The CNC Sextbook: Chp 1: What is Consensual Non-Consent?

(A Word document of these notes can be downloaded at the bottom of this page, please do not disseminate). 

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Chapter 1
What is Consensual Non-Consent?

Chapter Overview.
Consensual Non-Consent or CNC is an often misunderstood or condemned method of practising BDSM. There are major misconceptions about what it represents, how it manifests and whether there is any possibility of doing it safely. In this chapter, we shall go through an introduction to CNC, attempt to give it a (non-exhaustive) definition, try to understand why the desire manifests, discuss it as a function of a scene and as a function of a dynamic, and how those two situations differ.

What is Consensual Non-Consent? (CNC)

There is a temptation to give CNC an act-based definition. As a result, it is often used synonymously with the term rape-play or perceived as rape itself. However, CNC is not an act-based condition, it is an ideological one. It is the ideological condition within which the need for proximal consent to activities or states of being is mitigated by an overarching, pre-negotiated form of consent which contains the possibility for proximal consent to be violated. For the purpose of this book, we will divide consent into these two types:

- Proximal consent (as in consenting to the act in the moment, right before it happens, which is the consent you'd fetishize having violated).
- Overarching consent (as in freely consenting to the possibility of having proximal consent violated before any engagement between parties and the negotiated delineation of the circumstances in which it is and is not acceptable to all parties involved)

There are those of us who feel the desire to:
- Not be able to opt out of something.
- To be forced to do things (we may not necessarily want to do in that moment).
- To be unable to say no or to not have our refusal heeded.
- To be unable to stop playing when or if it gets impossible to bear or too intense.
- To have no choice in the matter or any power to influence joint decisions.
- To not be able to call time of death on a situation by way of safeword or revocation of consent.  

CNC contains the entire gamut of activities that meet one or more of those ideological conditions, but with the caveat that the element of non-consent that is contained within them is agreed upon, discussed, negotiated by all parties involved in sane mind and with complete awareness prior to embarking upon any of these possibilities (and we will get into how that can be done effectively, in the next chapter). By this definition, anything can fall under the umbrella of CNC, but the acts tend to follow a pattern, especially since for most people the purpose of engaging in CNC is to approach a state of panic, suffering, helplessness, intensity, extreme devotion, shock or sometimes even trauma. It is an edgier form of play and should be understood as such so all parties know exactly what they mean when they refer to it.

Things like the following may comprise how CNC-based acts manifest in scenes/relationships:
- Nondescript elements: A feature of CNC (and it is not a compulsory one, so it may not apply to all relationships) is that you consent in advance to things that are not fleshed out or known to you when you consent to them. For instance, your top may spring something you have not specifically discussed before — an implement, an action or even another person — during a scene.

- Non-desirable elements: The manifestation of this condition may also come in the form of things that the bottom is known to dislike (but not hard limits that have been determined during the process of negotiation). For instance, I really hate fruit flavoured pudding and food play of every kind, but it’s not a hard limit, it’s just something I hate, so a partner once made me eat a bowl of lychee pudding while they beat me. I hated it and would never have agreed to do that had our relationship not been governed by the norms of CNC.

- Triggering or Traumatic elements: One of the features of CNC is that it allows one to approach spaces of trauma, even if the traumatized party expresses resistance to being in those spaces. It possesses the possibility to trap one at the point of the trigger, given that there is little recourse to back out once you have already begun. It's like walking a tight-rope to the middle and then realising you are terrified, whether you go forward or backwards, you will still have to finish.

- Conflicting States of Being: You may end up in a situation where something you don't want to find pleasurable is pleasurable and something you always find pleasurable suddenly isn't.

- States of Long-Lasting Impact: Even if the engagement into this mindspace is incidental and short-term, there is the possibility for it to approach a space that may permanently or temporarily alter your feelings about a certain act or create a new trigger.

It is important to recognise and decide which one of these elements is admissible and agreeable to you. One must consider the possibilities presented by CNC in their most explicit states in order to truly understand to what you are consenting. It is not about making a list and consenting to all the activities on that, it's about consenting to the possibilities that fall under certain ideological conditions, even when they may be unknowable to the parties involved in explicit terms. The decision to engage in CNC is not one that should be made casually or lightly, and perhaps the most important step, and the one to consider right off the bat is the question of why.

Why Do You Want CNC?

The reasons may differ for each person and due to the limitation of only being one person (which I hate) I cannot exhaustively consider all possibilities, so I request that any reasons suggested in this section be viewed as possible answers, a guide to questioning or information to add to the extant narrative and not be taken as definitive answers on the matter. 

The foremost matter to remember is that the question of "why" is being asked to both the top and the bottom. There is a dangerous and erroneous prevailing narrative that only the bottoms need explain or struggle with their desire to subject themselves to something so seemingly awful, and that the reception of this condition is harder than its subjection. This is not true. Sometimes this bias is present because it is much harder to ask some questions from the perspective of the top, than it is from the perspective of the bottom. There is less social condemnation to contemplating why I want to feel violated than to contemplate why I want to violate someone. In the worst and least tolerant interpretation of these states, the recipient is perceived as damaged but the enforcer is viewed as dangerous/predatory, the threat of being seen or seeing yourself that way can stand in the way of thorough examination, and if you are deterred by the process of examination then perhaps you are not ready. 

The insinuation is not that the bottom is damaged nor that the top is dangerous, the insinuation is that the bottom could be damaged and the top could be dangerous and in the absence of thorough examination of the cause, you may not be aware of the vulnerabilities in your own mechanisms that ensure you know to protect yourself from being damaged or harming another person. It's like this. If my tap is leaking, I can try to manage the situation by stemming the flow and placing a large container to collect the water, or I can investigate the cause of the leak and intervene on the causal level to ensure the problem is stopped before it leads to any further wastage of water. Investigating the cause of your desires allows you to solve problems before they manifest and cater to areas of vulnerability so as to strategically mitigate damage. There is no reason that is disqualifying right on the face of it, but there are reasons that could come from places that are volatile, and it is prudent to identify and circumvent issues that may arise from this space. Additionally, it is rare for our specialties to be a function of one thing alone, there are spheres within which we exist as sexual creatures — the personal sphere, the relationship sphere, the social sphere — and they likely all contribute to how you interpret a sexual fetish. Let us consider some of these spheres:

a) CNC as a function of trauma.
Perhaps the oldest stereotype associated with sexual fetishism is that it arises from trauma, and certainly, it may for some people, and it may not for others. It is important to dig deeper than that. Personally, the way that my desire to engage in CNC is related to trauma is not the nature or specifics of my trauma, but how I view trauma itself. I have come to see trauma as the most effective way of controlling a person and bonding them to you, there is a romance to it that I associate. Trauma enables a space where the only comfort you seek lies in the only thing you fear. This is not a desirable state to most people and it doesn't have to be, but to some people trauma possesses an allure. It is often construed as a coping mechanism (which it obviously can also be) to rewrite your own trauma and exert control over it by choosing it (which again, it can be and it's perfectly fine),  but sometimes it is not about dealing with your trauma, but wanting to access a space of intensity that is only enabled by trauma, and you know of this space, because you have known trauma.

b) CNC as a function of the socio-sexual script.
The sexual script refers to the prevailing trends, narratives, morality, social ethics and pop culture representations associated with one or more sexual act or sexuality itself at any given time in the society where you exist. The sexual script impacts your sexuality. On an individual level, we do not consider the social aspects of our sexuality and it is the nature of individuality for each person to believe that they are the chosen ones who are exempt from it. It's rarely the case. Usually, how wrong or right something seems is influenced by a personal set of ethics, which is at least, in part, influenced by social morality. 

In the case of CNC, it often manifests in the fact that choice is a fraught concept in our world that is only now working through the nuances and necessity of consent. For some people, particularly women, the moral expectation that they must say no becomes associated with sexuality in a way that is inextricable and in those cases saying no or at least, not outrightly saying yes, is a vital condition to being able to enjoy sex (et cetera) at all. The option to being rid of the pressure of choice is the mindspace that is required to expel the social script from your bedroom, and CNC enables that space. It is not to condemn or even disqualify this reasoning, it is to understand the formerly unconsidered spaces that influence our sexualities.

c) CNC as a function of desire.
The heart, well, it wants what it wants, doesn't it? The fact that something turns you on is a good enough reason to indulge in it (so long as it doesn't expose other people to harm they did know they were being exposed to and freely chose to be exposed to). While it is necessary to engage in a certain level of learning and theorising, the expression of sexuality should be based on the assumption of pleasure and liberation, not on a textbook. I realise the irony of this statement and I am choosing to ignore it because, well, there is some magic to the possibility of an existence where I get to write niche little textbooks about fetishism. Bullet points and sex, that's my fetish. 

It is entirely plausible for one's desire for something to have no cause more than that it makes them horny, but to come to that realisation, I would hope that person makes the joinery through all other realms of possibility as well.

The Structure of CNC

Aside from the question of where your desire emerges, there is also the question of the different ways in which CNC can be practiced. For the purpose of this discussion, I have classified it into two sections:
- Scene-based CNC
- Dynamic-based CNC

1. Scene-Based Consensual Non-Consent
In such a conception of this phenomenon, the conditions of the construct would exist only within a pre-negotiated scene, with a particular person and within a predefined time-span. The conditions elapse at the end of play (and whether that is before or after aftercare is up to you and your comfort). The primary consideration when opting for scene-based play (especially with a new person) would be to realise that you two may not have developed the extensive non-verbal vocabulary that can only be developed when engaged in such play together and to overcome that by communicating exhaustively (and we shall discuss this further in the chapter on safety).
The goals, conditions and manifestation of scene-based CNC may contain the following elements:

- Active (apparent) Violation of Consent
The core of the pleasure of CNC is the NC part, that's really the heart of the fetish for a lot of people. They don't want to feel powerless *in general* but in this scenario, they would like to actively experience being made powerless. They would like to beg another to stop and experience the powerlessness of being refused. The begging is as much part of the pleasure as the refusal and the scene is a way to play out that desire. To scream for someone to stop and have that be ignored, to cry for help and be unseen, to say no and have that be ignored. In a very literal sense, consent-bending is the fetish here and a scene is a great place to explore that desire.

- Pushing of Limits
Some of us would like to go past a point that we would never exceed if we had the choice to stop in the moment. It's similar to those five extra push-ups you do because your trainer is yelling at you, they're able to push you through to the ones you wouldn't have done if you had been working out alone. The pushing of limits (which is different from the pushing of boundaries) is about circumventing unavoidable human reflex to not push ourselves past a point, it requires the negotiated space to push because that reflex only shows up when you're already at breaking point. The pushing of limits is also about enabling, for yourself, the possibility of going further than you can envision going. It may also enable the quest to diagnose your limits (and you don't have to use this method, not at all, some people just like a baptism by fire). The pushing of limits also have the potential to be temporary, one person may push you past a certain physical point in the scene you have negotiated, but it does not have to be a reassignment of your comfort levels. It's a space that enables stepping out of your comfort levels for a short while.

- Circumvention of Choices
To some people, CNC as a condition enables the ability to go with the flow, to be freed of the need to make choices in the moment and/or to actively experience the irrelevance of their choices. It's like consenting to a mystery box of pleasure: you may not necessarily know what is going to happen, what will be used to cause it, where you may be touched or hit and how far it would go, but you consent to the possibility of all directions in advance.

- Intense Emotion
Actively engaging in play that may approach trauma or terror may enable temporary states of being that cannot be enjoyed unless curated, states like helplessness, petrification, reflexive response, non-verbal endurance, fear, violation etc. The pushing of physical boundaries and the inability to escape can lead to the feeling of being paused within an unpleasant but intense state, like touching a hot pan but being unable to pull your finger away.

2. Dynamic-Based Consensual Non-Consent
CNC as a dynamic, what I sometimes refer to as an edge dynamic, is much more complex and harder to manage. Within it, the overarching consent applies to all discussed aspects of a relationship, in perpetuity and perhaps in allyship with other systems and conditions of control. While scene-based CNC is more common, dynamic-based CNC is certainly more aspirational and a lot of people I encounter believe they would like to be in such a relationship. They may be, but there is a dearth of information about how a relationship based on the disqualification of proximal consent may really look. There are several circumstances, conditions and governing features that may arise from/exist within such a dynamic, directly or indirectly. The following features will delineate the potential aspects of CNC as a dynamic, not all of them apply to all people, but the intention is to make the list as exhaustively as possible so you know as many possibilities to consider as you can while making these decisions.

- The Pushing of Boundaries
Boundaries and limits are like climate and weather for the purpose of this analogy. While limits my something shift up and down during a scene, ones boundaries tend to remain stable over time. I may feel comfortable, for instance, holding the hand of a person with whom I am sharing an intimate moment, even though that is something of a limit to me, but despite that moment of transgressing my limits, it is unlikely that I will become comfortable with people approaching me with affectionate touch any time they like. The latter is a boundary. Over time, the continued erosion of your limits, the inability to have any control over what happens could lead to a change in your boundaries, one that may have been deliberately caused by your partner.

- The Circumvention of Will
Unlike the circumvention of choice, which is usually in reference to each instance of decision-making, will is about the desire to make choices in this context. In a scene you may have your choice nullified, ignored or reduced but a long-term circumvention of choices could lead to changes in how your exercise will. There may be cognitive dissonance about what you want and what you don't, but more importantly the condition that you cannot decide that anyway may manifest as a broken will.

- Conditioned Responses and Suppression of Reflexes
Ritual and long-term application of a pattern may lead to responses, like fear or panic, becoming conditioned in response to certain stimuli. Our bodies react to certain things before we can really intervene, and even for a lot of masochists, the initial experiences of pain can cause reflexive resistance and defence, however over time these responses may become stripped down and your sense of self preservation is altered.

- A Lack of Fairness or Reasonable Expectations
While this is not a condition that applies to all CNC-based relationships, it could apply to some. The general perception is that if you submit to someone, or you dominate someone, there is an expectation of reasonable fairness, but in a circumstance where the dynamic of power can be enforced without consideration of the other side, the bottom may sometimes find themselves in a space where whatever is happening seems fundamentally unfair. Personally, injustice makes me feel more helpless and shaken than any other state of emotional discomfort, and it's not because I cannot say no or explain myself, it's because neither of those things hold any water in that situation.   

- The Underlying Condition
The central, underlying condition for CNC is that you may fanastise about and even negotiate these things while you are turned on, but many times, they may come to pass when you are not turned on. It is important to remember that when you provide overarching consent, you are doing so even for the times when you are not really in the mood, tired, upset. There may exist, within your relationship, a level of consideration on the part of the top, but this is not guaranteed, and for some people, the lack of consideration is the point. It is vital that you consider all your fantasies about CNC in a mindset when you are not feeling particularly sexual to be able to determine whether this is really something you want on a long-term or ongoing basis.


How does CNC apply to your relationship?
There is a tendency for us to believe that with things, whether those are sexual fetishes or goals, it has to be all or nothing. It does not. CNC does not have to be all of your relationship for you to engage in it, you have the freedom to design how far it permeates. The following are a few ways it can influence your relationship:

- As an aid
It may exist to enhance the already existing power dynamic between the parties involved, it does not have to be at the heart of the power exchange. It can be used, from time to time, to increase intensity or remind of something or as punishment, but it need not be central to the relationship.

- As a central condition
It could also be the primary condition of your power dynamic, wherein it influences every single other aspect of your relationship dynamic.

- As a transient state
It could exist within certain spaces in your relationship. It could be that you engage with it during play or when in private sexual communication with one another, but there could be other spaces, like service or your general existence, to which it does not apply.

- As a guiding principle
In this form, you can may apply the sentiment of ownership as enabled by CNC but still have practices of proximal consent in place. The practices may not need to include asking or checking in every single time, but a signal or a private aspect of communication that aids in the comfort of all people involved.

Overall, one must not lose sight of the fact that in our sexualities, it is less important for us to stick to a script and more important for us to stick to the desires elicited by our knowledge of ourselves. CNC does have to look a certain way, it can be altered to suit you and your relationships, the vital bits are to ensure safety, pleasure and risk awareness for all.