at a Sci-Fi convention in a tiny hole town.

(Last night I screamed no. I don’t tell them this.)

“Even that’s not enough sometimes, though. It is safest and sexiest to seek enthusiastic, spoken consent. There can be no confusion!” I answer questions, challenge ideas and more, all the while standing confidently on the liberal platforms I teach and preach every day.

(Yet, in the dark I scream no.)

I flash in memory as I speak on. Their body meets mine with heated violence. Hands wrap around my throat halting breath. My thoughts float and my skin is electrified with the tingling caused by deprivation. Hands loosen and I choke in air. Before I can recover, the beat moves on and I am swept away again.

I beg for it to stop, yet it continues for decades. It seems as though it will never end when all of the sudden it does.

I am surrounded by a serene quiet.

The seething mass of anxiety that swirls within me is, for one chocolate moment, blissfully still.

I whisper ‘thank you’ and kiss their lips.

You see, I live and love on the shattered edges of consent.

The truth is consent is a muddled mess. No one wants to tell you that, but it is. It’s been beat up, made fun of, and now its lipstick is smeared and it’s got low self esteem. Mostly it’s beautiful; also it’s complicated.

We tell little girls to make ’em work for it, or else you’re a slut. So want it, but don’t want it too bad. She’s confused already and that’s where we start. With that we move onto little boys who we tell to take what they want. Well sometimes, but now the narrative’s changing. “Listen for enthusiastic consent,” we explain, while not teaching her to speak it, even when she wants it. Non-verbals rule there, leading to ambiguity and often danger.

Then there are folks like me: messed up, dressed up, and ready to play.

My first sexual encounter was at six years old. I told him yes. That year of horror left me with a cocktail of mental soup that’s been labeled and prodded by therapists, friends, family, and the four cold walls of every room I’ve ever failed to sleep in … but never solved, not with all the pills in the candy shop. I was filled with impotent and misguided rage and a curiosity of experimentation that lead me headlong into the kink community.

With the kink folks, consent is the lord’s own gospel. The avatar of consent is the safe word. Yet, even there lies murky ground. When you are whipping someone and they are in their deepest places and they want to call “rutabaga” but find themselves unable … you know the dance began with a lusty willful ‘yes!’ but has fallen somehow into a silent, shivering ‘no’ … how do you see it and how do come back from it? I have seen people destroyed on both sides of this equation, living in fear of its mere possibility.

So, let us start by unpacking what words are.

Words are tools for taking the amorphous concepts that live inside one’s being and coalescing them into an idea to place into someone else’s blurry insides. It is a fatally imperfect transfer system. Yet, if you respect the person across from you and practice many forms of listening, you may began to attempt to approach the ragged edges of a concept as presumably simple as yes or as no.

It should never for a single second be forgotten that every miniscule shift of body and every tiny word in every sentence may mean something different to each soul. Sometimes even the utter opposite.

After all, I told my abuser ‘yes’ … as I tell my lovers ‘no.’