Posted by skyfox
on Mon 23 Mar 09, 4:43 PM to skyfox's blog.
I wasn't entirely happy with my first attempt, so I'm trying again. (Practice makes perfect, after all. I'll work it out eventually, I'm sure.)
Imagine, if you will, a table, two by two.
................Active..................Passive
Positive...........x.......................z.....
Negative...........y.......................a....
Active/Positive: Asking someone "Can I do this?"
Active/Negative: Removing consent from an activity
I'm not entirely sure what Passive consent looks like. I want to say it's silent, but silence goes with the above two active consents. In A/N (y), silence is consent, as the active part comes when consent is removed. But in A/P (x), silence may not be consent.
If someone asks, can I kiss you, the options are 1) say no, 2) kiss them, 3) change the topic, 4) do nothing. If I say no, then I am being active. The other responses are (I think?) passive. Yet while kissing them may show consent, and changing the topic non-consent, I don't really know what to do with the silence. My imagination tells me it could go either way depending upon a variety of small signals which are easily mis-read.
Perhaps active/passive should be explicit/implicit? Saying no is expicit removal of consent, kissing them is implicit granting of consent (or is that explicit?), changing the topic is implicit removal of consent, silence is... implicit... something.
Or perhaps there's a third dimension I haven't yet explored.
My suspicion (which has yet to be fully developed) is that most people do not agree on what consent is, and do not always recognise it in others.
The biggest rape myth of all is "she was asking for it", which appears in a variety of forms. "If she didn't want to X, she would not have done Y." This leads me to one of two conclusions: either this is a excuse which they do not beleive, or it is a truth which they beleive. If it is the latter, then this issue is that the rapist in question did not know what consent looks like. I beleive this miscommunication is the source of a lot of trouble and is why there is so much sexual abuse that is not convicted.
In SM we are lucky in that all people know what a safeword means. Once a safeword is established, there is no room for excuses of "I didn't know." The only exception being, again, those scenes where the sub doesn't safeword for some reason or another.
