You know what? If this essay pisses you off, I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let\u2019s start here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pretty straightforward, right? I think most reasonable people agree if someone says no, that means no. In fact, if you don\u2019t agree, I don\u2019t want to talk to you. Kindly fuck off, and keep fucking off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That goes for any<\/em> no, by the way. A soft \u201cno\u201d still means no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Important corollary: No does not mean \u201cchallenge accepted!\u201d It does not mean \u201cI wonder how I can persuade you to say yes.\u201d No ends a conversation. No doesn\u2019t mean \u201cwell, I should ask for the reasons<\/em> they said no, and if those reasons aren\u2019t good enough, I should argue\u201d No doesn\u2019t mean \u201cconvince me.\u201d No doesn\u2019t invite dialogue. The appropriate response to a no, hard or soft, is to accept you don\u2019t get to do the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hope most of you are already nodding along. You do get this, right? Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, let\u2019s take the next step:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMaybe\u201d is not \u201cyes.\u201d It might become a yes in the future. It might<\/em> be an invitation to further dialogue, maybe. But it is not a yes right now.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Valid consent needs to be free, informed,<\/em> and enthusiastic<\/em>. It is always limited in scope and can always be withdrawn. \u201cMaybe\u201d is none of those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still with me? Good. Because for a lot of folks who claim to value consent, what I\u2019m going to say next might just make you mad. For way too many of you out there, including a lot of folks in the kink community who ought to know better:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did you feel it? A disturbance in the Force?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ah, now we get to it. For a lot of people, \u201cconsent\u201d is not a rigorous process of making sure the people around you are enthusiastically on board with what you\u2019re doing, it\u2019s whatever gets them the attention and kudos they want in the moment. It\u2019s a brand. It\u2019s a word that signals virtue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the right situation, given the right narrative, a lot of folks out there will cheerfully embrace a weird, topsy-turvy, Ministry of Truth doublespeak argument that yes means no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve run into this personally. A bunch of folks, folks who I genuinely once respected and admired, who suddenly did an abrupt shift through the looking glass into mirror-world and insisted, with a straight face, that yes means no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I\u2019m not talking about a yes given under duress. I\u2019m not talking about a yes that was wheedled or badgered, a yes that came at the end of a lot of pleading, a yes from a person who is not an adult, a yes that comes from a place of power imbalance, a yes that started with a no. Those yesses are all nos. That kind of \u201cyes\u201d is not free, informed, and enthusiastic. If you get someone to a yes by wearing down their no, that…isn\u2019t actually a yes, just so we\u2019re clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m talking about a free and informed yes given by an enthusiastic adult who is fully on board with whatever the thing is. In fact, I\u2019ll even go one further:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only do a lot of folks who claim to respect consent say, under the right circumstances, that yes means no, they\u2019ll even tell you that a \u201cyes\u201d that comes from a place of \u201cHi there! Here\u2019s a thing that I really really want to do. You interested in doing this with me, please?\u201d means no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo Franklin, what the fuck<\/em> are you talking about?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lemme tell you a story. It\u2019s a story about divorce, and kink, and a vanilla partner twenty years later, and it doesn\u2019t have a particularly happy ending, but my goodness is it an interesting story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So let\u2019s set the Wayback Machine to the year 2000, twenty-three years before I sit in this airport terminal typing these words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I met her at a polyamory get-together. She\u2019d just moved to town from California with her husband, with whom she was getting a divorce. They\u2019d been having problems in California, talked about divorcing, and decided maybe a change of scene would help. (Yeah, I know, but hey, it\u2019s better than having a baby to save the marriage.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n We met again at a party hosted by one of the folks in the local poly scene. She later wrote, in a now-deleted blog, about how she felt \u201celectric\u201d when she was near me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She talked quite a lot about her husband: how incompatible they were, how she wanted to explore BDSM but he didn\u2019t want to, how she felt stifled by the fact he wouldn\u2019t do the things she wanted to explore. he had a whole collection of BDSM gear in her closet, she said, that he was reluctant to use with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few weeks later, she emailed me to ask if she could have some more BDSM gear (specifically electrical play gear) shipped to my house, because she didn\u2019t want to deal with the awkward conversation with her husband about it. I said sure, whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019d think this would be unambiguous consent. To listen to a lot of \u201cconsent warriors,\u201d you\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward a year. She\u2019s finalizing her divorce, and she\u2019s asked me out. One of the very first things she says, in this newly-minted relationship, is she wants to explore BDSM with me. \u201cI have this whole collection of bondage gear,\u201d she says. \u201cI want to use it with you.\u201d (Top-shelf kit, too\u2014leather cuffs, a collapsible spreader bar, a very nice hogtie collection.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a lot of folks in the BDSM community…<\/p>\n\n\n\n I say yes, because my understanding of consent is that when an adult person asks you to explore something with them, that means they\u2019re consenting to explore that thing with them, but what do I know? Good thing we have a bunch of folks who know better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, kink becomes part of our relationship. I explore a lot of things with her I\u2019d never tried before, as we discuss our respective fantasies and find the overlaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next year or so, this mutual exploration of kink becomes so important to her, she tells me she doesn\u2019t want me going to kink events and play parties with my other girlfriend (now my wife), she wants to reserve that for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I told her no, I wouldn\u2019t do that\u2014I was happy to make BDSM a part of our life, but my other partners also liked kink and I wouldn\u2019t be reserving that just for her. She has a bit of a reaction to that, but I stand my ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let\u2019s fast forward again to 2006. She finishes her undergraduate degree and heads off to grad school. I move to Georgia when the company I\u2019m a minority partner in moves to Atlanta. I blog about it<\/a>. We decide to remain partners, though she soon starts dating a kinky couple in Tallahassee. BDSM becomes part of their relationship as well; indeed, it is, she informs me, part of what attracted her to her new boyfriend, a dom in the local scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That works until it doesn\u2019t, as is often the case when a submissive dates a couple. She soon begins dating another fellow, a guy who\u2019s monogamous by nature and is okay with her shagging other women but not other men. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t like the thought of me playing with another penis,\u201d she tells me one afternoon. \u201cWe can\u2019t be lovers any more, but we\u2019ll always be partners. We\u2019ll always be family.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward a bit more. The new guy is gone, and she\u2019s now dating a friend of mine, as the submissive partner in a full-time \u201cTPE\u201d relationship, which if you aren\u2019t kinky basically means she\u2019s kind of his sexual slave all the time. Things go pear-shaped quickly. She claims he\u2019s abusing her, he claims the opposite, I fly out to support her, their relationship explodes, it\u2019s a mess. Through it all, she keeps telling me I\u2019m the only person in her life who\u2019s never abused her. I believe her. I shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sorry, gotta board my flight. Back in a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, picking this up from my seat as I fly through the air:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward one more time to the present day. I learn she\u2019s been talking to a person claiming to be a \u201cjournalist,\u201d telling the world that she never wanted to be involved in BDSM, or maybe se did but someone in their mid-20s is too young to consent, and anyway she\u2019s not into BDSM any more and isn\u2019t it terribly abusive that I participated in it with her?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this story gets some currency with some prominent folks in the kink community, which is shocking and a bit disappointing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because, you see, a person who accepts this narrative, does not and cannot<\/em> accept that consent exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, let me spell this out plainly, and since I\u2019m feeling a bit salty and I\u2019m not in a space to worry too much about sugar-coating my words to make them more palatable to the folks I\u2019m about to call out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We cannot accept that consent exists if we cannot accept that yes means yes.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re reading this and you think I\u2019m talking about you, there\u2019s a pretty good chance you\u2019re right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel like I shouldn\u2019t have to say this. Somewhere between \u201cno means no\u201d and \u201cI really want to do this, I\u2019m divorcing my husband at least partly because he doesn\u2019t want to do this, please please do this with me means no,\u2019 some folks who really ought to know better have lost the thread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As someone close to me put it, it\u2019s as if \u201cyes means yes only if I have the option of retroactively deciding twenty years later that I don\u2019t want to do it any more and I don\u2019t think that I made the right choice back then, so I want the option of retroactively calling the choices I made \u2018consent violations\u2019 in order to avoid the discomfort of dealing with my own changing perceptions about it.\u201d And I must admit I\u2019m a little surprised by the number of folks who are on board with that, at least so long as being on board with that serves as a way to declare their virtue. (\u201cLook at me, I support women! I\u2019m virtuous!\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s really, really<\/em> hard not to see this as gaslighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As gaslighty and dishonest as all this feels, I don\u2019t even think it\u2019s malicious. I think we all have, to some degree or another, the tendency to project our current emotional state backward in time, and assume the way we feel now is the way we always felt. Nobody reading (or writing!) this can say they\u2019ve never been guilty of projecting what we feel now back into the past. We do not remember things as they were, we remember things as we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And honestly, maybe that\u2019s why she would always keep a blog or a journal for a year or so, then delete it, then a while later start a new one, only to delete it again. It\u2019s incredibly freeing, this constant burning down of your own record. It allows you to say \u201cno, I didn’t do that, I didn\u2019t say that, I didn\u2019t feel that. I have always felt the way I feel right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.morethantwo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/nomeansno.png\")
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