I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it would be something to do with consent that got me posting here again.
It’s not actually the Rod Jetton story, though. It’s this post in the Daily Beast by "Leon Marborough" on "The Legal Dangers of Rough Sex" which is very, very concerned about the dangers of "withdrawal of consent". Oh, there’s some token talk about the dangers of seriously intense play injuring someone – but that’s not really what the author is concerned with. He’s concerned with "the murky issue of consent itself".
Is it possible to consent to being beaten or choked, or participate in some other possibly harmful activity during sex, then change your mind afterward? What if the abuse was consented to, but ended up being rougher than the submissive party had bargained for? Or even trickier: What happens when someone is so deep in the interaction that they surrender to it even when, subconsciously, they don’t want to. At what point does BDSM become a crime?
To answer this question, about whether or not a bottom can withdraw consent and when, you might think he would ask some bottoms or subs, who have presumably thought about an issue that faces them and they must interact with intimately.
But that would be silly, because bottoms and subs aren’t tops and doms and therefore don’t have anything important to say about their own boundaries and lived experience. (Not like Sascha just gave an example of how to negotiate such things, for example.)
Instead, he goes on to discuss the answers to these questions with another top/dom (who happens to be a lawyer) and looks at some previous case law. And getting that side is fair enough, if we heard from anyone else. Instead, there’s a lot of talk about how a sadist top loves and cares for the bottoms they are hurting, but there’s no thought of actually asking one of these women (and it seems evident that for these two it is women) for their opinions on the matter.
"Steven" (lawyer and super-top) is the only "expert" we get to hear from — and he’s a prize.
“I am a violation top,” says Steven in his soft-spoken voice. That’s someone who works at bringing a bottom past their personal point of comfort or willingness, and compelling them to dwell there.
So already I am predisposed to think of this guy as an asshole. Perhaps this is just Leon’s writing doing his friend no favours, but I’m tend to be suspicious of tops who decide their bottoms’ limits don’t matter. There is, of course, a difference between a bottom asking to be taken past the limits they are used to and a top deciding a bottom should be taken past those limits whether they asked for it or not.
Leon notes that Steven has constructed his own consent framework, designed strictly to be within the limits of the law, and that satisfies Steven’s criteria for whether he can "live with himself". It is based on the fact that consent must be viewed within the three time frames related to the event: before, during and after.
Pay attention now, it is a strict code, obviously constructed by a deeply ethical mind. One might think that consent in all three is necessary, but Steven is more a Meat Loaf kind of guy – two out of three ain’t bad.
- “Consent during and after but not before the act is seduction.”
So saying no at the beginning doesn’t count, it just means he has to try harder to wear you down seduce you.
- “Before and after, but not during the act…That’s my sweet spot.”
Charming. So it seems he will be deciding whether or not you have any say in your limits this evening.
- “But before and during but not after the act, that’s just buyer’s remorse. There’s no crime in it, and for good reason.”
Right. So if you look over what happened afterward and decide that you aren’t happy – it is buyer’s remorse. Steven says so, it doesn’t matter what you think. You know, the pandemic of "women are crazy and accuse men of rape if they feel guilty later" that you hear about all the time anyone ever mentions a rape accusation.
The fact that there is no actual time frame here, just a relational time frame, should be noted. After all, this framework seems to imply that if consent wasn’t given for two of the three, Steven would consider it wrong. But his first one already establishes he’ll not take no for an answer, so I’m sure "lack of consent before" counts right up until you give in – at which time it is consent during – which, if you recall, is the part he doesn’t like (his sweet spot is no consent during). And since you weren’t supposed to consent in the middle, if you didn’t consent then and when he eventually stopped you decided you still didn’t consent? It’s probably just buyer’s remorse, because you consented to not consenting in the middle, right?
Add in his being a lawyer, and so presumably good with arguing semantics and probably pretty charismatic, stir well with the ambiguous nature of what consent might be legally, and this guy throws up nice big potential abuser flag to me. I can easily see this guy browbeating and gaslighting his bottoms. Again, he may be nothing like this in real life, but the article really doesn’t put him in a good light.
Steven cites the Janovich case from about a decade back, in which the accusation against him was dropped when the woman refused to testify. There are some words of advice to get to know people before you play with them, and the general reinforcement of "BDSM cannot fail, only be failed" that tends to be a formal necessity in these pieces.
It’s hard not to shake the sense, however, that this is a piece by male tops talking to other male tops with the reminder that "dem bitches are crazy" and so might withdraw consent even though she "was totally into it at the time" It seems these two would have trouble thinking any situation where the bottom didn’t end up in the hospital could really be anything wrong. I’m not sure even then.
Can consent sometimes be murky? Yes, I’ll cop to that. But if consent is always murky for you, I think you might be doing it wrong. I’m also deeply suspicious of anyone whose reaction to "consent might be murky" is to seemingly find out exactly how much they can legally get away with/convince others is ok. If that’s your first reaction to a consent question, then I’m pretty sure I should stay the fuck away from you.
P.S.
The Jetton case also seems to be a terrible one to use as your springboard if you want a discussion of the issue. If you read the article I linked up top you’ll see that the "better" version of the story released so far has Jetton and his accuser agreeing to sex and agreeing to the safeword "green balloons". Then Jetton drugs her or intoxicates her to the level she can’t resist, severely beats her, and tells her the next day she should have used the safeword. In the original police report, they don’t agree to sex, but they do hang out, after which she is drugged, beaten and then he tells her she should have safeworded.
Now while I am sure Jetton will claim consent, and as with most rape cases, claim she is making up any of the drugging issues, it still is hitching your horse to someone who appears deeply unsympathetic.