The CNC Sextbook: Chp 2: Negotiating For CNC

Note: This is part of a textbook I am writing for the practise of CNC. The entire textbook will be available on my Patreon, the first chapter is posted here. There is a downloadable document at the bottom, please do not disseminate.

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Chapter 2

Negotiating For CNC

Chapter Overview.

In  this chapter we will go over the specific practises involved in negotiating for CNC. These are general negotiation tips and practises that can applied to both scene and dynamic-based CNC. We will end with a loose step-by-step process of negotiating.

What Are You Negotiating For?

There is a difference in negotiating for other scenes and in negotiating for CNC, the primary difference is that the goal when negotiating for scenes and D/s relationships of other kinds is to ensure that your (proximal) consent (which is the only kind of consent in question) is never violated as the bottom or top, and that as the top you ensure the safety of your bottom. CNC is different because you are negotiating to have your consent violated and the goal is to do so in a way that ensures maximum safety when you do have your consent violated. The following things should be kept in mind when negotiating for CNC:

1) You are negotiating to enable transgression.

This is about the goal of the negotiation and while effective communication to the end of revealing and understanding you and your partners’ paths to pleasure is part of the bedrock of negotiation, the active goals change based on what you are trying to accomplish. When negotiating for CNC, you are trying to create a path to safer transgression. You are attempting to create an environment where someone’s choice or will can be circumvented, violated or ignored in a manner that mitigates the potential damage from it.

2) You are negotiating to circumvent the non-reliability of in- scene/dynamic communication.

I never use safe words, because I use all my words. Whatever kind of scene or relationship I may be involved in, I say what needs to be said whenever it needs to be said, but CNC creates environments where the meanings of many words or phrases are distorted or to be ignored (ie; words like no, please stop, I cannot take it anymore). At the outset, it is vital to recognise that you are changing language itself for a person and creating a circumstance where even if they use that language reflexively, it wont be heeded, and as a consequence you must consider, prepare for and guard against the potential non-reliability of language in advance by establishing a system of communication that differs from the usual.

3) You are negotiating to do things that make you horny, at times when you may not be in the mood at all.

This is something that is at the heart of CNC or other such disciplines. For example, say you are a long distance swimmer, and you absolutely love to swim, but you also have goals you wish to achieve. In the interest of these goals you draw up a plan, a day-to-day regimen of exercise that you must follow, you are very excited. You get a nice new notebook, that smell of fresh stationery just driving you nuts, you put your plan down on paper, you cannot wait to start implementing it. On the first day you are so excited, you go do your think, you come back and note you time and distance, the second day is much the same and maybe even the third, but then on the fourth day, you’re tired and you feel unmotivated because the novelty of the planning has worn off and the notebook is old now, you wonder how bad it would be if you just skipped one day. Well, bad, it would be bad because discipline in terms of achieving goals means that you have to work at it, you have to stick to the plan, even on the days when you mist feel like saying no. And that’s CNC too, it’s fun to plan and wonderful to fantasise about but eventually, there will be a time, when you may be expected to stick to the plan when you are truly not in the mood. The conditions apply even when you are not horny.

How Do You Negotiate?

As such the process of negotiating for anything follows a predictable pattern, however the general term is mildly adversarial in its implication that each party is attempting to outwit the other in order to get the most out of the other. This is not the mindset with which any sexual interactions, least of all CNC, should be approached. There are no winners or losers in this type of negotiation, it is designed to get to a place where all parties involved feel most safe, respected and excited by the prospect of their undertaking. If any party feels like they have lost something in the process of negotiating, that is a potential red-flag that should be investigated. The following is detailed methodology that you could adopt in order to negotiate for CNC scenes or relationships. It may not suit everyone and it may not be applicable as a blanket to all relationships, please do not apply it without conscious thought and understanding of yourself and your relationships.

Step 1

Negotiating With Yourself.

An effective negotiation needs to have goals because without them you will have no way of knowing exactly where it is you are trying to reach. The first step is to identify what it is you want. Before you can do this with another person, you must do it with yourself, negotiating with yourself is like preparing for a meeting at which you are expected to present your project. I usually do this by making two lists:

A list delineating exactly what I want from the (sexual) encounter : For instance, say I want to have a scene where my physical tolerance for pain is tested. I want to experience a state where I am taken past the point of my tolerance and beaten to an unknowable level that only comes to an end when my top decides that it does. In this scene, I want to be able to cry, beg and ask them to stop but not have that mean that my partner will stop or even, necessarily, alter what they are doing to me.

A list delineating all the hurdles to the achievement of that state and all the bits of information that have to be known in order to accomplish this state. In continuation of an exploration of the aforementioned situation, I will demonstrate the diagnosis of potential hurdles and necessary communication in reference to it.

A) To take me past my level of tolerance, the top needs familiarity with my level of tolerance. In general, I do recommend that transgressive states be approached with partners who have at least some familiarity in playing with you and the bottom have some familiarity with their own limits by way of experience and not notion, but it is not my decision how people do things so I my speaking with the assumption that the top may or may not be familiar with the bottom. In that case, how do you communicate your tolerance to a person? There are several ways. You could use your body as a guide and tell them how you mark, bruise, react or behave when approaching your level of tolerance. You could use potential implements as a guide and share your responses to each one to create a chart of how you internalise that pain and what that makes you feel and how it looks when you get to the state of too much. You could have them watch you play with another person, but that also should be taken with a pinch of salt because one’s reactions may vary from partner to partner.

B) How will they understand that I don’t mean no when I say or indicate it? There is a particular flavour of manifestation in CNC-scenes, and most often people, especially tops, who think that they are so super hardcore and awesome don’t consider how to feels to actually have a person tell you to stop and beg you to end their pain. When it actually happens, even though the person told you in advance that they don’t want you to pay heed to their protests, it’s not actually so easy to do that. It’s one thing to be turned on by the idea that someone is at your mercy, it’s another when they audibly beg you for that mercy and mean it. Your arousal does not always erase all societal morality, nor should it, the struggle to reconcile those things is a telling and vital process. As the top, it is natural to want to err on the side of caution, and as the bottom, it is a little bit difficult to exhaustively communicate exactly how you may protest. If you told your top you may say no but that should be ignored, they may be thrown if you say “I cannot take it anymore,” instead, but it is not possible to know in advance all combinations of protestations you may make. So, what do you do? I demonstrate, which is a solution that necessitates that you have an ongoing system on play with the other person and you escalate states in which you may protest over time. This is not the case that everyone desires in which situation, I recommend that you establish as many types of protests that you may register and explain where each one may be coming from.

C) In beating me to an unknowable level, will this person know that the limitations of being human still apply? It is important to be able to trust the skill of the person who may be hurting you to a point that is past your tolerance. On my end, I know that I am always most stressed when I cannot be ensured a level of safety that keeps me alive. I have no problem with the possibility of being cut when someone is running a knife over my genitals but I will not enjoy that at all if I cannot take for granted that the blade was cleaned and disinfected. Similarly, I want to approach spaces where I cannot take the pain anymore, but I cannot relax into them if I cannot trust that you wont burst my eardrum in the process. Experience is one element of this, of course, but I have no qualms about testing and extensively questioning my top’s anatomical knowledge when it comes to pain-delivery. I also feel it is perfectly fine to have shortcomings in your understating but those shortcomings must be factored into the type of play that we design. If the top wishes to further their knowledge of something or learn something new, I do not engage in those scenes with the conditions of CNC in place (expect with my long-term partner). You can violate me most safely with things you have achieved some level of proficiency at.

D) In the absence of reliable communication, will they even know when to go for the kill switch? Quite obviously, there is a fairly high level of surrender involved here, but to achieve the ability to surrender, I need to know that my responses are understood by my partner. Unlike safe words which communicate when to stop, states of being demonstrated through response communicate what your bottom is going through at any given time, and how to interpret it. When a usually quiet person starts to scream a lot that means something different than when a generally screaming-person starts to cry. I need the comfort of my top understanding the various modes in which I demonstrate my suffering and what each of them mean (especially in terms of what I am going through, emotionally). Without that, I do not believe any top can make a genuinely informed and reasonable decision on when to stop and when to continue. In all likelihood, I will not be able to make a good decision on that front when I am entrenched in the state of suffering, I may make a decision that damages me or I may make one that stands in the way of my own achievement of my sexual goals, and for the top to make the best  and most gratifying decision they need to know all I know and all they know. I can trust people when I know they are operating out of a corpus of information as opposed to desire alone.

Questions like these, ones that arise from your own description of what you wish to attain sexually, form the raw material that you bring in to negotiate with another person. Aside from the questions that arise from the situation and the basic information (limits, likes, boundaries, etc) you would provide to another person, I also recommend evaluating yourself for the following information:

- Your risk assessment and the method with which you assess yourself for risk: All of us present risk in some way to our partners. For instance, when a very specific response of preservation is triggered in me (and it usually happens when someone attacks me in the chest, or makes me feel like they are about to attack me in my chest), I reflexively respond by grabbing their throat. That is a risk I present to someone who may play with me, especially in CNC circumstances. The risk you present may be too much for some partners and alright to others, but they all have the right to know all of it, in order to fairly choose whether they wish to engage in this way. In locating all the ways in which you present risk, you will need a method and the other party should know your method as well.

- Your signatures: Many of us have similar physical experiences when it comes to exploring BDSM — whips, chains, gags, rope — but we don’t all have the same associations with those things even when they are identical. Our experiences, especially our emotional experiences, determine how we receive things and they are truly unique to us. They are our signatures and sometimes that means that our responses to certain things cannot be predicted by the other party using any normative metric, so you have to identify your signatures and make sure they are known.

- Your trauma responses: You can and if you do this long enough, will, be traumatised by it at some point. It goes without saying that an understanding of your trauma is key but also ensuring that you communicate how you may respond to trauma after the fact. I have a friend who is really into cuckolding but they are also genuinely traumatised by the process, and as a result of this, they experience great, overt pleasure in the moment, and afterwards, usually the next day, they experience neglect, even if their partner is ensuring they get their attention and aftercare. Usually, this person will attempt to pick fights or re-interpret every instance of the play that transpired through a different lens. This response to trauma could be disqualifying for some. For some people, and it is okay, the fact that this personal experiences an emotional state of neglect after the fact may mean that they cannot do it, but for others, it means that if they had this information, the information that tells them about the potential for this response, they could prepare for it better. Even when you think that your responses to trauma may make you “look bad,” it is better to share them because it is much worse to subject another to them and make them doubt your relationship, or to suppress or hide them. The nature of informed consent is that you have the responsibility to not only communicate exactly what you would like to do but also exactly who you may be when you do it.

Step 2

Studying One Another For Data

Once you have clarity on the information about yourself, you must communicate that information to the other party and receive theirs. It sounds like I am saying that you need to prepare dossiers and exchange them, and I think that is cool to do, but you don’t actually have to do it that way. You can obviously just talk about it like normal human beings who aren’t obsessed with buying folders. The purpose is really to test for compatibility and there is no reason for it be dry or boring. This is a stage of discovery and at this stage there is no need to commit to anything or even make any decisions at all. Several things to keep in mind:

- It Is likely that your systems of data-collection about yourself are different from theirs. Use their system to address the gaps in yours, and encourage them to use your system to address the gaps in theirs.

- Postulate as many “what if” scenarios as you can muster. Eg) What if I start screaming with no proximal explanation, how would you react to that? What if I start to cry, how do you feel about that? What if I feel like I have sufficiently pushed your boundaries but you don’t feel pushed, how would we communicate that?

- Get a sense for how they would respond to errors or unforeseen situations.

- Inquire about their previous experiences and how they handled various challenges in those situations.

- Always, always, always investigate the WHY. To me, understanding why someone wants to do something is always the most important part of the process of negotiation. It helps me decide whether this person is right for me, what questions I should ask them, whether our motivations align well enough to make magic and the potential areas of vulnerability we may make together.

Step 3

Reconciling Your Goals To Formulate A Joint-Goal.

People are not fetish-disposal mechanisms and it is important to recognise that your goals may be at odds with those of another in which case, you are not well suited to do this with one another, or their goals may only align with a portion of yours. You have to prepare the Venn diagram of what you bring to the table and what they do and find the shaded area which you can safely and pleasurably approach with one another. Some of the things you want could be hard limits for the other person or they could be areas in which they lack experience so while they may be open to exploring that further, they may not wish to do so within the confines of a CNC setup. Right off that bat, it must be established what actions, behaviours and areas of engagement fall under the CNC umbrella for you, and it does not have to be everything. My recommendation is to start with things and in spaces where you are most compatible and most experienced so that the only element of discomfort is the potential violation and not everything you are doing together. Too often, I hear stories from bottoms about consenting to a CNC scene and being subjected, without the option to call death, to things that they had neither done nor truly fathomed doing before. Let the initial stages of your CNC-based interactions be on an opt-in basis instead of an opt-out one. If you are extremely experienced at whips but not at choking, go past your limits with whips to most safely experience and understand your responses to violation. With a partner, this translates to finding spaces where you have established the most trust with each other.

Step 4

Repeat Step 1 Together.

The second time you perform the first step, you have t make both lists as a team as opposed to individuals based upon the establishment of what it is you wish to accomplish together (and can safely accomplish together) and what hurdles may stand in the way of that. After preparing these lists, a discussion of the hurdles and how they are to be circumvented is warranted in great detail.