Consent is not the be-all and end-all

[MagicMix]

Following on from the thread about the impact of porn and other threads about the implausibility of consent to brutal practices.

The focus on sexual consent in feminism in recent years has been positive to a certain extent but I think we have lost nuance when we consider consent to be the key to sexual ethics.

Consent is not a green light for whatever you want, it is the bare minimum. Sex without consent is obviously very wrong (rape or sexual assault). And most feminists have at least some understanding that coerced consent is a problem and does not equate to true consent, although some seem unable to understand that paying someone is clear-cut coercion.

But we have to go further. Consent does not make everything all right. There are some things that can never be all right and the anti-kink-shaming 'sex-positive' thinking that refuses to condemn anything as long as someone is getting sexually aroused by it has led us down some very dark paths.

If you can stomach it, here is an article about a woman who claims to be sexually aroused by being waterboarded.
www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/waterboarding-kink-sex-bdsm-torture-779066/
Now I don't believe her and my personal opinion is that the M is BDSM is a form of self-harm, but really that is not the main point. The point is, somebody did that to her because she asked for it. People are quite literally torturing other people in the pursuit of sexual pleasure and we are expected to be non-judgmental.

The point is that the S in BDSM is sick and wrong. It was said on the other thread that we need to bring back kink shaming. Yes a thousand times. They can call me a prude, frigid, accuse me of being in a moral panic, I don't care. If someone gets sexual pleasure from hurting people, torturing people, acting out scenarios that put them in the role of rapist or slave-owner, I think that person has an unhealthy, dangerous sexuality and should seek help. It should not be accepted uncritically as harmless just because there was consent.

What is torture to you, may be pleasure to them. If there is obviously injury such as bleach poured over them, then obviously that is different but that is not general practice within BDSM.
Yes and BDSM practitioners do tend to negotiate and train etc. But it's not just the "experts" who are carrying out these activities.
If a group of people can do unsafe things in a managed way, to mitigate against risk, (which I'm not 100% convinced of but I know they do make an effort) then should they be allowed to do the dangerous sexual stuff but amateurs aren't?
That would be impossible to police.
I think you're right about the justice system, there needs to be a huge amount of evidence of consent for certain activities. But how do you prove consent? A porn actress might sign a load of release forms and still feel like she was abused and taken advantage of on set. If I was going to inflict damage on another person (which I wouldn't, but as an example) I'd want to be damn sure it's what they wanted. But, ironically, I would never do it anyway; it's self-selecting as an activity.
So have we got a Dom problem? If experienced BDSM practitioners recognise subs as being in charge, and doms have to train up and have to provide aftercare etc then what happens when an inexperienced dom decides to try out this stuff on an inexperienced sub? Outside the "protection" of the BDSM community, in a room somewhere, after a tinder date or in the middle of an unhealthy relationship.
Why do we allow the hobbyists to dictate what is sexually acceptable - if we were to ban those extreme activities (for example) is it really any great loss? If you can't consent to being cut with a knife during sex play then it can't be used as a defence for a "rough sex gone wrong" murder. It's not like you could police anyone's sex life, so people would still do it, it just would not longer be a defence.

why can’t the “risks” be shared? Ok a sub may be at serious risk of injury/death. Why is it so incredibly bad for doms to be at very real legal risk?
Dom Insurance!

Fuck it I’m gonna come out and say it and I know this is probably toxically masculine of me, but if I was the father of the 16 year old and those men did not see the inside of the courtroom I’m afraid I’d be taking the law into my own hands and ensuring each and every one of those men were physically incapable of inflicting similar trauma for the rest of their lives.

I’d then present myself to the nearest police station and confess to precisely what I’d done, and serve whatever time the court deemed necessary for me to serve. A lesser known purpose of the prison system is to protect criminals from the society they have wronged.

At its very basic the root of Anglo-Saxon law that we are heir to in the West surrounds the concepts of harm/loss. Has harm occurred to this 16 year old? It most definately has and the question of consent really only speaks to the severity of intent.

do we accept that she wanted to die during painful sex?

Whether or not we accept this has no bearing on whether we prosecute the perpetrator.

I’d be taking the law into my own hands and ensuring each and every one of those men were physically incapable of inflicting similar trauma for the rest of their lives.
You say that, and tbh I'd say that too - but you wouldn't be able to do it in real life, it's not that easy to hunt down strangers. And what would you do with them? Kill them? If you hospitalised the first, you'd never get to the other two, would you?
I'm not being deliberately difficult - I always used to think like this but I've seen it happen to other people, I've known men who have had things happen to their daughters, for example - and the incandescent and impotent rage those men feel destroys their entire family because they can't live out their revenge fantasy.
So even thinking you'd do all that is self-soothing. It makes it less scary that it happens because you imagine you'll do something about it if it does.
Life doesn't work like that.

Ereshkigal exactly, because you can't consent to being killed. But somehow you can consent to having your genitals damaged?

FlyingOink I actually thought of the idea of general sex insurance a ways ago. I can’t get behind the wheel of a tonne of motorcar without insurance, because well it’s dangerous.

I think the whole insurance thing could be extended to children too. So if some chap unintentionally knocked up a woman then the insurance could be leveraged to pay for the costs incurred in raising the kid. Make it like the car whereby it’s illegal to even have sex without insurance.

I like sex as much as the next man but child poverty, and all these women sustaining life changing injuries are not acceptable consequences.

FlyingOink of course your right I’m not an especially violent man, but I would give it a good long think, and no I wouldn’t want to kill them just ensure they wouldn’t be capable of inflicting similar in the future.

That whole story has me angry beyonf belief.

AntiSocialInjusticePacifist
I only mentioned it because it think it makes us feel better to imagine we'd take revenge if something like that happened to one of our nearest and dearest because the reality is we are pretty powerless.
The insurance idea would never get off the ground but I think it's interesting that we can accept responsibility for driving around in a ton of metal, and require pre-training, supervision, sobriety, insurance etc for doing that but anything sex based is a free for all.
I've been trying to think of another activity that has the risk of injury etc that is both legal and requires no regulation or insurance and I can't think of one.

I'm guessing the responsible aftercare involves cleaning and binding wounds. Is that part of the enjoyment and of feeling cherished and looked after?
Sounds like self harm by proxy to me

I can't imagine many 'female dom chops off male subs testicles as he asked for it, he subsequently bleeds to death' being accepted as 'accidental consensual sex death, nothing to see here' type thing in the way females being killed by blokes are, despite there apparently being many more female dom than male.... No fucking way.

If you can't consent to being cut with a knife during sex play then it can't be used as a defence for a "rough sex gone wrong" murder. It's not like you could police anyone's sex life, so people would still do it, it just would not longer be a defence.

Quite.

I can't imagine many 'female dom chops off male subs testicles as he asked for it, he subsequently bleeds to death' being accepted as 'accidental consensual sex death, nothing to see here' type thing in the way females being killed by blokes are, despite there apparently being many more female dom than male.... No fucking way.

I agree.

Sounds like self harm by proxy to me

And I think it often is.

If you can't consent to being cut with a knife during sex play then it can't be used as a defence for a "rough sex gone wrong" murder. It's not like you could police anyone's sex life, so people would still do it, it just would not longer be a defence.

Exactly.

If you can't consent to being cut with a knife during sex play then it can't be used as a defence for a "rough sex gone wrong" murder. It's not like you could police anyone's sex life, so people would still do it, it just would not longer be a defence.

This is a blindingly obvious point that flies, like Concorde, over some people's heads.

do we accept that she wanted to die during painful sex?

Whether or not we accept this has no bearing on whether we prosecute the perpetrator.

Precisely.

We don't even allow people to assist loved ones who have a terminal illness, no quality of life at all, and are desperate to die. They consent to their own death, and it's still a crime to do it.

Women should be given the same protection.

"We don't even allow people to assist loved ones who have a terminal illness, no quality of life at all, and are desperate to die. They consent to their own death, and it's still a crime to do it."

Common sense usually prevails in these cases though, very few are prosecuted and the sentences are much lower if they do.

I wonder if that "leniency" would apply if the person didn't have a terminal illness at all, but the person who killed them said they wanted to die?

I'm guessing the responsible aftercare involves cleaning and binding wounds. Is that part of the enjoyment and of feeling cherished and looked after?
Sounds like self harm by proxy to me

Yes, I've also heard people who have freed themselves from BDSM describe it as part of the process of trauma bonding.

freed themselves from BDSM
I'm going to look into that, it'd be interesting to see it from survivors' perspectives.

I’ve been involved with girls who are extremely sub in the BDSM (well extremely from my point of view), they have explained aftercare to me, but where I struggled with it is you are supposed to be all cuddly and chatty, supportive and caring, but honestly shouldn’t that be what 98% of a relationship should be like. The notion that some woman has to undergo god knows what to earn that level of intimacy is batshit madness to me.

The notion that some woman has to undergo god knows what to earn that level of intimacy is batshit madness to me.

AntiSocialInjusticePacifist that positive reinforcement training is how you're supposed to train a dog.
The thinking is that if you're randomly nice to a dog they don't understand why and try to associate it with what they're doing at the time. So if you laugh when your dog barks at the telly and pet it, the dog learns that barking at the telly is the right thing to do.
And you shouldn't praise or pet your dog unless they do something for you, which is why many people tell their dog to sit before they give it a hug or stroke it.
This is the same training but for women, and those women are not only treated worse than a dog, but should never be in that mindset to begin with.
I'm sure many of us have struck lucky with a partner or previous partner (or thought we did at the time) and wondered what he/she saw in us - this is that taken to extremes, no?
Feeling unworthy of affection and intimacy, sneering at "vanilla sex", it all makes sense really.