CHALLENGING CONSENT

(based upon a letter - this is a response)

The concepts of consent were very, very carefully thought out since this community has spent many years being viewed as the same as abusive or assaultive relationships. If a relationship has no inherent check or balance and the dominant person within the relationship becomes damaged, mentally ill, or otherwise altered (say by drugs), then that dominant person may, can, and will take actions against their submissive to damage, injure, or even kill them. Willfully placing yourself in a position where great harm may be done to you challenges the very fundamentals of what is safe and what is sane - essentially, you have to remain functionally competent or able to 'choose' in order to meet any of the three ideals of SSC.

Power is a corruptible condition and should not exist without some measure of restraint in place to govern its excesses.

I understand your 'fantasy' desire to be completely owned, but this is more an issue within yourself or how you elect to view your relationship rather than existing in reality. You desire to be 'unable' to stray or say no. The truth is that you can always stray or say no; the true bindings against such behaviors must come from within yourself, not be imposed upon from without. A dominant is not a warden, guarding or imprisoning your errant behaviors. You are the warden of yourself, and any compliance you give to a dominant will truly be hard won from that ego center within yourself each and every day of your life.

Any relationship, D/s included, takes vast amounts of patience, communication, luck, and hard work to be functional, particularly those who elect to live in such relationships full-time. You do not escape any of these things by becoming or presenting yourself as a slave; you merely address them from that context while within the actual relationship.

What lives in the mind is far different from what reality feels and lives like. I sincerely counsel you to approach a D/s relationship without the presentation of the needs of such a fantasy. See how the relationship works and slowly approach a condition of consensual slavery if that remains your desire once you are within a relationship for a 'loooooong' time. When in truth and reality you functionally know the nature of how you actually live, then both parties to the relationship can make 'informed' choices on how to apply those structures. At this point, you are not informed or have not lived this reality and are, by and large, incompetent to make such a choice. What you do have is ideas and dreams which you 'think' you want. What the mind can do in fantasy and what the mind can do in reality are often light years apart.

SSC are actually forms of 'acceptance of responsibility' for oneself. They are the means we use to say no to abusive persons and abusive relationships masquerading as D/s or BDSM. If the self becomes incompetent or is unable through poor mental health (such as low self esteem) to know what is destructive, health threatening or mentally damaging to themselves then they lose the ability to adequately protect themselves from persons or situations which can damage or destroy them - this means they are 'unable' to offer 'reasoned' consent - any consent given in such a situation is considered to be derived from duress, pressure or coercion and is merely a mask to cover or hide nonconsensual assault.

In the end, your mental and physical health and well-being are 'your' responsibility. This does not change when you become involved in a relationship; it merely becomes blurry when responsibility 'issues' appear on the surface to be shifted from one person to the other.

Lastly, creating or living in a relationship is not an 'end' goal. Relationships, by their very nature, are in constant evolution and change; the rules you set up today may become ridiculous or worthless tomorrow when the circumstances and dynamics of your relationship are different. This is generally why 'contracts' tend to fail; many contracts view a relationship as a contained ending, spelling out how each person will act, feel, and behave - forever. These immediately become limitations to exploration and growth, evolution and change, and most often it is the rules which are vanquished, not the nature of change itself. For a relationship to survive, all parties to the relationship must remain flexible, dynamic, and open to the processes of change. You cannot possess a relationship like a trophy on the shelf, but you should consider yourself eternally 'earning' that relationship every day, every moment, every choice you make. If you elect to write a contract, remember that what you truly end up with is a piece of paper with words on it - the person, the relationship, is not embodied within that paper - the paper offers merely a description of your ideas based upon an unknowable future.ge.

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AN* - Archivist Note: Links for email are no longer valid. Bookstore link is for a heritage site that is no longer active; the successor live site may not have the OP's works.