On play parties & disillusionment
Hi friends, my heart has been tender lately. How about yours? I think I am going through a mid-career crisis.
A few weeks back, I attended a new-to-me play party. Because in a world where sex is deemed inherently exploitative, being present in spaces where sex is neutral, normal, and perhaps even celebrated feels revolutionary in and of itself.
And as it has become the norm – at least in my circles, if touch and sex are present, consent exercises are inevitably invoked. This play party was no exception.
First, we were invited to take a few deep breaths and slow down. Lovely. Then, we were invited to walk around and ask another participant ‘may I kiss you?’. Cool. And in response, we were instructed to bottle our true reactions and practice saying ‘no’. Alright.
I wanted to be a good sport, so I mingled. After a couple of rounds of exchanging quick kissy questions for anticipated nos, I locked eyes with an excitable young man. “May I kiss you?”, I asked in a monotone voice void of sincerity.
Interrupting the rapid flow of forced rejections, the young man bobbed his head, gazed at me softly, and bit his lips simmering in an endless pause. “No”, the word teasingly poured out of his fallen jaw at the conclusion of his delayed performance of consent.
Pretending I didn’t notice the fetishization of the moment, I thanked him and yanked myself away from this sticky situation. What just happened? Had he just managed to single handedly subverse this ‘exercise in empowerment’?
Here I was spending the better chunk of my career getting behind exercises just like this, and he playfully spat on it and handed the garnished platter back to me. I could feel a piece of me dislodge with curiosity: “what is the purpose of this exercise?”
I excused myself from the crowd to reflect on the turmoil inside. Questioning the value of collapsing consent into a series of yes/no questions, I wondered how this was going to help me and others feel safer at this play party.
This is not the first time I find myself disillusioned by the false promises of consent culture. I remember the moment consent stopped being sexy to me. I told a partner that I did not enjoy a part of our play, and their response was, “but you consented to it”.
Wallowing in the distance between consensual and good sex, I’ve spent years trying to make sense of my own experiences. My explicit verbal nos did not prevent my rapes, and my explicit verbal yeses did not make for harm-free, let alone, good encounters.
Too many times, I’ve seen ‘consent’ being used to bypass the complexities of navigating human connections. Because this is what happens when we look outward for solutions to problems that require an internal compass.
Truth is, I can no longer pretend that this approach works for me. I think I need to break up with ‘consent’.