Playing with Consent

An extended version of this workshop was presented at the festival Uncensored in London, May 2019.

Other versions have been presented at :
Eurix, European Riggers Exchange, Berlin 2017 & 2018.
Xplore barcelona 2018.

Consent is about being able to listen and to respect one and another, and it’s necessary for any types of relationship, play, artistic collaboration and especially necessary in BDSM. It’s as well a very useful skill in common life to develop happy and healthy relationships.

 

In the last years we have been confronted more and more on discussion about Consent.

Movements like #Me too and “Ni Una Menos” have brought to collective attention that our societies might have been based, until now, on archaic values, where predatory & abusive behaviours, inequality and privilege were norms: the common dynamic between any kind of relationships and especially between men and women.

Religions, states and institution try to define and control the way people live their own life and a lot of prejudices and taboos still exist around the sexual body and the desire of some to live a free sexuality. We have all been raised in a “sex negative“ society, where “sex“ is a weapon of warfare, the way power affirms itself and controls social interactions, a fundamental marketing tool and the content of an ever-growing industry.

We all have experienced shame, fear, inadequacy and other negative emotions; many of us have been traumatized or even abused.

The human race is now facing a major crisis requiring ecological, political, and social change: I believe our future depends on our capacity to raise collective awareness. But mainstream culture seams to be more attached to the defence of traditional gender identities and old educational values, then allowed transformation and raise of awareness.

We must be able to question the relationship it might exist between the violence we experience in our societies and their old values.

There is an ongoing CENSURE on theses topics. But how not to question the legitimacy of our models in a world, where half of the population is repetitively abused by the other half*? Where Equal rights are still massively denied to any kind of minority and the claim of different subjectivities seams to be received as a treat by the majority.

For all this reasons I believe is extremely important right now to train consent. Consent is about being able to listen and to respect one and another, a basic skill that should regulate any human exchange.

Only emphasizing the concept of “Consent“ and teaching it to children, we will be able to develop happy, healthy and fare relationships between human being and a better world.

In my workshop I will explore and demonstrate how to train skills to reach a better understanding on personal and others people boundaries and how to develop verbal and non-verbal agreements, that can be use in erotic exchange but also in daily life.

During any type of life interaction, performance, instant composition, Shibari practice or a BDSM scene, emotions and reactions can be very different from what we previously aspect; for this reason previous and verbal negotiation are for me not enough. We have to be able to develop skills to welcome a constant attention to the expression of our own feelings, needs and wishes and to the one of our partners. We must train to ask for what we want and how to respond when our partners ask for something. More we practice clear expression of “Yes “and/or “No“, more we will be able to develop consensual interactions.

I believe it’s a revolutionary act and a way to promote equality and respect between genders, to learn and train how to create, sustain and preserve consent: a concrete way to promote radical changes in the way we live, perceive and relate with each other.

At the end of all, we may even be witnessing the end of patriarchy….