These refer to a number of writings from workshops on consent. These concern a number of perspectives that are still quite often (but not always) not taken into account, both through lack of mention of the people and communities involved and through making 'general statements' which may invalidate, or be seen as invalidating, some such people and communities.

Comments from Polys (Polyamorous people)

* Concerning statements like "I have a boyfriend/girlfriend means NO". Well, in the case of a Poly person, this might mean "I need to tell my current partner(s) about all prospective further partners" (and might include doing so at an unstressful pace).

Also, regardless of whether a person is Poly, if "I have a boyfriend/girlfriend" is met by such as "I don't care" or "they won't find out" or "so do I, who cares?" one might consider one has further reasons to not want to have anything to do with this person.

Back to the case of Poly people, if talking with a person that doesn't even know you have a partner, it would be entirely normal to say "I have a boyfriend/girlfriend" well before deciding whther to come out as Poly to the person one is talking with. As such, stating "I have a boyfriend/girlfriend" can be a useful preliminary toward determining whether the other person would respect one's other partners, or, indeed honour any Poly pacts they themselves make.

* Another issue here is that NO NOW doesn't necessarily mean NO NEVER.

Some ways of saying NO carry more connotations of NO NEVER than others; there are also entirely clear ways of saying NO NEVER, and of clarifying that NO means NO NEVER.

For instance, "don't touch me" can be enhanced to "don't touch me ever (again)".

Comments from non-drinkers and others who benefit from expanding consent workshop mentions of 'alcohol'

* While issues involving alcohol are commonplace in situations involving consent, one should be aware that substituting "alcohol" for a less culturally normative substance does not alter the intent of the statement. % The same applies to various other reasons which are not necessarily substance induced.

* So such as 'stay away from me because you are drunk' should be reusable as 'stay away from me because you are high' or 'stay away from me because you are angry'. % The basic form here is 'You're not in a good state, and your not being in a good state in no way obliges me to accept your advances or be pressured by you. Nor shall your not being in a good state in any way serve as a valid excuse for your unwelcome/intrusive behaviour toward me.'

* And similarly for such as 'regardless of whether I've been drinking, I don't consent', and 'I've been drinking, so I am not in a good state, and I'm not comfortable with you putting your arm around me/offering to walk me home'. % Some parallels may include 'I am bereaved, so I am not in a good state ...' or `I've just been dumped, so I am not in a good state ...' % The basic form here is 'I've taken something/I'm under great distress at present, and, while that may render me vulnerable, as sure as hell I don't want your advances or your trying to take advantage of me'

* You should be aware that if you are receiving unwanted attention from someone who is drunk, high, in a rage etc, that while that is no excuse for their behaviour, it may be a cause of them not understanding what you're saying at the time. By which you yourself might choose not to confuse your being in the right with your not being in immediate danger. We will not however talk here about what to do if one finds oneself in definitely or potentially dangerous situations.

* You should be aware that assumptions like 'all students drink' or 'all students get drunk' may alienate a fairly large proportion of students who do not. It is a case of assuming, or only catering for, cultural normativity. E.g. some people do not drink for religious reasons, medical reasons, or safety reasons. Some consider they cannot afford to drink. Some international students come from countries whose culture associates drinking with moderation. Some have personal reasons to study hard without going drinking on some evenings, or are barred from drinking by sports coaches. Some of the above students are regularly and unwantedly pressured into drinking; some are bullied or ostracized for not drinking; it would do if the campus welfare and safety advocates don't come across as being one further group which only caters for 'normative drink culture students'. Finally, of course, some of these students who do not drink, or never to excess, have none the less been harassed, sexually assaulted or raped. Nor by any means were the perpetrators necessarily drunk at the time or habitual drinkers.

Comments from people who practise consensual BDSM

* Good, some consent workshops don't assume that everyone's sex life or love life is 'vanilla'. There are in fact many ways of not being vanilla; consensual BDSM is but one of a number of subsets on non-vanilla, so you shouldn't equate non-vanilla with BDSM. Still, BDSM can serve as example of non-vanilla elements. Lest you do not know, BDSM is more accurately B-D D-S S-M, standing for bondage-discipline, domination-submission and sadism-masochism.

* Our main point, however, is that once BDSM has been mentioned, a lot of further issues arise as regards how some 'consent workshops', 'survivor support' etc are phrased and run.

There is quite some tendency for people writing about consent to implicitly mean 'vanilla sex' when they say 'sex' and 'vanilla consent' when they say 'consent'.

Suppose now that one of the people involved does not perceive sex, or courtship, and therefore also unwanted courtship and harassment received, as being a solely vanilla province.

One can demand that another person not carry out acts of courtship in one's direction. Do not hold my hand, do not kiss me, do not try to kiss me, do not ask again whether I'll marry you. One can do so in the expectation that bystanders and the law will readily understand that these are courtship behaviours and in this case unwanted and clearly stated as so.

The point then is that one should also be able to demand that another not carry out unwanted unconventional acts of courtship also. Do not kneel before me, do not offer to beat me, cease to ask to be my slave or for me to spank you. Do not hang around in front of me with your wrists tied together in a piece of string. Do not tell me that your cuts and bruises are 'my fault'.

Doing such things unwantedly is not BDSM; BDSM is consensual.

An individual who practises BDSM who carries out 'unwanted BDSM courtship' is an individual carrying out unwanted acts of courtship. This is harassment, even if almost nobody present understands wha is going on though not recognizing it as courtship. There are at least four sorts of cases of this.

1) It could happen to a person who does not know about BDSM. They consider the unusual behaviour directed at them to be unwanted, but don't even know what to call it. One does need to know the nature of unwanted behaviour in order to say it's unwanted. Eg one can use generalities in describing it, such as "not interested" and "stay away from me". As well as this dealing with not knowing what it is, this also covers against the possibility that the individual just passes from one specific type of unconventional unwanted action to another.

2) It could happen to a person who does not practise BDSM but is aware of BDSM. Such a person might say something along the lines of "It looks like you are flirting with me in a BDSM manner, but I am not a person who is into BDSM, and those are unwanted attentions".

3) The person receiving unwanted attentions may be a person who practises BDSM themselves. That does not give other people who practise BDSM 'licence' to give that person unwanted attention; indeed, those doing so are not adhering to the consensual norms of actual BDSM communities.

4) the person receiving unwanted attention may be Closeted Of most relevance, they could,

i) be Closet-BDSM. In this case they may not be willing to act as 2) or 3), but could use their knowledge to ensure that the 1) they use just happens to be effective. i) is furthermore a nontrivial case because the person could feel unduly affected by this behaviour. It could for instance be very intimidating or indeed felt in an unwanted sexual way. One might for instance want of the person one loves to kneel before them, but for some random person one does not know or like to carry out the same action... It's hopefully clear that this is much the same as the difference between a consensual kiss and some random person sticking their tongue down your throat without any kind of permission.

ii) They could be a Closet-Survivor. In this case, the nonconsensual element of the unwanted behaviour could be very hurtful, triggering, damaging. Also the lack of public recognition - for the nature of the courtship, its unwantedness, and the wrongness of being subjected to such unwanted courtship - could itself be very hurtful, triggering, damaging.

Finally, one might bear in mind that an individual subjecting others to 'unwanted BDSM courtship' could well be doing so from an abusive angle, e.g. specifically looking for who reacts badly and helplessly for reasons such as 4).

* Next let us consider consent in actual BDSM relationships.

I) May assumptions -- based on consent occurring in a vanilla context -- do not apply to the non-vanilla context; some of these may be, or be seen as, invalidating some or all of the consensual non-vanilla people.

II) On the other hand, many statements about consent that are reached by having large amounts of feedback including from LGBT* people, people who view sex and/or romance as other than vanilla, Ace/Aro/Grey/Demi people etc, are formulated in sufficiently general terms to not be, or be seen as excluding these.

As an example of I), once for instance bondage is involved, assumptions that one party 'has to be physically stronger than the other' go out of the window as regards being some kind of universal truth (such also do not apply quite generally to LGBT* and in a few other cases).

As examples of II) consent requiring constant communication and being retractable are useful conceptual properties for notions of consent that continue to apply well in BDSM. If a person consents to being tied up for a tickling or a light spanking, only to be subjected to unwanted penetration or non-consensual torture, then rape and/or serious sexual assault have taken place, and possibly other serious crimes too, such as malicious wounding.

* Consent is act by act. This is already true of vanilla sexual practises; the points at which BDSM enters the discussion are that BDSM has a far wider diversity of types of sex and/or of romance. Also that BDSM requires particular attention to be paid to consent, since many BDSM people do not consent to certain of the BDSM acts or romances, or their doing so may depend heavily on circumstances. Thus saying NO to specific things is very important.

* On these grounds, for instance, people who practise BDSM use safewords. These are recognizable and incontrovertible labellings for 'stop immediately'. Upon stopping, those present can determine what's not OK to the extent that those present are willing to disclose it. Thus the use of a BDSM safeword can be added to the list of ways of saying NO. This is rather probably a valuable example, not just through its inclusion of BDSM but through its generality also. It may for instance lead to vanilla people also setting up safewords, since safewords are much more 'a detailed means of stopping things immediately without question or any kind of confusion due to other uses of everyday words when consent is at stake' than they are a 'BDSM-specific' convention.

It is just that BDSM is a background in which there are many issues, including non-obvious ones, and out of this the use of safewords arose as a very fast, very clear means of not consenting to specific actions.

This covers, for instance, someone finding a conventionally non-sexual action makes them uncomfortable. In such cases, one may not be imediately able to tell which part of one's actions is causing this, and there are situations in which saying 'No' or 'Stop' can be confused or not picked up on, whereas saying a safeword would lead to an immediate cessation and an immediate understanding that it's a serious matter for the other person.

A serious matter regardless of whether it is conventional, of whether they are able or willing to explain it then and there. This revolves around safewords being chosen to be uncommon words that cannot be misheard as other words.

It also revolves around the safeword being the top priority, for instance if a couple are fantasizing about an overpowering, then ordinary words about overpowering may well be being said all the time. Then a non-consensual No might be confused with all the previous 'No's'. But the safeword itself would never be used as part of any fantasy, nor occur in the conversation by accident. Thus it always means 'stop immediately', it is never understodd as anything other than the safeword, it is always taken seriously and it is never contested, ignored, shrugged off or given secondary priority relative to anything else. To be clear, plenty of couples who do not identify as BDSM people on occasions fantasize about things, including overpowering. The point is that people who enact fantasies without being BDSM, or aware of safewords, may not realize that this can lead to situations in which one fails to be able to convey to one's partner that they are to stop immediately on grounds of consent. Those who practise BDSM, however, have thought about this kind of matter very careful and have consequently produced a safeword means of dealing with this issue.

People might then wish to take this piece of feedback from BDSM people so as to set up an incontrovertible means of retracting consent with a single clear and elsewise not used word. That means no having to 'explain', 'convince' in order to cease what one is not OK with. The other party has no excuse to 'assume it's a joke', 'not serious', 'laugh it off' or 'willfully misunderstand the signal'.

Some people who practise BDSM may additionally wear gags. This leads to the further issue that a person may consent to be in a position in which they cannot speak. Thus in some cases spoken safewords are insufficient. Due to this, safewords based on such as hand or body gestures can also be set up. The point here is that those who practise consensual BDSM have thought very carefully about such matters. These may test such as whether the safeword is audible through a gag or whether the person can indeed make the safeword hand gesture in the position they are tied up in, as well as not forgetting to constantly keep that hand in their field of view. The issue then is that people who are not part of this culture may not immediately understand the implications of e.g. partner 1 asking partner 2 to put partner 2's hand over partner 1's mouth during sex. Which include that if something then goes wrong, then partner 1 may not be able to convey to partner 1 to stop. For even if they had decided on a spoken safeword, they have veered into a situation in which that is insufficient precaution.

The safeword logic, then is to cover all situations one has with one's intimate partner(s). One then only tries something new if one is certain that the safeword set-up already in place has been carefully checked not to break down in the new setting. Whereas it is seldom the case that trying something new requires the safeword set-up to be expanded, this is an important matter whenever a new situation has any capacity of interfering with the existing safeword set-up. Matters of consent having top priority then translates to having a sufficient safeword set-up prior to any other considerations of trying new things out. Many people will, in retrospective, understand that gagging, or holding one's partner down, can be dangerous regardless of whether indeed one's partner asked for these. This is because such can lead to not being able to communicate 'no consent' to something else occurring while in this state. Some people will respond to this by refusing to gag or hold down their partner. Some people, however, feel being gagged and/or restrained as sexual. Some of these people may feel considerably more sexual pleasure in such situations, some may even not be able to feel any sexual pleasure without such elements. In such cases, one may be willing to do what it takes to have those experiences, consensually and elsewise safely. For some people, such experiences take the place of what a vanilla person experiences as sex. Moreover, these situations are entirely legal provided that all involved consent to them. Due to these things, those who don't feel that way have no right to invalidate those who do. One reasonably common element is that the person who wishes to be 'held down' is the stronger partner; in such cases, restraints will be used. However, it should also be pointed out that at lest some restraints are probably safer to use than holding down is, in the event of one's partner asking to be held down. Thus some people will, in retrospective, prefer bondage to being held down even if they are the physically weaker partner.

* Please note that safeword means of protection readily includes people who are Closeted, because it ensures that what they are not OK with stops without them having to detail why, or be subjected to having to argue why, thus risking or necessitating them to have to Out themselves. In particular, many Survivors are not Out about that, not even to their partners. It is then entirely possible for some of a Survivor's partner's gestures to trigger the Survivor, including a range of actions which do not usually have any sexual or romantic connotations. A Survivor might for instance not be able to tolerate types of contact that their abuser used, some of which could well not be seen as 'sexual'. Suppose for instance that an abuser used to hold the person they were abusing by the wrist whilst carrying out the threatening and silencing parts of the abuse. Then the Survivor might not be OK with their new loving partner putting their hand on their wrist. Clearly during sex there might be 'several to a dozen' points of contact of that kind of nature, and a Survivor may be unwilling to list things they know they are not OK with, and might in any case not know all such. Part of the issue is that a Survivor may not know which aspects of a particular gesture one is not OK with, without which one may not be able to give practical generalizations. Then promoting widespread use of safewords is helpful toward Survivors and other Closeted people, particularly in conjunction with not having to say why were they not out to their partner about why. Or in the case of it happening to be triggering, but as yet without there being a known underlying reason for that. Survivors and Closeted people may wish to take note that setting up safewords may help them put an immediate end to things you're not at all comfortable with, regardless of how 'conventionally sexual or romantic' these things are.

* Once restraints are involved, some of the assumptions made by those who 'speak for' or 'provide services for' survivors (but actually are only doing so for some subset of more normative survivors) can cease to hold. Firstly, it is possible to get restrained without consenting to be. Secondly, it is possible to be restrained on the pretext of it being for something one consents to, only for one to be subjected to non-consensual abuse. Such things are clearly not part of what consensual BDSM people do. They are rather what can happen when an abuser involves use of restraints. These things are one of the various means by which a 'physically weaker' person may sexually abuse a 'physically stronger' person. This can apply e.g. to women abusing men, to a substantially smaller Gay man abusing a substantially larger one, or to a substantially weaker Lesbian abusing a substantially stronger one. Wheras many acts of abuse are carried out by physically stronger people on physically weaker ones, the assumption that this is always the case is problematic. So is any kind of insensitivity or ridicule toward Survivors for which this is not the case. One might also consider, for instance, that people with stronger personalities or social standing may on occasion have the means of overpowering somebody by those means for the purpose of sexually abusing them. The same may apply to individuals with mean streaks and/or who are willing to commit other kinds of crime and/or abuse in order to get what they want. For instance, they might use blackmail to that end, or social ostracism, or the threat thereof from the position of being mcuh more 'popular' or 'socially connected' than the person they are targetting for abuse.

As regards descriptions of 'abusers', 'battering personality' etc.

* We point out here that such individuals do not just badly hurt others by conventional sexual or relationship means.

They might for instance use or enjoy 'BDSM' type things, except these are not consensual and thus not truly BDSM.

* Also, many individuals of the 'battering personality' have means of silencing people. They can use these to cover up either of the above, but it is well possible to be badly abused by such an individual's silencing itself, whether or not one ever had a relationship or sex with them. They might for instance be a 'work colleague' who enjoys hurting others at work, and covering it up.

Generally speaking, such people either enjoy hurting people in nonconsensual ways or are disposed to profit from situations regardless of whether this badly hurts anyone else involved. The latter includes, for instance, ruining the lives of 'perceived rivals', or ensuring their own promotion or election by underhandedly hurting other candidates.

They might for instance be posing as a friend that one unfortunately has come to confide in, who then reveals their callous nature as a controller, a blackmailer, a fraudster, a user.

They might be a family member who's a controller but not (so far as you know) a sexual abuser.

As such, we suggest that consent workshops be expanded to awareness of the different manifestations of what some such have called a 'battering personality', but few to date have expanded upon along the above and below lines.

* In particular, one should assert the right to not be botherered by non-sexual behaviour that makes one highly uncomfortable either.

* One does well to know that much of the abuse is carried out by such individuals, many of whom do so serially whilst using silencing to avoid detection. Such are often highly dangerous when confronted, including via being accustomed to ruining other people's lives and getting away with it in ways other than those they have so far hurt you with. So if somebody abused you sexually, say, and you confront them or report them to the police, don't let yourself be taken by surprise if the individual in question also turns out to be adept at telling lies, trying to shift blame, finding apparantly unrelated ways of causing you grief (including by means that cannot be traced back to them). Or of finding means of being controlling toward some of the people who matter to you, or who are part of the investigation.

This 'battering personality' is in fact well-known in each of life's walks, but those experiencing each case of it rather seldom join the dots to see that through i) paying too much account to the detail of how the individual misused their profession or their particular bond with you (partner/friend/family/stalker/work colleague...) And ii) through not having contacts in other professions, workplaces, or with other survivors so as to establish that much of what's gone wrong in each place is down to individuals with a common modus operandi when it comes to being hurtful, telling lies and silencing people.

* This leads back to the demography of abusers found e.g. in the US Air Force's study.

* The main points here are:

I) Much abuse is carried out by a very small fraction of the population, which does so repeatedly.

II) Education under the assumption that all there is behind abuse is widespread ignorance amongst well-meaning people does not work.

III) Serial abusers know who they are, and are largely impervious to changing their ways (other than by a subset of them being caught doing illegal things and having to spend some time in prison).

IV) The type of education that is likely to work is widespread awareness of the true demography of abusers. Thus talking about the nature of the abusers is likely to be an important part of consent workshops, which is why making such a point is a good step in the right direction.

V) The being aware across all walks of life aspect means that dealing with sexual abusers and sexual harassers, in isolation from dealing with abusers and harassers in other parts of life and bearing other relation to oneself, is not likely to work very well. This is because it fails to focus on the silencing part of attackers' actions, which they draw from all the other organizations and personal bonds that they have mistreated, damaged or seized. Furthermore, many people who have been sexually abused consider the silencing part to be as bad as, or worse, than the sexual abuse itself. Thus leaving that part unmentioned, or trivialized, is doing no favours as regards listening to Survivors.

Not to mention that some had their lives ruined in non-sexual ways by individuals with similar 'control issues' and callous behaviour. These Survivors should not be left out from at least some of the support groups, listening services etc.

* For those who aren't aware, there is a long history of services nominally for Survivors in practise excluding some Survivors. Eg not taking in male survivors, not catering for LGBT* survivors. Now we say also not catering for Survivors of non-consensual 'sadists' who chose non-conventional ways to abuse, all the better for the public and the law having a hard time understanding what they were up to (or so the Survivor thinks or fears). And as regards the Survivors of abusive family members, in cases in which the abuse was not sexual or physical, and of workplace abuse. Finally, given that school and workplace abuse both exist, by interpolation university abuse exists also. Its not having been studied in detail (unlike the other two) is no excuse to deny its existence. It is ludicrous to assume that abusers go on a 3 or 4 year break between being the school bully and being a workplace abuser, whenever they happen to be attending a university in between. This is just another case of wrongly treating each walk of life by itself, rather than being aware that the abusers will be present in each, just using the character of each differently as regards how they hide and what they think they can get away with. In terms of data, their existence is supported, for instance by surveys of sexual assault at those few universities that have carried such surveys out. Can anyone really believe that individuals who carry out sexual assault at university will desist from other forms of abuse, bullying and harassment, especially when these are clearly documented in both schools and workplaces?

A concluding point

* At least some of the variety of support groups and services available should cater for all Survivors of individuals with something like this account of the 'battering personality'. Regardless of whether the abuse was sexual, of whether the Survivor is out about the abuse being sexual, and of whether the attacker or the Survivor might have experienced some parts of the abuse as sexual.

Some final comments we might form another page from

* Another page under construction *