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is that they do wacky things to your body.  For instance, when faced with a sniffly, feverish cold, one might find that the unexpected hand job from a lovely companion who has been not particularly up for sexual activity of late results in you getting a splitting headache.

Still, I do so like clear demonstration of desire, even when it can’t be acted upon.

(this will be rambly as it is 2 in the morning and I just can’t seem to wrangle my thoughts) 

People might have guessed it would be a consent post that brought me back.

I am, in the words of one of my lovers, a "consent fetishist". By this she means that my interest/obsession with consent goes to such lengths that she will point out people wearing t-shirts that say "consensual sex is hot", find me consent quotes, and I get to check off "consent" as part of my Fetish Bingo card if someone we’re in bed with goes out of their way to be clear about gaining consent.

 It’s a big deal to me.

 So, unsurprisingly, I was pointed to Calico’s post "Grey is a Kinder Color" - inspired by Debauchette’s post about how hot the time she was raped in Italy still makes her- about the ambivalence Calico feels concerning certain types of sex/fantasies that make her hot.

I couldn’t parse that. In the world I knew, pleasure and violation were mutually exclusive. To go from hot sex to abuse, you needed to shift the carpet, declaim your experience with a revisionist history. Abuse wasn’t sexy. If you thought you’d liked it, you were deluded.

Maybe, just maybe, a belief system that holds me (us?) to be stupid and blind is not an accurate one.

 The post by Debauchette is an excellent read, and she describes what she labels a "faux-rape". It seems people are very conflicted about being able to find rape hot. Of course, this is only one kind of rape. This wasn’t rape being used as a terror weapon or anything.

 I could discuss the consent issues in play in Debauchette’s tale (she specifically mentions "there was a moment when I knew I could’ve made myself clear, in any language, but I chose not to. I wanted to see what would happen.") and the very interesting comment section it has generated, but mostly I want to discuss people thinking you aren’t allowed to find something that is wrong hot.

 Why on earth not? We’re fucked up, complex creatures, we humans. We find all kinds of things hot. Finding something hot does not make it a good. It is perfectly possible to find the thought of being ravished/forced hot and find the reality of it ethically horrible. Many, many people’s bodies respond erotically to rape - this often ends up as a mind fuck for people because how could they have had such an intense orgasm from something wrong? (People, we have orgasms in our sleep sometimes - the body does what the body does, it doesn’t change the ethics of a thing.) Marcelle Manhattan touches wondefully on how ambiguity makes us uncomfortable in her response to Debauchette here. (However, she does bring up the "Second Wave Feminists say all sex is rape" myth which just drives me nuts. No, that’s not what Dworkin was saying.)

  The sex can be clearly hot and still be abuse. Orgasms aren’t a magic wand that makes things better. Dear lord, people have been having hot sex throughout recorded history, were all those people and sex acts in contexts of perfect spiritual equality? Of course not. We humans are capable of eroticizing just about anything, so what? Erotic != good by definition. (Erotic is a slippery enough slope as it is; would that rape have been hot to her had it been anyone else at any other time? Or even if it was him at another time?)

 Now, defining and judging abuse is a tricky thing and one shouldn’t ignore the subjective interpretations of people in this matter, but you can’t believe in inalienable human rights and not think it is possible to find some objective way of judging these things.

It’s three in the morning, there are too many good comments on just those three or four posts, and I don’t have enough brain to deal with them now. Hell, I don’t even have an ending for this post.
 

 

 

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?