Contemplating Ethics.

In the early years of my exploration within the “kink community” I had a few experiences that I have come to view differently over the course of the years. There was the time when I ended a relationship, a very short one, with a man who was making me uncomfortable with his equalisation of being submissive and the patriarchy-dictated role of women in relationships. When I ended the relationship, he showed up at my place of residence, parked outside for hours and called me incessantly demanding I give him a chance, a logical explanation for ending the relationship and the face-time he deserved as my former top (which he was, for ten days, because that is how long it lasted). At the time, I felt horrible, like I had driven this man to these depths of despair and as a result I apologised to him and agreed to remain friends with him, which was something he demanded from all his former subs, and used as a system of vouching for future subs. Even when we had first spoken, he had bragged about the fact that all his former subs were still his friends and would have nothing but good things to say about him.

Well, of course.

If you ask me what I would have said about this person a month after we parted, I may not have vouched for him, but I definitely would not have been able to shit on him either. I felt terrible about how I had made him feel, he continued to remind me of the fact that he sat outside in the rain for me and that I misled him with promises of love and that is the impression I retained of our entanglement for a while. I thought of it only from the perspective of what I had done to him. It was only a little later that I started to think about it in the context of how our relationship had even come to transpire. I had never really said yes to anything, actually. He had sent me a “slave contract” that I had categorically refused to sign, which he, nonetheless, continued to cite as the basis for his expectations for me. I had told him I was polyamorous and had other partners, but he had insisted that he wanted control over who else I saw, and routinely stated that after a little while of being with him, I wouldn’t even want to be poly anymore (even though he was married, and cheating). He continuously told me my ways of life were wrong including (but not limited to) living alone without supervision, not going to the gym and being thin, wearing “western” clothes and not seeing the beauty of my culture, smoking weed and going to clubs with my friends, you get the drift. The first time we had planned to play, I told him I didn’t feel so great about it, he insisted, I cancelled, he showed up and picked me up anyway, and said we would just spend time together.

When I started to view things from that perspective, they looked very different. When I factored in the fact that I was nineteen and he was in his late thirties, it also looked suspicious in a different way but let me clarify. I don’t mean that I was stupid or clueless at nineteen, nor do I mean that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I’m no saint, I did kind of lead him on, because I did know from our first conversation that there was absolutely no way I would actually date this man. I also did know he was married, it was presented to me as “she sort of knows but she really doesn’t want to be part of this world” but I did, in fact, know this was suspicious and it didn’t make so much of a difference to me. I said things to him that I didn’t actually feel or believe, like emotional flirtation. So, even though I was nineteen, I don’t want the benefit of naivety or ignorance, the only way in which age was a factor here is that he had been following a pattern of entrapment that (I later learnt) was fairly common in the “kink community” for a long time and I would have seen it a lot easier if I had been exploring in the community for longer, and had known of its existence. It could also be factored in way of experience. I’ve always said that just because I started doing something new today does not mean I was born yesterday, inexperience does not equal idiocy, but for women and other marginalised groups that are targeted within sexual spaces, experience doesn’t necessarily only refer to learning the ropes of a sexual subculture, it also means learning the dangerous and abusive conventions of one. I didn’t know those things and I figured so long as I retain responsibility for my actions, it would all be okay.

And that is what they count on.

They count on the fact that you will want to take responsibility, you will feel guilt for how you treat them, you will ruminate on your behaviour and as a result of seeing the mistakes you made in that situation you will continue to be unable to hold them responsible for theirs. I know that because at some point I started to talk about the strange experiences I had had with these men and every single time I was accused of doing the same thing — Retroactively revoking consent in order to avoid taking responsibility, discussing private matters in public and maligning people I had come to dislike.

There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but first of all, let’s deal with the accusation of not wanting to take responsibility. I hardly think that is fair, because it would be so easy for me to not take it, actually. I could present these facts as being a nineteen-year-old woman being coerced by a forty-year-old married man who was stalking and manipulating me, and that would be accurate but I deliberately include my role in it because it is actually relevant and important to me that I take note of my behaviour, stock of my ethics and refine my actions in accordance with the errors I have made. It’s not intended to excuse his behaviour but men like that will pounce on the opportunity to make it so. If I knew that he was married that does not mean that his insistence on showing up to my place when I said I did not want to see him was valid. And, it was as invalid when it happened, as it is now, but at the time, I didn’t see it as such because I was only looking at how I had affected him and believing that his reactions, whatever they may be, were justified because I had hurt him. The revocation of consent cannot be retroactive if consent was not present at the time, even if one of the parties didn’t see it. Imagine you fuck in a room where there’s a person hiding in the closet unbeknownst to you, the fact that you don’t know and maybe don’t even ever discover that they were in there does not make their behaviour any more ethical, it just makes you unaware of information that was vital to you.

However, I routinely encounter people who treat retroactive revocation as the boogeyman, always arguing that it makes them unsafe because then any bottom who does not like them or feels slighted would turn around and claim they have been violated. I don’t discount that it could happen (and I would discuss that further as well but it does seem like any discussion we have on this subject already veers only in that direction and I’d like to dare to notice a different pattern), but I have been around a while and for the most part what I see is bottoms who hold their tongues, reform their behaviour and worry about their part in sordid affairs, and when they do speak about these experiences, they often take responsibility even when they place blame, express fear and are met with hostility. Particularly of the kind where we are told, “It didn’t seem like you had a problem with it then,” or a variation of that.

There’s something there.

Let me tell you a different story. There was a sadist with whom I planned a heavy-impact scene about a decade ago. I had not played with this person before but I had experienced a great deal of pain-play by this point. I had also remained on the fringes of the community. I didn’t know the people, I didn’t want to know the people, I didn’t know the rules or the practises, because I had tried it, and it did seem like everyone was full of shit. (Sorry!). The scene we had planned contained some high-skill elements like sharps and whips, which I freely and fully consented to doing. A day before our planned scene, he reached out to me to tell me that a friend of his would be in town on that night and wanted to know if he could join the scene. I didn’t know that friend. I was told that he was very experienced, very well-respected and a long-standing member of the community. I was also told that I would still be playing primarily with the person with whom I had negotiated, and he would be responsible for ensuring his friend understood all of our discussions. I agreed to do this. Now, obviously, one can say that was dumb as fuck, and I agree, but I also did fully understand what I was doing, okay? I recognised that I was agreeing to heavy-impact with a stranger on the word of a person I didn’t know well without having a single discussion with them, I easily identified this as risky behaviour and I was deliberately taking risks because there was thrill to it for me and they were (nor are) in any way responsible for protecting me from my own intentions. If I choose to engage in risky behaviour for the purpose of enjoying the risk, I bear responsibility in what happens to me as a result of that. However, it also means, that they were being risky behaviour and whether or not I was impacted by that, the choice to engage in this form of communication and play also said something about them, right?

And, look, nothing happened. I had a great time. Our scene was fun, intense, wonderful and I found they were both extremely skilled sadists so if I evaluate this situation now and I say that I saw red-flags in their behaviour it would be very easy to tell me that it didn’t seem like I had a problem with it then. It doesn’t even seem like I have a problem with it now, but what I am trying to say is that me having a problem with something or being impacted by it is not the only factor in whether there was a problem. I have since gotten to know these people better and there are some things I see now that I didn’t see then. For instance, their public position about consent and their practises around it don’t, at all, match up with how the negotiated with me. If you presented this same situation to them, and asked them to academically weigh in on the consent practises here, they would not defend their stand-ins which, to me, indicates, that they may be people who will suspend good-faith engagement if the opportunity to do so arises which doesn’t necessarily make them responsible for protecting the party that allows them to do so, but it certainly does make them responsible for evaluating their own ethics, why they were willing to suspend them and why they even exist. It makes me wonder how that may play out with other people. I fully acknowledge my part here, openly, and have before, and I continue to learn from it, but if the other party never takes stock of their behaviour, quietly or loudly, and continues to operate with impunity, just because I didn’t have a problem with it then, doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing to an environment where other people are expected not to have a problem with it.

And I know, at this point, we must wonder, which is it? Do I think my consent was violated or not? Who is the predator? Do we know for sure? And, the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know if my consent was violated, I don’t feel violated, but I feel discomfort around some aspects of these (and other) interactions with regard to my part in them which makes me wonder if they do too. I feel that every time I talk about these kinds of things, the whispers around me grow and I am often questioned about why I am making private matters public or how I have any leg to stand on when I am xyz as a person. I don’t think I am. I was part of these things, I should be allowed to talk about my life but it feels, always, like I am being encouraged to be quiet so it doesn’t complicate my life any further, which seems noxious and threatening. I always feel scared, too, even when I don’t name anyone nor target them, in my excavation of myself, and my interactions. There are so many things I do not say out loud because I am worried about hurting the people whom I can easily demonstrate have targeted me in some way, but it still feels like I was more wrong even when I see the pattern of gaslighting that makes me see it that way, and I feel terrible because it flies in the face of who I really am but I worry that discussing these things is always received in one way. It’s always about the vindictive woman trying to ruin someone’s life.

I’m not trying to ruin anyone’s life and if your life is ruined by someone telling the truth, it’s your actions that ruined your life not my words. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it, it did still actually fall. If someone discovers that it fell ten years after it did, it did still fall ten years ago and remains fallen. If a murderer saw it fall, the murderer is wrong for the murder, but the tree did actually fall. I don’t know how to make sense of all if it in the present, it’s hard, but I’m not motivated by attempting to ruin anyone’s life, I am motivated by trying to understand mine. And a part ofn understanding my life is about developing better systems of recognising which behaviour is okay and which is not. I want it to be obvious, okay? But there is a lot at play which influences a person’s ability to parse good-faith engagement from predatory intent. There is the social aspect of community, of course, of disparate levels of power between players, of experience-politics, of standing in the community used as currency. There is all of that, but there is also stuff that is a lot more personal. For one thing, my baseline for trauma is ridiculous and broken, a lot of things that should feel wrong to me, don’t feel wrong when they happen to me because they aren’t internalised as anything close to trauma and that makes it feel like it must be okay. It’s intuitive and it’s hard to learn that your intuition is broken so you must rely on an external morality in order to know whether or not you were violated. If you ask me about a lot of my life, I will tell you that it was fine, when I give you details, you will tell me that it was not fine but I will still feel like it was.

Trauma is not the only reason, I am also, autistic. That’s the first time I have said that, like that, since being diagnosed a while ago, and I feel uncomfortable (for personal reasons) but I’m going to leave it there. Being autistic does not mean I am just open prey because I don’t know better, no it presents a different set of challenges, in that, I am a pretty shit judge of people’s intentions (ie: I just believe they are what I am told they are) and a lot of social behaviour seems strange and makes me uncomfortable anyway, so things that are actually predatory slip through the cracks sometimes because they make me uncomfortable the same way as a lot of social behaviour that I am told is normal, does. Moreover, a lot of times, I don’t actually know how I feel (about something), I use a system of evaluation that incorporates the social, human, political, emotional, moral etc aspects of things and deduce what a human being would feel in that situation based on the specs and then I have that emotion. Or, at least, I log it as the one I am having. For most of my life, I thought this is just how people have emotions, and then when it was clear it’s not, I believed it’s how I have them, now I have a better understanding of how my neurotype influences my interpretation of what I feel and I find, when it comes to most of my life, I have no idea how I actually feel, I just know what I logged. And that means I revisit parts of my life and attempt to gain a more tactile understanding of how I felt about things that happened. If the act of me revisiting means that I am not happy I made a particular decision, that’s on me, but it does often, also mean, that the people around me who participated wilfully ignored their own ethics as well, and that’s on them. It was always on us, how much on whom is a different discussion, but like literature, our consent was meant to stand the test of time. Even if we didn’t see it that way back then.

And I know what happens when you have discussions like this. There are always actors who tell you that it is unfair to them for us to view the past through the mores of the present (and maybe there is some truth to that) but there are also patterns and systems of abuse that enabled the mores of the past, and sometimes you see those clearly only in retrospect. I don't think the past, as it stood a decade ago, was a time when it was okay to stalk women, make them feel like they owed you something for hurting your feelings or one where people who teach classes on consent thought it was fine to whip strangers you never even had a conversation with about limits or safewords. I think the past did, however, contain an environment in which such things were allowed to flourish and that's why I want to talk about these things. Not because I want to be empathized with as a victim, but because if I had been more aware of the patterns of predation that existed within the community when I was making these decisions, I may have viewed them differently then as well. If I had better systems of emotional regulation and identification, I may have as well.