David Davis 46, part 5

there is no "safe": my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Another day, another book about sexual consent—if such a thing is even possible! For The New Inquiry, Sohum Pal reviewed Manon Garcia’s The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex, which “asks if consent could be retooled to serve the ideal of ‘good sex,’ sex which is not only pleasurable, but also ‘a moral good.’”

Yikes! I haven’t read Joy myself, so I’ll rely on Pal to do the heavy lifting for me, beginning with Garcia’s muddled logic: “Of predominant concern for Garcia is the condition of patriarchy, but one might easily extend the same question to the logics of colonialism and racism, of ableism, or of economic class (Garcia never arrives at such questions…).” And then there’s the limited scope: “Garcia seems somewhat mired, perhaps because her prescriptions rely on the thin premise that there is a unitary act called sex, a denial of the possibility that any sex between any two (or three or four or more) involves new negotiations of preferences and practices.”

Pal notes Garcia’s inclusion of BDSM in a historical survey of philosophies of consent, which leads directly, he writes, to her questioning whether the social hierarchy allows for any consent at all, ever, period. For Garcia, the tricky issue of sexual consent is a nut to be cracked—until an actual redistribution of power is the nutcracker, in which case the entire exercise suddenly falls into question.

BDSM’s various consent frameworks often pop up in texts about sexual consent, but rarely are their logics taken seriously by the academics that put them there—how can they, while dismissing sex workers as drivers of patriarchy (speaking of chestnuts…), as Garcia does? For her, BDSM is an abstraction within the greater abstraction of consent, not a real thing that real people do (unless they’re mentally ill, but this naturally disqualifies them from the category of “real people”).

Here’s the thing: any narrative that frames sexual assault as an aberration rather than as deeply normalized will only ever root around in the mud of its own normalcy. A failure to engage in the material contexts in which questions of consent arise results in books like Joy, which, per Pal, “[claim] to be speaking in universalisms but only [deploy] evidence from heterosexual, gender binary particularities”¹. Even if a white-washed, straight-laced version of patriarchy is the problem, as Garcia argues, the solution will not be discovered by those served by it.

As I mentioned last time, there’s a strong argument to be made that the connection, presence, and community required to pull off a safer SM practice means that that practice is extremely consensual, even more so than vanilla sex—not by necessity, but by design². In positioning BDSM as little more than a foil of the mystical “moral” (🤮) sexual encounter, the thinkers churning out claptrap like Joy not only fail to solve for real sexual consent, but reinforce the reactionary and conservative strains of thought animating its dominant discourses. As Pal writes:

“Consent is a heuristic for assessing the legality of a sexual situation, but it cannot be a heuristic for understanding what is desired or desirable sex. This is the difficulty with desire—there are no intellectual shortcuts or heuristics to be taken. Rather, in understanding our own desires and the desires of others, we are forced to take a step into the darkness, complete with the risks of guessing wrongly and falling through.”

What if sexual consent isn’t to be found in normalcy? What if a bold pursuit of it is what led us to SM in the first place? What if a desire for pain, control, or stigmatized sensations and relations—in opposition to legal, consecrated, procreative, heterosexual sex—is what actually produced the advanced consent practices that you and I are currently thinking our way through?

I’m being a little provocative, but also…not? This series isn’t just about tracking down the SDATs whose habits, practices, and beliefs cultivate safer play. It’s also about divining what it is that we want before, during, and after we get it—which really matters when we’re involving other people in our desires.

It’s tempting to make a home in Garcia’s world. If only sexual consent was always as easy as yes or no. If only creating more laws to punish its transgressors would eliminate the violence bred by police, prisons, and the state. If only putting even more of the onus on survivors of sexual assault (and those slated to become them by an inegalitarian society) could unpaint this corner. But it’s not always that easy. And caging people doesn’t reduce the incidence of sexual violence. And sometimes there really is nothing that you could have said or done to have prevented that person from hurting you.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know this: safer sadists, dominants, and tops want your consent—and understand that it’s complicated. More on that next time.

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1. I think Pal’s language is clunky here, but you get the point.

2. I am obviously not saying that consent violations don’t happen with SM, or that consent cannot exist in normal sexual contexts.