Podcast E31: When No means Yes And Also No.

Hello everyone! 

You know we talk about communication and CNC so much yet I constantly find myself at odds with people the moment I question the gamut of information a little bit. It often feels like when CNC as a state is achieved, communication ceases entirely. So what does communication look like within the confines of that dynamic? Is there a need to monitor the active state of consent of you bottom? When does that consent matter more? When does violating the given consent of a person lead to the diminishing of trust? Listen to this podcast to get no definitive answers. 

Enjoy! 

Transcript (generously provided by Erischel and Venerant)

Hi. You know I was thinking about how much I suck at greetings and really I started watching this thing on Youtube called PBS Eons, they do these little videos about animals and science and evolution and they don’t greet their audience either they just jump right in and they go at the speed of light. They're so fast that the entire video is just like DATA DATA DATA DATA…I really like it. I might go back to no more greetings. Which is not to say that anything I do is as data-heavy as what those guys do; they are like scientists. I'm just stoned. I realized recently that my entire generation is stoned all the time. I honestly thought it was just me and my friends but of late the more people I communicate with that are my age or younger…they are just stoned all the time. What’s happening? I'm not complaining… I don't think ‘stoned’ makes a difference. Like I have all-the-time stoned employees and I have never-stoned employees and I have to tell you that the quality of work is not being determined by that. I'd say that the primary difference between my stoned employees and my not-stoned employees or colleagues is that the stoned ones are really reluctant to take calls - you’ll call them, they won’t answer the phone, and then they'll text you 6 seconds later just to ask you what’s up and hope you won’t call back. And I kinda get it…I don’t like unscheduled phone calls either. Don’t call me without telling me that you’re going to call me because I might not be prepared to engage with you on that level. It's a very similar problem that I have to this podcast and how it starts. That entire initial 30 seconds of communication - “Hi, how are you? How’s your family? What’s happening? How’s the weather where you are?” I can’t. I just cannot. It’s horrible! So I may stop doing the greetings again. Regardless I will not stop doing kink-centred content because I think it makes a lot more sense. I mean how much fucking shit can you know about me, actually?

I’m already out of stuff to tell people about me, like there’s no more. How much can there be about one person? I drink coffee, I like to do yoga, I write things, and…I’m a social nightmare! By that I just mean that y’know I’m fun at a party, not so much at dinner. I’m too loud for dinner actually. A lot of my problem I think is that I’m very loud and emphatic about everything I want to say and everything I feel. Also I’ve come to realize a major problem with my communication style is it’s very well-geared towards communicating with large groups of people at once but it may be poorer at small groups of people. I’m good at individuals, and I’m good at large groups. Everything in between is a little bit of a problem. And when I say I’m good at the individual I mean with people who are not in relationships with me. I’m good at individual-based communication with strangers. With friends and people I’m in relationships with…I mean aside from my husband it’s a bit of a toss-up. Like I can’t tell whether I’m good at it or I’m bad at it. I thought for a long time that I was good at it. But I’m going through a phase in my life where I feel very distant from the people in my life and it’s sort of a comfortable distance. I remember feeling this way most of my life until somewhere in my early 20’s I decided to branch out a little, make some friends, have a support system, have love in my life, and that went well. It was good! But now I find myself reverting back to some older habits - not all of them…there are relationships I'd like to retain but there are so few and most days I find myself wanting to talk to a faceless mass of people as opposed to an individual who knows and understands me. Because there’s also that even in having relationships with so many people I don’t think I make a lot of revelations about myself. It’s very easy to do that when you tell people everything about yourself! You’d think hiding stuff about yourself is the way to remain a very private individual, I don’t think that’s what it is. I’m not reserved or private at all. I give you so much information that it's impossible to make one conclusion from it. You can make all the conclusions because when you don’t give people information they dig harder for it. It’s a lot of mysterious and ‘ooh who am I?”. They will  search and every little tiny bit of information you do reveal is going to have so much significance. Whereas if you bury them in information there is just no problem whatsoever. What are they going to do? Parse through so much of it to determine what? No one is worth that level of attention! So I find myself reverting to an earlier system of communication which was to enjoy the company of everybody and then go back home and be yourself. It’s not that I’m not myself when I’m out with people, it’s just that myself is layered. Like everybody. And I don’t think it’s so much that we’re being fake when we’re out socially it’s just a social personality and the reason you don’t reveal the entirety of your personality when you’re out socially is not because you want to keep it from people, more like it’s fucking  tedious to explain it to everybody. And I know you’re probably thinking “Oh weren’t you just saying you’re going to make kink-centred content?” I did say that! And you’d think that this isn’t that…but it is. Because it’s my segue into talking about communication.

Is it necessary that I explain my process or would it just seem better if I just went into it? Do you sometimes feel like this podcast is me learning how to make a podcast with live interaction? Because I sometimes feel like I make the assumption that everyone is following along that journey more than anything else. This feels a bit narcissistic to think that anyone would be that invested in me learning to make a podcast. That’s like, one of 7 billion? I’m just a little fascinated by the way entertainment segments are structured and the ideas that go into creating them. Some of them are really really good! You know the show with Seth Meyers - he comes on at night and talks about something that happens during the day and then he does a monologue…regardless…segue to something else. If I could take one thing from the US and bring it to every single country but especially where I am right now it would be Late Night television. You know the new satire format… it’s just this form of entertainment is the perfect form of entertainment for me. My entire life I’ve been resisting television because I was like, “There's nothing on here for me, I am not enjoying this,” because there’s a bit of a problem when it comes to watching situational comedy that it’s so fucking formulaic and it’s not information-heavy. So if you figure out the formula it can’t be entertaining anymore. But satirizing the news! That’s…the data is always changing and it’s always relevant to what’s happening right now so you’re always going to need that information and say you just want entertainment alongside it, just the ability to add levity to something that’s so fucking serious. And also perspective! But also creativity. So that that segment, the reason I was talking about this is that there’s a digital correction segment on that Seth Meyers show and I love it so much. It’s so creative yet simple, like corrections are a cornerstone of journalism. Well…I don’t know about anymore but let’s go purist and talk about how things used to be. But it’s so important to publish those in the newspaper or after you write a piece and later you discover something so you update it. Whatever it is - corrections are a really important part of the news. But the thing is that they are not entertaining! Rarely is anyone going to go read them. But this format makes it so entertaining - I love it so much. Also it’s not useful at all because he rarely does correct himself but he does bring up all the possible ways in which he could correct himself or he brings up a perspective that you hadn’t considered. I don’t know…I can take it or leave it with him but the thing is that the format…I just love it so much. It’s so creative!

I’ve meandered all over the place already today. But we were talking about creative ways of doing things and I have to tell you: My most creative way of doing things within the world of fetishism is CNC. Let me tell you why. You may not know that initialism/acronym - it’s consensual nonconsent. Which is like, a redundant tautology if I ever heard one but it’s just so unnecessary and so creative. I want to talk about it a lot. I guess you did need a term for it, like what else are you going to call it? “Forcing someone to do stuff that you want to do” is quite a mouthful, like it’s a whole sentence. Not that CNC is much better - it sounds like a municipal office for toilets. Even saying the term makes me feel a little sick. I think terminology upsets me profoundly. But what’re you going to call it? This is what it is. It’s when I tell you today that you can do whatever you want to me so that tomorrow when I tell you to stop you don’t have to because there’s an overarching concept of consent there somewhere.

Basically it’s just that you’re in a situation where you want to feel like you’re being forced but you’ve previously  consented to being forced. It’s not so hard to wrap your head around this. This is not what I want to discuss about it anyway. What I want to talk about is how I feel, often, that people who talk about this, practice this, do this but mostly the people who theorize about it…sorry I started thinking about the people and got annoyed. The way they discuss it makes it seem like…when you consent to engaging in this, communication ends at that point. Let me explain: So I had a conversation with one of these people - he’s very high and mighty, everything protocol people. I don’t want to typecast but you know what I mean. So I said something to the effect of: For me, the process of giving up the right to consent is a slow thing, a gradual process, and it’s heavily contingent upon information that me and the person that I’m giving it up to will share with each other about who we are. And more so about the information that they give me because I’m gonna make an assessment about whether this person will handle this responsibility in a way that is ethical and after I do decide to do that even past that point the communication has to continue because people change, relationships change, grow, things get added and subtracted and that option to update the terms of the relationship - that needs to be prevalent for me. And sometimes you update the terms of the relationship in a way such that the relationship cannot continue. That’s the terrifying thing about having people in your life - you love them, you love who they are, but you cannot stop them from changing and you cannot stop yourself from changing either. You can continue to reside an idea of yourself and I’ve seen such relationships as well but inevitably there is a lot of sadness that gets added to the relationship because of that and I don’t want ever my sexuality to cause me sadness. Except when I’m having sex. So…I said this to this person and what he said was “Oh so that’s like playing at CNC but really living it means opening up yourself to a complete transformation blabbity blah, you know the general…this is ethereal, this is eternal, this is more than you can understand, it is spiritual, it will shake you,” I believe sexuality can do all of those things, I’ve just never felt the need to go up to someone and talk down to how they fuck. So it’s hard to relate to people who do feel the need to do that.

Regardless, this person was very insistent that there are no updates to the terms of a relationship and also there’s no need for them to consider what the person they’re doing things to may be going through, where they’re coming from. Like for me I’ll give you all the information and you’ll make your decision one way or the other. I’m just giving you all the information so you can make your decision better. And also so that any of my responses don’t come as a surprise to you or any of the consequences of what we’re doing don’t come as a surprise to you either. But to this person the idea was that past that point of overall permanent general consent there is no need for me to be a person anymore. And within a sexual context I completely get it but outside of that…this existence where you are one thing? This is terrifying to me. Which is not to say that I don’t understand what this person’s primary fetish is, I think I would love to be this person as well. You know I think a bit of codifying people within roles when it comes to your sexuality has to do with making people easier and I would love to be able to do that. Like if a person could be to me just the role they embody in my life and I could just have the parameters of those really clearly laid out and never act in ways I wasn’t anticipating, I would love that! Who wouldn’t love that? But I can’t do that to people because as much as I want to play rape I also don’t want to mistreat people. So I am, as a result, very comfortable in knowing or thinking or feeling or being the person who is playing out a rape instead of actually getting raped. Because I’ve actually been the latter and let me tell you that even if you think you’re recreating that exact thing…you’re not. You can’t. You cannot. The consensual part of consensual nonconsent will forever undermine that fantasy. And if that’s the fantasy you’re trying to recreate you should think about way more things than how to just determine how much consent matters in this scenario. Like there’s a lot more going on if you actually truly need to feel 100% like this is nonconsensual. And I’m not judging, I’ve felt it. It wasn’t exactly about sex, at least not for me. That wasn’t exactly about sex. I still feel it sometimes; I still engage it sometimes as well regardless to think that those two things are the same is a problem and probably offensive. So to me this generally accepted notion of CNC that it’s just “You start it and then it’s just like a static thing in which your consent is a static thing as well and it just continues…” I guess it can be but a lot of times it is when relationships like that end it comes as a shock to everybody including the person in the relationship that somebody was violating somebody’s consent for real and I just like to fucking avoid that. I don’t think that one should ever get so caught up in the OCD of what the rules should be that they fail to consider reality. And that happens sometimes. Sometimes the it-has-to-be-this-way variable is so strong for people that they’ll reject a real thing that’s in front of them because they cannot adjust their  expectations enough to cater to another person. Now this is true in any relationship. As much as you’d like to take someone on in slavery you won’t be able to extract their entire personality from the process. Relationships and love and sex - they’re truly collaborative things. And I think that we feel a great temptation to make them not be so sometimes. A specific type of person does feel that. I can admit that I’ve felt it, I still sometimes wish that I could just make a list of “this is what I need from this person” and then I’d just get exactly that. But that’s a selfish desire. For instance I know somebody in a power exchange relationship who wouldn’t do anything that their partner truly liked because for them it undermined the fantasy of them being completely in control. Now that can work when the other person is into exactly that as well but that’s rare. The idea of that is a lot more alluring than the reality of that is enforceable. But once you’ve chosen to be with someone or play with someone or have a relationship with somebody…at that point the general rules start mattering a lot less than they matter - the person you’re with. That’s who matters. And who they are and who you are and how that interacts matters a lot more than how it should be.

So, to me there are two sides here – and I’m now gonna talk about this a little more personally because I don’t want to give general advice to anybody, so I’m just gonna tell you how I do it, and then you can take anything from that, or nothing from that, or turn your nose up at it. If you made it this far into the talk honestly, I’d be surprised. So, from my understanding the consent part, is the part where I agree, that within the parameters of “don’t kill me”, or maim me, or injure me in a way that’s sort of permanent – I will consent to my partner doing things to me that I may not have specifically signed on for, I may not want at the moment.

Like, an example of this is he’s taken to waking me up every morning by pulling my hair. Now, I’m a slow waker upper, in the sense that in the morning, I’m the worst person you’ll ever meet. I just need to be alone until I’ve had my coffee. It’s just what needs to happen. I’m great at falling asleep with other people, I’m terrible at waking up with other people. Because the new day– I’m just a whole other person.

So when he wakes me up by pulling my hair it shocks me out of sleep and forces me into a role immediately. It’s a major shock to my system. I need twenty minutes to wake up, and I need to get about my day the way I need to get about my day. Until 10 am, I could honestly do without all human interaction. No one gets this about me the way my mother does, she just does not engage with me in the morning. It’s not that I’m sleepy, okay, it’s that I’m empty, and I need to fill myself up with the right levels of everything to be able to interact with the rest of the world.

Regardless, so in a relationship scenario where my partner was waking me up by pulling my hair and I’m the person that I am, ideally I’d tell him to stop, right. But the thing is, this consent thing, this whole “I gave my consent to you to do whatever you want to me”… It’s sort of serious to me too. I’m very flippant about everything, but shit is real to me too, I’m not just making jokes about the whole world all the time. I want to see where that goes. It does something profoundly real to me, it’s a stentorian voice inside me that demands attention when it’s awakened, if it’s talking I kind of got to listen. And the agreement to not stopping it, that agreement is sort of a romantic tenet of this relationship, and I like it the way that it is.

But the situation does present a conundrum. When I say I provide all the information so that my partner can make the best decisions with regard to me, there is in my mind an ideal decision state. Like would I prefer it that he not wake me up by pulling my hair? Yes, extremely much. Does he have all the information to make him come to that decision? Also extremely much, I am a very chatty individual. And do I expect on some level that the ideas that I put out there, the ones where I’m giving you information that should lead you to my ideal decision state… when it’s not reached, does it upset me a little bit? Well, I’d like it to not upset me. And sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes it does. It’s a minor level of upset for the most part, sometimes it’s more serious.

But that’s not the conundrum, the conundrum is if your trust in this relationship is based on your partner always reaching the ideal decision state, is your trust then diminished when they don’t? Now to me, it’s very important that the answer to this question be no, because ultimately if you want something really specific you should just ask for that. And if not getting this really specific thing isgoing to rob from the relationship or your pleasure – just don’t do it. And if your partner not designing their side of things is going to lead to you trusting your partner less, then I think maybe it’s not worth it.

Absolutely there really are real things that lead to trusting your partner less, but I think in those cases the relationship and the dynamic are more intertwined than ideally you’d want them to be. It’s like you want to keep your professional and boyfriend life separate, like sometimes I think there’s a temptation to keep your sexual and personal life separate as well.

For me the most major factor in losing trust in a person has to do with consequential lies. And the most consequential lie to me is when you lie to me about who you are. When you mislead me with strategically placed information. I don’t like being manipulated without my consent. And often it’s things like that that lead to diminishing trust in a relationship.  It’s rarely that, “oh I don’t want you to pull my hair and wake me up but you’re doing it anyway,” because I did technically consent to letting you do it, but I’m upset about it, so I’m gonna like you less. And okay, that really does fucking happen, I just put it like that it sounds absurd. Because it is, but also... There are layers to the absurdity.

So for me there’s always the line between an acceptable decision, and one that’s just wrong. Waking me up by pulling my hair is an acceptable decision, but lying to me undermines the entire system of communication that we have in place and I have to reset everything, and that one is much less acceptable, and it’s just wrong

And sometimes this line is harder to skirt, so let me give you an example. Five days ago my husband wanted to beat me, and that’s fine, and he did. And my arms are really really sore as a result of that, but that’s for the later part of the story – regardless that day I was pretty much a blank slate except for my back hurt very much because I injured it while working out, so I told him that my back hurts very much, I injured it while working out. Now that was just information that I thought was relevant to him beating me, and he didn’t beat the lower part of my body because that was going to make the injury worse. And so he just went after my arms which got really really sore. And two days ago he was hitting me again and I told him my arms are really really sore because they haven’t healed at all from three days ago. And he said, “yeah, I don’t give a fuck.”

And in both situations I feel I provided the information that was relevant, the state of my body at the moment, and in both cases that led to different decisions. Now is this going to make me feel that he doesn’t care about me at all, or is this going to make me feel that he came to his own conclusions based on the parameters of the pain? Ultimately there are two questions. Would it have been okay if he had beat my lower body despite me alerting him to an injury, and would I have preferred it if he hadn’t beaten my arms despite me alerting him to the fact that they were extremely sore.

I think it would have been hard to deal with him beating my lower body despite him knowing that I have an injury. Now the thing is that I would still be fine with it, it also would not diminish my trust in him in general because the level of the injury was such that it would have been fine by the next day anyway. Granted him not making it worse is a good thing and I’m glad that he errs on the side of caution when it comes to things like that, but also sometimes I do have cramps and he’ll still hit me over them, so. It doesn’t diminish the trust for me. It could for you, but it’s a good thing to consider.

Would I have preferred it if he hadn’t beaten my arms? Yes, of course, they were hurting so fucking much. Did I like it? Yeah, kind of. Like this reinforcement of “I don’t really give a fuck that you hurt, I’m going to hurt you anyway”, it’s extremely hot. The point is that it’s difficult to know that you have to have this discussion, because when the entire world of options is your playing field, it’s very difficult to narrow down the specificity of what could happen.

So that’s my side of things, the other side is his side of things which I think is more about the non-consent. And I think in the moment it’s very important for him in this relationship dynamic for him to make ongoing and accurate – at least as accurate as possible – assessments about when my consent should matter more, and about what. I mean just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it compulsively, every time, every day, constantly, just to prove a point. It’s important that we not be children about this. To me it’s important. To some 50-year old men that’s not important.

This goes to what I’ve been saying about consent not being this static state, it’s a constantly updating condition in the person that you’re with. Sometimes you may want me to be reluctant but I just may be really eager to do something. And other times I’m just really reluctant so it’s kind of like forcing me.

Which doesn’t undermine necessarily the overarching– it’s not violation at that point when you have consent from me to do things that I may not be consenting to, to do them. But it’s unwise not to think about it. Because sometimes the feedback is irrelevant to the person who’s doing something to you. When I tell my husband apparently that my arms hurt, he does not give a fuck. In fact, he says that he was extremely upset that I should think that matters. Upset is a stretch, I think there are 5 things in the world that make him upset: it’s not enough sleep, not enough food, not enough air conditioning, not enough cuddle time, not enough pats. Regardless, I just keep getting distracted by my own self.

Despite the general state of consent, I think there’s also the active state of consent. Like, what do I feel in this moment? You don’t have to act on the basis of that, but it’s important to consider it just for the long term benefit of everybody involved in the relationship. The worse you handle this communication and this state of affairs the shorter the relationship is going to be. This I can fucking guarantee. I mean it can be really long, but then the aftermath is gonna be horrible.

So the active state of consent, the current state of consent, it’s not really always commuicated as such, sometimes it’s communicated in terms of information like me saying, this hurts or that hurts before somebody hits me. It’s not saying don’t do it, it’s just giving information and then you do with it as you please. But there are times when doing with it as you please is just wrong. And there are states when this active current consent should matter, and it should matter more. And for me one of the very important states is when you’re doing new things. It could be something you’ve done before or I’ve done before with other people. But if you’re doing it for the first time with this person, it’s a new thing to the entity of you.

There are gradations to the something new, if you’ve beaten me with a stiletto before and you want to beat me with a boot, I think that’s fine. But if it’s something new entirely, like maybe some suture stuff, or needles, something more intense or truly different that you’re not sure how you’d respond to, I think in those situations an active portal of communication and the ability to at least say that you want to stop this should exist even within the dynamics of “I’m not gonna say no.” And in that scenario when you do say no and your partner doesn’t listen and that does impact the trust you have in them… I can see that happening. I haven’t been in that situation with my current partner, but I’ve been in it with my previous partner and as much as I’d like it to be all dotted i’s and crossed t’s sometimes one thing spills over into another.

And the other situation in which consent – the active current consent – should matter more, I think, is when your partner is behaving extremely uncharacteristically. Say you’re used to doing XYZ thing with me and pushing it past a certain post and today you decide to push it even further and I have a reaction you haven’t seen before, that’s a good time to check in. And an uncharacteristic reaction doesn’t always present in the same way, if a real screamy person gets quiet, that’s uncharacteristic as well. This is also under the gamut of new things. When you’re going places you’ve been a thousand times before you can afford to be a little careless about where you step, but when you’re going someplace completely new there’s really no harm in taking precautions. If it undermines your “this is the way it has to be” fantasy that’s a fucking problem for you and your partmer. If you guys are both fine with it then godspeed, who the fuck am I, but– you may not have considered it like that.

As to the question of what really matters then, is it the overall consent or the one that you’re giving or not giving me at this moment, I think it’s a delicate fine balance that changes constantly. So it’s really just a very precise science that you’re bound to get wrong at least a couple of times. But the aftermath of what happens when you do get it wrong does tell you a lot about the state of communication between the person you were doing this with. If you find yourself– See, it’s unfortunate, the thing is that there should be a lot of boundaries, but sometimes boundaries are only set when boundaries are violated, because you didn’t know that that needed to be a boundary previously.

So when something does go wrong and you find yourself guessing at your partner’s intention, that’s a failure of communication. If you can’t tell whether they did it on purpose, whether they did it with ill intent, whether it was just a miscalculation or it was a misunderstanding… If you can’t diagnose the problem, then the problem is bigger than the situation. And sometimes it takes a little while to be able to diagnose the problem, and in that state of flux, where you’re in that state where you can’t tell for sure why you reacted in a certain way to something, why something set you off, why something caused you to feel like you were breached, sometimes you have to exit the shock stage to be able to consider it.

So in that moment if you have a partner who’s pushing you for information despite you telling them that you can’t come up with the information right now and you need some time – sometimes that’s okay, sometimes they’re just really scared and worried and they need to know what’s going on with you. And sometimes it’s because they want to to hear a really specific thing. They want to hear you exonerate them. In any case if the goal of the diagnosis is to place blame, I feel like communication has already failed at that point.

And sometimes the violation is intentional and in that situation placing blame is paramount. But alongside it also responsibility. Which is not to say that wrong isn’t wrong, wrong is just wrong, and wrong is absolutely identifiable, it’s not as shaded as people would have you believe. That determination is made by intention I think.

But what I’m saying is that when things go wrong, that’s a very good time to strategize about your communication, and also just the state of your relationship. Because it’s like an audit when things go wrong. I’m not saying things have to go wrong, I’m just saying, iiiin all likelihood they will. And when they do, how you deal with that is an excellent diagnosis of whether your methodology is currently working or not.

And maybe in that moment because you’re coping or you’re dealing with shock or you’re trying to figure stuff out, or you’re feeling emotions that you hadn’t anticipated, you may not think to stop and take note of what led to it, but eventually you should do that. Every failure of the system is not just a time to reboot, it’s also a time to diagnose the issue.

And I like micro-diagnosing too. Sometimes when you’re talking to the person you’re doing stuff with, and they say things, really small things that could be indicative of how they approach certain situations, that’s a good time to start a conversation about them. Very little things can happen between the 2 of you, or the 3 of you, or the 12 of you, if you can sustain that.

…Without turning it into a cult, you know, that would be a first.

What I’m saying is that something doesn’t have to go wrong for you to diagnose errors in your process of communication. Sometimes really small things will enable you to do that, but you’ve got to fucking pay attention. My entire problem with the whole culture of CNC is that it projects itself as an environment where we talk constantly about communication but all of the communication is about negotiation and then past that point we don’t talk about communication at all.

But communication is a super active state of being, and if you drop it off at some point then you’ve really only communicated up to that point and you’re sort of assuming that past that point you’re just gonna be the same people every single day. Which is dumb, and you shouldn’t do that.

I guess that’s everything I have to say. I might disclaim this by saying, please don’t take any of my advice.