For the past few years, I have become more and more interested in a certain type of potential predatory practice, a certain style of manipulation that abounds in the kink scene – The Exploitation of Loopholes.
Let me give you an example.
Over a decade ago, I was (casually) playing with a top who put a shock collar on me. I am deathly, extremely, tremendously afraid of electricity but to be fair, in our negotiations, I hadn’t actually mentioned my fear. To be completely transparent, we had established a loose format for what we might do and left some room for spontaneity, and while I mentioned other limits, and I didn’t exactly say “anything goes,” I did not mention electricity. I’ll tell you why, as well, it was because I hadn’t inculcated the possibility of electrocution into play. I knew that people did electro-play, but it had not ever cropped up around me, nor with any of the people I had been with up to that point so I didn’t think people around me were actually doing that. To me, my fear of electricity was a life-thing, not a sex-thing and I suppose, on some level, I figured it wasn’t in the realm of possibilities that would come up during that (or maybe, any) scene. It did come up. I, immediately, declared my deathly fear and explained that I did not wish to do this and I didn’t know I should have stated that beforehand because I didn’t know it was an option, but he believed since I had not brought it up when we had previously negotiated and we had agreed to some level of spontaneity and fear in play, he should be able to do it. He did not believe he had to pay heed to my delayed declaration of a very serious fear (even though I said as much) because we had negotiated to allow fear and we had already finished negotiating and he put the collar on me anyway, through my protests. Technically, that was true, I suppose. Fortunately, the collar was broken and it didn’t work, but that is merely incidental.
I have since changed my negotiation-style, particularly with someone new, I ensure that we operate on an opt-in basis and not an opt-out one and I only engage in unscripted, fear play within or through long-term dynamics because I have much more awareness of the kind of communication it takes to do that well and safely. I also reserve the right to communicate through the scene, should I need to, and I learnt that because there were several tops who were uncomfortable allowing that possibility. Essentially, you only speak if you need to safeword, but other than that, nothing you say is admissible. I don’t respond well to the concept of the first negotiation being gospel because I know that unprecedented situations and reactions crop up, especially with people you don’t know well, and they sometimes crop up regardless of how many times you have done something before, and I find that communicating how I am responding to them, as they happen, helps me determine whether the person I am playing with is willing to adapt (or if their pleasures lies solely in extracting exactly what they planned to extract from me, whether I knew it or not) as well as whether there is the possibility for a longer term dynamic. The truth is that, sexually, I want to be in that harrowing, helpless, fearful state of having no control, but I know now that the path to it is not built on force and “pushing” boundaries (by the unilateral choice of the top), but on communicating well, so I would rather let myself slowly walk to the point where I am able to challenge boundaries with my partner(s), as opposed to being cornered into challenging them. I need to relax into accepting fear and helplessness (over a period of time) and I know how to do that now. At the time, I was operating with a completely different set of rules and sense of comprehension.
First of all, at the time, I was in an extremely dysfunctional, volatile and abusive primary relationship, and the norms of that relationship were my baseline, so any practices that were better than the practices of my primary relationship seemed like super healthy practises to me. I had been fucking, dating and kinking most of my life but I didn’t actually know there were ethics to this (until I became part of a community, which was a little before this happened), essentially, the culture of sex within which many of us are raised, particularly here, is a rape culture not a consent culture and prior to gaining better sexual education or learning, I was extracting my knowledge and pleasure from that environment. It was partly that environment that enabled me being in my abusive primary relationship. I don’t think the fact that my baseline was so warped is in any way the responsibility of the top who put the shock collar on me, he had no idea about the state of my primary relationship, really, only that it existed and maybe some details of its structure, but none of the abuse.
However, I have since met other tops, as well as realised myself, that awareness of the social structures within which you operate your sexualities is a good way to apprise yourself of extant power structures (which, in no way, means that you should undermine the agency/autonomy of a young woman because you believe you need to protect her, that’s not awareness of structures, it’s acting upon what you believe to be your role within a structure without asking the other affected party). The way I have seen this exploited is usually when someone in the power equation (not the negotiated power equation) knows they would like to do a certain thing to another person, and they know the other person may not think to ask about that/specifically forbid it, and the person in (a position of systemic) power deliberately does not bring up the possibility unless the other does (even though, they are aware, it will come up). It feels like you have to “crack” a negotiation with that kind of dom because it’s not geared to ensure maximum safety.
With regard to the shock collar, it was presented as the penalty for my failure to negotiate around it in advance and that was the thrill of it to the top in question. Their approach, an approach that I have since seem many, many times, was to seek the loophole because that was the peak of pleasure to them. And also, look, if that’s what you are into, that is not the fucking problem. I like being (consensually) sexually exploited as much as the next person and that is negotiated into my current primary relationship, I like being cornered, that’s not the red-flag to me, the red-flag was that it was clear that this person knew exactly what turns them on (ie; cornering) and they didn’t tell me that in advance. I could have been into cornering and in agreement with doing it, but I didn’t know that was happening.
Okay, I didn’t ask, that’s true as well. And honestly, given my style of sort of reckless abandonment and acting out a death wish as performance art when I was 20, it would be very possible to believe I would be chill with this (and honestly, honestly, at the time, I think I was, and more on this later). It’s a little bit because I force-feed myself responsibility for everything, if shit ever goes wrong, I will be the first one to say it was my fault or responsibility. It’s a good habit and also a bad one, I have let people blame me for their shit all my life because I usually manage to convince myself it was probably 100% my responsibility anyway (and I’m working on it), and as a result people who are looking to live a life where they don’t have to be responsible for their behaviour, are very easily able to take advantage of me (and I am not working on that, because I have deduced it is not my problem). If you ask me, I will still take full responsibility for allowing a situation to arise where someone could put a shock collar on me.
However, recently, I started to consider it from the perspective of both parties having disparate levels of experience in this scenario. Look, I honestly don’t know whether more experience should mean that you bear more responsibility, but I think that question cannot be answered in generalities. First, we have to ask what constitutes experience and what are its perceived implications. It’s very easy to exploit experience and very hard to use it responsibly and well. In the scenario I have been discussing, the way I see the value of experience would have been to recognise that there was information I needed about this person’s known (to them) methods of operating (which, again, are fine if that gets them and the person with them off, and they know that) that would have allowed me to make a more informed decision, and they could have provided it to me, because (due to my own experiential handicap) I was clearly not capable or aware that it was a question that needed to be asked.
It’s like this. Say, I have been cooking for a few years but I am about to prepare taro for the first time, and I don’t know that if I let it be even a little undercooked it will make my mouth itch. I have seen taro being prepared around me and I have eaten it many times, but I have never worked with it before and was never instructed on its preparation. I would still feel like I know enough and also, I wouldn’t know to ask whether this thing that I see people safely consume around me all the time and have eaten many times myself could poison me. Say, you are a person who is in this kitchen with me, you have prepared taro many, many times and you know that it is my first, would you not feel like it was your responsibility to tell me about the potential poisoning?
I have different answers to this question depending on which role I put myself into, to tell the truth. As the person at the bottom, I can see why it’s not necessary that the more experienced party left me uninformed because of malice or lowkey desire to poison me, they could have just assumed that if I was cooking this dish, I had done the research. However, I’m old-ish now, and since the past few years in situations of negotiations, I have found myself in the role of the “experienced” party (if, at all, there is a disparity of experience), I’m still not the top, but the disparity is not about top or bottom. It’s a newer experience for me to be the “experienced” party, there’s a learning curve, but I can say with confidence that I do feel more responsible (and again, I don’t mean I feel superior, smarter or in any way better than the other person), I mean, I feel that I should bring up things that the other person may not know to bring up because they may not have done them before and until this occurred to me, I hadn’t actually thought about the shock-collar incident as not just my responsibility or mistake.
Viewing myself as the experienced party, showed me how I would negotiate differently, with awareness of that power disparity. For instance, I often find that when I am negotiating impact, a lot of people will mention which implement is okay with them and which one isn’t, but the places on their bodies on which they are comfortable being hit come up only in the context of marks or no marks, but I know, that before I had a tonne of experience with impact, I didn’t quite understand that I respond to pain differently based on the part of my body to which it is administered, and with what. I don’t think it is my job or place to decide for the other person where they should choose to be hit, or even if they would necessarily face the same reactions to change in locations as I do, I just feel that I am comfortable with taking the responsibility to ask them about it because it’s possible they may not have thought about it, or known it needed to be thought about, and I do know. I also know that it’s comforting to people to have the option to discover if that is the case for them and that entails being able to let them share that as it is happening and be receptive to that information. It’s something I know and using that information to (maybe) benefit someone or if not benefit another, ensure my own conscience is clear, is a practise I like to employ.
Essentially, it’s about intent, if you are sharing something that may not be pertinent because it could be helpful, I appreciate that but if you are not sharing something, deliberately, because you’re hoping to exploit it if I cannot get to the place of asking that question, I can now see how there is intent to manipulate in that (and also, you can be into manipulation like that, but it’s only ethical if everyone knows that is what they are consenting to). That’s where defining experience becomes exceptionally important to me. It’s not really about the number of years or your age, it’s not even about how many times you do something, it’s about whether you had any willingness or made any effort to learn from the things you do. Basically, I could cook taro dozens of times but if it makes me sick every single time, did I really learn anything? Am I an experienced taro-chef or do I just keep insisting the vegetable is wrong even though I am preparing it incorrectly? Mistakes happen, to me, experience means taking responsibility, deconstructing and using that information to develop better practises. Having evolved into this perspective about experience, I now see my experience with the shock collar in a different way and I know that raises a different question that I cannot quite answer.
Was my consent violated? Is it fine to retroactively realise it was?
I don’t know. I really want to not have to answer that question because I see both sides of it and I can make both cases for myself, and I also know my shortcomings. Additionally, I can only apply this situation, as it happened, to myself, and I cannot speak to it as a generality (and I don’t want to because it’s a hop and skip from there to enabling victim shaming). Also my own biases about the situation apply, and my own fears (because, honestly, you worry, some people who read this know me and maybe they will begin a process of trying to guess who this is about, they may make me feel like I am obligated to reveal more than I want to or understand, they may blame parties on my behalf, I may be triggered by that for reasons I don’t yet know, they may accuse me of lying, they may question my practises as a 21-year old etc and I didn’t actually write this to put blame on a person, I wrote it because I find this is an area that is rife with miscommunication, predatory intent and the kind of nuanced communication that is seldom stated explicitly and I believe this situation elucidates the complexity of negotiating power exchange quite well, for all parties).
Do I now see this situation differently? Yes. I see the parts of both parties differently. Was I traumatised by this when it happened? Truthfully, not really (though, the reasons for that are not great ones, they are what they are), but the real question is that, if there is no victim, does that mean there was necessarily no predatory intent? I dunno, you guys, I dunno. I haven’t been traumatised or victimised by every unscrupulous practise I have observed or been subject to, but taking note of them has informed with whom and how I play, it has helped me develop better methods of negotiation for myself and to vet people better.
It also made me see how situations may be perceived differently between parties and how they approach their perception makes a huge difference. It didn’t make me feel violated and so I didn’t quite take note of it as a transgression, then, but it did make me feel cornered, so I reacted by developing more exhaustive methods of communication for the future. I don’t advocate for a baptism by (many) fires, but it has happened to many of us, and as a result we maybe (erroneously) learnt not to sweat the “small” stuff, failing to realise that a seemingly “small” incident could be part of a pattern that is dangerous to way more than just you. He saw it as getting away with the unfettered game (which, I don’t even know if he saw as unethical in any way), and so I don’t believe he adapted his practises of communication to be different after me. I stopped playing with this person, he did not realise or learn why, because I didn’t say it, and I didn’t really know in detail either. Doer and receiver can have totally different experiences and even if I didn’t “get hurt” that doesn’t mean the practises at play were sound or ethical, it took a while to get to a place where I understood that was possible. My generally “reckless” approach to sexual exploration was my cross to bear but that doesn’t excuse or erase the potentially manipulative practices of the doer either.
I don’t have closure to offer on this matter, not to you and not to myself, the lesson is in the journey not in the conclusion, and even so, it’s not exhaustive as I don’t know all the rights and all the wrongs. I didn’t write this for that. I wrote it because it always helps to know what other questions you could ask yourself and the world. It always helps to dig into the depths of consent and see what you may have been missing. I didn’t know, a decade ago, that there were people who intended to exploit my loopholes, now I know. Maybe you know too. Maybe you already knew. I just feel safer having said it.
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