Consenting to Non-Consent
I have never understood non-consent. Well, perhaps I can understand it somewhat intellectually, but I really don’t understand it in any kind of visceral manner.
I just really can’t see what would be interesting about it. I know Rona finds it hot from one side, Eileen from another, and can find fantasies on it all over the web if I look, and yet seem to be missing something about it.
It may be simply that I really have no interest. That’s fine, there are lots of things I have no interest in. It may be I just haven’t found an approach to it that works for me.
In an IM conversation, Eileen said that "Non-con fantasies come out when you start taking simple feelings inspired by different parts of BDSM and taking them to extremes."
An example she gave concerned bondage. One of the things I like about binding people is removing certain options from my partner. I like seeing how there are things my partner wants to instinctively do that they can’t, and so are forced to process or react to in another way. It is the same when I am bound (although it has been some time since I’ve been bound).
There is something creative in placing restraints. Not just in sex, but in many creative endeavours, too much freedom is sometimes a problem, while putting limits into play forces creative solutions and new responses. It is one of the reasons games have rules. Calvinball is fun sometimes, but so is chess.
But none of that strikes me as non-con in any way. One consents to removing options. Eileen has said that a lot of non-con is "becoming aroused by playing with the tipping point when options are just-this-side of gone". I can get that intellectually.
I think that there are a number of issues involved for me. One of the main ones is simply that I am heavily invested in the idea of consent - active, affirmative assent. It is something I argue as for what the standard of consent should be, ethically, rather than the negative framing we tend to have now in society. Too much feminist and social theory makes it difficult for me to not find non-con immediately suspect. Another issue may simply be that most of the non-con fantasies I have ever read strike me as really abusive. (Yes, I know fantasy is not reality.) A third is likely that the one couple I know at all intimately who played with non-con, who are both long-experienced kinksters who had been together for years, had it blow up on them rather spectacularly. They are no longer together, and for some time she considered the incident sexual assault (I don’t know if she has re-assessed her view of that or whether she simply decided it wasn’t worth arguing about anymore.) I know that he has sworn off ever playing with non-con past a really low level again, no matter how much his partner might claim to want it.
I think I have difficulty hearing "non-consentual" and going straight to "no say whatsoever". Everything less than that isn’t non-consentual in my mind, it is negotiated limits. (For instance, my mention of putting a knife to someone’s throat and making them give me a blowjob. The only people I would consider doing that to are people I know would find it hot and who would trust me to do it - so it isn’t non-consentual in any interpretation in my brain.)
So I ask you all (limited though my readership is), what makes non-consentual play hot? What is it I am missing? Or, rather, what might you suggest is a way for me to have an in to see why people find it hot? Or is it just that I am, in a way, doing the same thing with non-con that I do with kink in general. defining anything I do understand as not really non-con?
