Meaningful consent?

[calmet]

Like many young women, when I started having boyfriends, I wanted to have sex. But like most in the UK, I was taught that sex= penis in vagina sex (PIV).

In reality, there are many ways of having sex. But if you are taught that having sex means having PIV, the you accept if you want sex, PIV is an automatic part of it.

So do women who think thsi meangfully consent to PIV? I don't think I did. To meaningfully consent I would have to know I had the choice of having sex with a man, and not having PIV. To meaningfully consent, I would have to be able to have a boyfriend who accepted it if I said I did not want to have PIV.

You can't meaningfully consent, if you don't know you have a choice, and if you can't say no.

Matilda - Your first partner was obviously watching porn and getting his ideas from there. It was when the internet became widespread, that more hardcore porn became commonplace. Before that you had to visit a dodgy sex shop and get a video under the counter. Much easier to log onto the internet.

Kitty Stryker, a well known woman in the BDSM scene, in 2011 wrote this blog post about the abuse of women in the BDSM scene.

kittystryker.com/2011/07/safeward-i-never-called-it-rape/

As a result, many other women in the BDSM scene also started to tell their stories online of the abuse they had suffered. It is a myth that women into BDSM are less likely to experience sexual coercion or abuse.

Yes, I know Kitty Stryker and her work and I admire what she has done in calling out abuse on the BDSM scene. It's not free of abuse and abusers, any more than non-BDSM relationships are. But I think (and I don't know how much research has been done to prove this right or wrong) that there is less abuse of consent on the BDSM scene than in 'mainstream' sexual interaction because there is more discussion and fewer assumptions are made. But I do think there is more that needs to be done on the BDSM scene as there is in all sex education and all discussion about sexuality to reduce abusive behaviour further.

I have read a lot of what has been written about sexual abuse of women in the BDSM scene after Kitty Stryker's post. It sounds just as abusive as any other scene.

Calmet, I simply don't know, and I don't think anyone does, whether the BDSM scene has a greater or lesser or equal proportion of abuse as the rest of the world does. I have always had the impression that it was safer and have heard more stories of abuse from outside the scene than within it. This may be partly because BDSM often involves women being the ones who Do Things to men, so 'exploring your sexuality' on the BDSM scene doesn't always, automatically, mean 'letting some man do weird stuff to you.'

I don't want to this to be take wrong, it's not meant to offend and I fully admit I am coming from a place of ignorance about BDSM. But is it possible that there might actually be fewer woman complaining about abuse because they are happy to submit to a certain amount that people who have vanilla* sex wouldn't? SO say a man who wants to pull a women's hair in a violent way can just ask a woman who is in to BDSm where as he might not getr the same response from another woman who isn't in to the scene. So he just does it with out permission?

-hate that word

RFFU, I don't think that's right if you see that abuse is about power, not sex. So if I'm abusive and want to pull someone's hair, pulling the hair of someone who enjoys it isn't a demonstration of my power.

If there is no thrill in dominating a willing partner though the whole sub/dom thing woulnd't exist though right?

It raises the whole issue of can we consent to everything?

So is dwarf throwing, which is actually a "sport" okay because those being thrown consent to it? Or do we accept there alimits to what you can consent to?

I am not sure there should be limits on what people can consent to. If we own our own bodies then surely that means it's up to us what happens to them. People can choose to do all sorts of things that are risky and/or painful such as contact sports and strange endurance tests. Just because you or I wouldn't fancy, for instance, base jumping doesn't mean that other people should be prevented from doing it.

"If there is no thrill in dominating a willing partner though the whole sub/dom thing woulnd't exist though right?"

The "thrill" of abusing someone is still different.