#but i can never really recount that here without being accused of being a terf lmao

[minlex]

Sometimes I feel quite removed from the "queer community" or whatever you call it, even though I know I technically could be a part of it. I'm trans, I'm queer. But I think the reason I feel so out of place is just because while I am those things, they're not the most important part of me. I'm lucky enough to have friends and family who respect me and doesn't think twice about it, giving me more time to actually do things I enjoy rather than feel dismayed about my identity all the time.

It's more important to me that I'm a communist than I'm trans for example.

[askjeeveshypno-blog]

What I know about consent violations from having seen a lot of them

Crossposted to Fetlife. 

*TLDR: This stuff is complicated, memories and stories are often flawed, and outside of a few sharp lines there is no consensus on what IS a consent violation to say nothing of what is the correct punishment for one. *

Hi, I’m AskJeeves.  I’m a “community leader” but please don’t blame my communities for what I’m about to say.  I literally ran this past nobody but my wife so the responsibility for my words would be entirely mine and indeed, it’s possible some folks I work with running organizations will be unhappy with me for my directness here.  FWIW, I also have never been the head consent person in any organization.  I’m just a board member of three different kink groups who has also been in the community for a really long time.

But anyway, in various kink positions of responsibility in hypnokink, regular kink and a kinky arts organization, I’ve seen quite a few complaints.  And here are some general impressions.   I’ve messed with some details for privacy but kept the spirit of the complaints intact.

1. Most of the scene likes to gossip and the drama around consent violations is pretty sweet gossip.  The chain of secrecy is almost never intact.  I’m good at keeping secrets.  When I hear about a consent complaint, I treat it as confidential and don’t talk about it.  But people who know I’m in a position to know VERY FREQUENTLY talk to me.   This puts me in this wacky position of “A complained about B, and everyone seems to know that.  A is talking about it and B is talking about it, and people want to talk to me about it, but I don’t 100 percent know WHAT A and B are saying and if one of them is leaving a detail or two out on purpose and I reveal it, I’ve seriously breached my responsibilities,” so I do a lot of smiling and nodding about consent complaints.  Also, “B and I are at the same party and B is recounting a romanticized version of what they did that leaves out a lot of facts and if I’m quiet it looks like I agree but I’m really not in a position to speak up,” which also sucks, but they way.

2. The vast majority of complaints we get are in gray areas, and it’s almost impossible to nail down what a “consent violation” actually is outside of what’s actually illegal or specific enough to be spelled out in rules we already had:

a. A guy wrote about kink stuff on his public facebook on the regular.  Somebody who was mad at him got drunk and posted something on the same facebook page about how much he sucked for not coming to her play party.  Said guy got drunk person banned from a dungeon for “outing her” in a place he’d already outed himself.  

b. I’m pretty judgy about JK Rowling retweeting TERFS, but should a con punish someone for retweeting a post that outs somebody?  

c. If someone steals someone else’s money without permission, is that a consent violation?  

d. If C and D make plans to play, and then C loses interest but never actually says “actually, I changed my mind,” and just puts off or ghosts D, how many times can D follow up, in what ways and getting what responses, without it becoming harassment?    (Soft nos are VERY complicated from a “trying to enforce consent rules” perspective.  In this situation,  C almost always says that D is ignoring a “no” and D almost always says that C seems really busy so D thought D would keep trying and they were eager to do the play C had earlier said they wanted.)

e. If E made a promise to follow a bunch of rules set by a group, and then broke one of them, and F, a member of the other group, complains to a my group that E consented to follow the rules and broke them and the complain to MY group, which has different rules, is that violating the first group’s consent?

f. Hypno-specifically, what counts as non-negotiated use of persuasive language and where?

g. The above complexities quadruple for trying to ban someone from an event or organization for something they did online.  Does this happen in rare circumstances?  Yes.  But the bar is quite high.  

h. Some of y’all who are black and white thinkers or just very decisive will feel like you can go down this list going “Yes, no, yes, yes, no” but suffice to say, even if one of these seems straightforward to you, it hasn’t to me in the past, perhaps because of further details I’ve left out for brevity or something I changed to make the situations less specific..

3. If you’ve been banned or whatever, threatening to bring in a lawyer never helps you.  Kink organizations are private.  We mostly have our own lawyers and know very well how incredibly legal it is to exclude someone from a private organization for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all unless it’s a discriminatory reason.  Proving “discrimination” is very difficult, proving “defamation” is too.   Suing a kink organization for not letting you in requires money up front that almost none of us have, so it’s an empty threat anyway unless the person making the threat is independently wealthy.  I write this under the assumption that if you ARE independently wealthy and are willing to sue us into the ground if you don’t get what you want, these words won’t stop us anyway.

a. Suffice to say that when you threaten to sue it indicates to me as a person in a position of responsibility is that “bringing in a lawyer to make threats” is something you’re willing to do when you don’t get what you want, and if my organization continues to deal with you, this will almost certainly happen again.  So why would we want you in our private organization?  Do you really provide so much benefit to the organization that this constant threat is worth it to us?

b. Caveat: If someone has sexually assaulted you, by all means, call the cops or a lawyer if you feel comfortable doing so.  I’m not at all saying that legal mechanisms have no place in kink when directed at the person who hurt you. But as fair as organizations are concerned threatening to sue, or coy letters about how you might threaten to sue if you don’t get your way, are counterproductive and have a strong whiff of bullshit, which is never a good thing if you’re trying to convince us you’re not lying about anything else.

4. Long relationships that end in one or both parties accusing one another of consent violations the moment they break up are a nightmare to deal with on the consent side.   Because abuse REALLY DOES happen in long term relationships.  But there are many ways  of being a shitty partner that are consent violations.  People who have just broken up last week can almost never tell the difference.  

5. People who talk about consent ALL THE TIME have a bad habit of setting their own rules about it in ways that benefit their own bullshit.  Such people are often so excited to talk about other people’s consent violations that they make a big deal without having investigated or otherwise gotten the full story.  So people who make a big public deal about rumors of other people’s problems have raised a red flag about themselves.  This is completely irrelevant if they never have a consent complaint raised about them.  But if they do, the red flag is there.  A red flag doesn’t decide anything, but people are going to notice it.

6. I get that Jeff Mach got paid.  Just about nobody else in kink does and if you’re looking to get paid, running a con is a terrible way to do it.  We’re volunteers throwing parties/events for the community. We want people to be safe but we also hang out at our own parties/cons and we don’t want to hang with jerks.  Nobody gets banned for being a jerk alone, but if you’ve yelled at us, been an asshole when you dumped our friend, been accused of minor things many times before, or otherwise caused a lot of problems, that’s not going to help you get what you want. Again, if I personally think you’re a jerk but no one ever complains about you, that’s fine.  Some of you ARE jerks and I demonstrably haven’t.  But if you’ve got what feels like a long history of being difficult or causing problems, that’s a strike against you.  My kid brother has a long history of cussing out cops and has been told he has the worst driving record in the county where we live. Most of the judges and cops in our county have met him and he was unpleasant every time.   If you think every new time he’s a defendant there is a clean slate and none of that prior stuff matters, you’ve been sold of a vision of our justice system, and possibly humanity, that doesn’t exist.  We are trying to be fair but it would be weird to expect a bunch of volunteer kinksters to be less susceptible to their own perceptions.

7. Rumors people have heard about bad behavior, complaints from unverifiable and likely fake scene names, or a friend making a complaint on behalf of an anonymous friend are simply impossible to investigate or do anything about.

8. Two years ago, a group of people got together to lie about an innocent person assaulting someone.  They were people the consent folks at the event liked and trusted.  And then the truth came out.  It is never impossible that this is happening.  And it ruined what seemed like a pretty solid kink organization.   There are mitigating factors here and there but the bones of it are an organization people put thousands of dollars and untold hours into that brought a lot of people joy was ruined, because like eight people didn’t get what they want on something incredibly minor and broke the consent system, and the con, on purpose.  Again, the consent folks didn’t handle things optimally either, but when eight people are willing to tell the same lie it’s tough to imagine that ending well for them, their victim or the organization.  Consent organizers never want that to happen to us, but it’s unrealistic not to accept that it could.  

This stuff is complicated.   And again, I’m only writing on behalf of myself.  But these kinds of issues are what folks who seriously work on consent face.   I'm happy to talk about them.  But if you think you have an iron-clad, one-size-fits-all solution, you probably don't?