We might broadly define consent as a wholehearted and mutual ongoing agreement between parties and/or individuals towards a common goal. Consent lies at the crux of radical imaginings. Practicing consent is all the more important since we did not consent to capitalism. In a world of non-consent, consent becomes radical.
But what is consent? We often hear about consent in terms of sexual praxis. Consent is saying “yes,” asking/waiting for the emphatic “yes,” and listening to “no.” It is practicing boundaries, both towards oneself and others. However, consent is more than that. Consent is an ongoing and nuanced exchange. Consent can be ephemeral and allows itself to be invoked, revoked and tailored to complex, evolving situations. Consent is a conversation and demands a back and forth. Consent challenges us to lay our desires bare at the feet of our lovers and comrades while centering their desires with our own.
Consent may best be defined as a harmonious understanding between all parties involved. Some things we can do to be better at consensual, harmonious engagement include:
• Being honest about our own desires and limits
• Sticking to our own boundaries
• Honestly acknowledging the boundaries of others
• Sticking to their boundaries
• Predicting changes in boundaries when possible
• Asking for continuous feedback
• Giving continuous feedback
• Being open and enthusiastic about receiving feedback!
We can practice these principles anywhere, anytime – not just with lovers. Consent and its practice allows us to reverberate within pleasurable, harmonious and truly revolutionary moments, rather than to become trapped within our individual mental prisons. Consent dares us to imagine affinities that encompass yet surpass sex. The revolutionary possibilities are endless. Consent is merely the beginning.
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Being here in our bodies and present is essential for good sex as well as resisting the Empire. The body is the first and most foundational place to occupy. If we are not embodied, we struggle to feel our own needs and desires, lose track of our edges, and our yes’s and no’s. As sex educator Ariel Szabo says, “Disembodiment blunts the signals consent relies on. Desire gets confused with obligation, fantasy, or performance. Your body’s signals arrive late, muted, or not at all. …numbness masquerades as neutrality, freeze looks like agreement, and people pleasing passes as generosity. It doesn’t stop with you. If you can’t feel yourself, you will struggle to feel another. This is why the Empire has purposefully created a culture of disembodied people. They want a population where people don’t feel the ways they take from the people and the land without consent.”
The Empire actively encourages and produces disembodiment, because a disembodied populace becomes quickly complacent, easier to control. When we are disembodied, desires can be easily fed to us. The disembodied person easily accepts “tomato” as the pale, mealy, corporate-grown product at the supermarket in the middle of winter, not knowing the juicy asymmetrical cleaved lusciousness and jeweled variety of ones grown in our own garden. If we accept hegemonic definitions of sex, what are we missing?
The point of this article is not to suggest that everyone should love “heirloom tomatoes,” if you follow the tomato metaphor. Some people don’t even like tomatoes or sex! The point is that you have a smorgasbord of options. Some people are asexual (Ace), some are hetero monogamous, some are queer, some are poly. Let us not forget the joy of solo sex! The point is that each of us does what brings us pleasure. By defining sex positively, as a mutually pleasurable energetic exchange, everything other than that is something else: complacency, freezing, coercion, violence.
When we embrace embodied mutual pleasure as a guiding principle, presence, communication and play become our guides. Let us slow down, experiment, and stumble our way into ecstacy. For an easy, low pressure, low stakes way to experiment, look up the work of Betty Martin and the Three Minute game to feel for yourselves the difference between giving and receiving, taking and allowing, and practice saying yes and no.