Consent is not a series of noes. It’s the safety that gives us the freedom to say yes.
Added 2024-10-13 06:38:17 +0000 UTCConsent can seem like a restrictive thing in theory. If we laid out all our “don’ts” and “should nots” end to end, they’d make it around The Citadel 50 times: Don’t negotiate mid-scene. Never ignore a hard limit. Don’t mistake an alcoholic “yes” for a sober one. Never involve yourself in other people’s scenes without an explicit invitation. Ad infinitum.
But the truth of consent is not in what we remove from the kink pile, but how much we leave on it. If a top resents every limit you have, you’re forced to focus on the walls they’re trying to break through. In an attempt to clear a safe space for yourself, you remove items from your kink pile and add them to your hard limits.
Post-play space lets you process what’s happened and, if necessary, work through harm. Without that “home turf,” you world shrinks to the size of a plum and even your soul becomes small.
Even subs need a sense of power over our own existence. We don’t give up our control because it’s easy. We do it because we feel we have the ultimate choice over what we give up. Take that safety away from us, and we begin fighting furiously for our power.
Consent is not a series of noes. It’s the safety that gives us the freedom to say yes. Allow us to give up our power by choice, and we will do precisely that. We’ll do it when it hurts. We’ll do it when it’s hard. We’ll do it until submission feels like home.
I once knew a top who treated my limits with respect. The freedom of it felt like the wide open sky, and so I gave. I gave until he felt like home.
And there really is no place quite like it.
