Consent Culture and Hypnosis

My first lesson in consent culture came from my first private kink event: the presenter was demonstrating a chest harness, and asked the volunteer, "I might brush against your breasts when I bring the rope down the front, is that ok with you?" This really struck me at the time - asking specific permission for something from someone who had already volunteered to be an erotic rope bondage model - and it cued me in to the greater emphasis on consent in the kink community. When people are being tied up and beaten, among the great variety of things that kinky folks do, there's too many ways for things to go wrong without a strong foundation of consent. But I believe the concepts apply very urgently to vanilla sexual encounters too - and to hypnosis, whether sexual or nonsexual.

Consent culture, in my understanding, is an agreement that a high standard of consent is needed for anything that occurs between people in romantic/sexual encounters. When it comes to new partnerings in particular, this means that a critical component is explicit consent, that is, discussing things with words. Even when both partners are acting in good faith - i.e. taking each others' boundaries seriously - nonverbal signals are just too easy to misread, since we carry with us all the assumptions from our past partners and from the broader culture.

I remember there being a wave of anxiety in the 90s about explicit consent, manifested for example in comedy sketches spoofing it, but thanks to essays I've read in the last year, mostly recommended by my friends, I know that explicit consent, and consent culture, does not ruin sexual encounters - in fact it makes them better. These are great because rather than telling harrowing consent violation stories (though those are important too), they tell true stories of consent going right. And it's hot.

Disrupting Dinner Parties: Modeling Consent

Queer Guess Code: Un-memorizing the Silence is Sexy Date Script

Kinkopedia: Consent in Action: I Didn’t Kiss a Pretty Girl This Weekend

Research to be Done: Tips for Consent-Conscious Dating and Fuckery

Charlie Glickman: How to Ask for Sex
 
Pervocracy: Rescripting Sex

For someone like me, a cautious person who has sometimes been romantically crippled by fear of crossing invisible lines and creeping out the people I'm trying to attract, the explicit consent model is incredibly exciting as a way to make moves confidently and non-oppressively. And when consent culture is the standard, as it is in the mainstream kink world (at least as an ideal), and my partners know that I am serious about it and not into pushing limits, they can feel in control of what happens, and safe to explore things they want to try or that I suggest that appeals to them. Basically, more sexy things can happen, and crazier sexy things, the more solid the consent is.

And this of course applies to hypnosis. I've written before about how shitty I consider a lot of the mainstream models of consent for hypnosis, such as stage hypnosis where volunteering to go up on stage is often considered blanket consent for anything that happens, including potentially very humiliating things. As kinky hypnotists, with all these great models around us from other edgy forms of kink, and the risk of playing into rape culture, we have to do better.

My goal is the same as the goal for all consent, for my hypnosis partners to not feel like boundaries have been crossed, and to feel good about what happens both during and in retrospect. All the tools of explicit consent and beyond are helpful with that. Both the Wiseguy and the Peter Masters book have good little discussions about it, but there's a lot more work to do. The starting point, I think, is that everything that happens in every single trance has been negotiated, at least the category of suggestion, and that the standard is an enthusiastic "yes".

This entry was originally a longer guide to the subtler points of getting consent right, and the special issues for hypnosis, but a conversation with a friend convinced me that no way am I ready to to write such a guide. In particular, I need to talk much more to the hypno bottoms I know about their experience with consent, not just the bad experiences but the good ones too.

The point though is that I am already striving to live up to consent culture, and it is already making my sex/hypnosis life better, beyond making it less likely that there will be a serious disconnect. I have used these actual words, "Would you be comfortable with taking the hypnosis in a sexual direction?" When the answer is no, or anything but a strong yes, I try to make it instantly clear that I am cool with it and that there are plenty of other places to go if the hypnotee wants to continue.

But... sometimes the answer is yes!