I’m pleased to be welcoming Alex Holmes (he/him) to Coffee & Kink with his first guest post. I’d also like to thank him for his extraordinary patience while I took a million years to read, edit, and publish this piece.
Alex has also, coincidentally, covered the subject of revising your boundaries downwards in this piece. This is something I think we don’t talk about enough and something I really want to write about more in the future. So look out for that coming soon!
Heads up: this post discusses forms of violence including rape, sexual abuse, “stealthing” (which is also a form of sexual violence,) murder, and intimate partner abuse. If that’s likely to be triggering for you, please skip this one if that’s what you need to do to take care of yourself.
Amy x
So, I have a confession: a few years ago, I wrote a series of erotic novels (under a pen name, before anyone stops reading this to go hurriedly searching for them!) They did pretty well, as erotica goes. But these days, I’ll admit that I’m hugely conflicted about them.
Don’t get me wrong, they were decent books – well-written (if I do say so myself), decent plot (ditto), plenty of “action,” and they sold well enough to pay a few bills and get excellent reviews along the way. They still sell, albeit occasionally, and I still get the odd quarterly royalty payment from them even now. None of that was the problem.
The issue to me, now, is that two of those books are very clearly based around an implicitly consensual non-consent (CNC) setting that’s, in hindsight, more distinctly borderline on the “consensual” part than perhaps I’d like if I were writing them today. Put bluntly, they feature a very obviously “fantasy” slavery setting that a decade or more later I’d have to say I’m not particularly proud of. I was younger and I’ve learned and grown since then, what can I say?
Now, these books were very clearly set in a fantasy alternate history, behind a very clear These stories are fantasy. In real life, consent and safety are two of the most fundamental cornerstones of BDSM…’“introduction, and no-one – I felt then – was going to take the “captured heroine” thing seriously as an expression of how women should actually be treated. Moreover, a significant proportion of the readers were women, and all the comments I ever heard about those stories –from all genders – were entirely positive. They were fantasy. People got it, and readers enjoyed them.
The stories obviously played to the same fantasy audience as Roquelaure and Reage (to be clear, though, they weren’t anywhere near as well written as either!): the idea of fantasy helplessness, of being in a situation where choices were taken entirely out of our hands and safewords and traffic-light check-ins were unheard of, appealed to audiences of all genders, it seemed. No-one suggested that there was anything going on other than some relatively okay-ish erotic writing and a little fantasy alone-time.
In private, I’d continued to practice kink with consenting partners, and with discussed and agreed-upon limits, aftercare, safewords, easy-release knots, safety rules, and regular wellbeing check-ins. At no point did I equate that world – other than in an occasional “shared storytelling” sense – with the fantasy land of poor Princess Elizabeth (my protagonist) and her unfortunate downfall and eventual rehabilitation and revenge.
Why Consent Is On My Mind (And Should Be On Yours, Too)
I started thinking (again) about this stuff recently, in response to the Andrew Tate arrest and the unfolding horror of what was allegedly going on in his house in Romania. It coalesced into a coherent (I hope) set of thoughts in response to a number of tweets I’ve seen talking about masculinity in BDSM, and how – apparently, according to a certain section of Twitter populated entirely by profile pics of faceless men in suits and ties, often holding a leather belt – “feminism has no place” in D/s. Women, apparently, have no place in dictating what Dominants (read: men, or so these people assume) can and can’t do. Essentially it was toxic, who-gives-a-damn-about-consent? masculinity writ loud.
Those tweets, and the stories of misogyny and the radicalisation of young men lured in by Tate’s philosophy that were coming into the mainstream media in the wake of his arrest, triggered some of those concerns I’d had previously. This raised (or maybe re-confirmed) a bunch of questions for me about how we talk about consent. As much as I believe I’ve learned and grown in the period since my books were first published, and as much as the stuff I’ve written more recently (and the way I try to treat others in the bedroom and in general) is hopefully a little more “two-way-street,” it saddens and disturbs me that, in the third decade of the 21st Century and sixty years since the height of the Sexual Revolution, an article on consent even has any reason to still be written. And yet, here we are.
Consent is Fluid, Changeable, and Revokeable
I’ve always believed that, in any D/s scenario, the power lies with the bottom, not the top; submission is a gift that’s given to a partner, not taken, and it can be revoked just as quickly if things no longer feel safe or enjoyable. Similarly, we know that consent isn’t a fixed, one-time thing. It’s fluid, and it can be withdrawn if something no longer feels right. We’ve heard a lot recently about “stealthing”, in which men receiving consent for safer, condom-clad sex only to surreptitiously shed the contraceptive and try to slip in bareback in the hope that their partner doesn’t notice until too late. A note to those men: if it wasn’t what was consented to, then it’s non-consensual. And there’s another word for that.
But consent can also be withdrawn for stuff that you thought you wanted and then it turned out you didn’t; sure, if you like being spanked then you might think “I quite fancy being caned”, or paddled, or whatever. It’s a reasonable progression to consider. But after the first stroke you realise that, in fact, it’s a very different experience and actually you’re really not into it at all. It’s entirely reasonable to ask for it to stop. That’s withdrawing consent, and it must be respected and accepted without question.
Revising Your Boundaries Downwards
But it’s even more nuanced than that. What about those things we used to love, but which kind of don’t fit quite so well anymore? We all talk about how, particularly in long-term, supportive relationships, our boundaries and trust develop and things that perhaps we didn’t feel comfortable asking for become easier or more natural. But it happens the other way, too.
Sometimes, stuff that used to make us as hot as fuck sometimes just feels kinda… ookie. That’s ok. We’re allowed to have that to happen, and we should be able to say “yeah, I don’t want that right now, actually” without incurring the “well, you used to be fine with it” huff.
Fantasy and Reality Are Wildly Different Things
When I was researching for my books (and yes, I did actually research stuff), I did a fair amount of talking to people in BDSM groups, in person and online, to find out what was and wasn’t considered okay, rather than just relying on my own take. I realised I wasn’t the oracle on this, and that other people had a great deal more experience and knowledge than I did. Part of that involved spending some time in online chat rooms and message boards, where I was amazed at the number – and it’s a stupifyingly high number – of supposedly Dominant men who thought that, simply because someone has a lower-case letter at the start of their nickname (signifying their being a sub), they’re fair-game for opening up with “on your knees, slut.” I watched it, time and again, thinking “would you start off with that opener to someone you’d never spoken to before down the pub?” There is, it seems, a significant number of people who can’t tell the difference between dominance and simply being an aggressive asshole.
So what’s the point of all this? I guess, fundamentally, it’s one that every good partner should know. Whether we’re in a D/s scenario, in a more vanilla setting, or just living our lives together, respect and communication are paramount. That trust is fundamental, and it’s built slowly and lost in an instant. Afriend of mine used to say that “trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.”
Consent is an active thing, and it’s constant, fluid, and not “one time only”. The safety and welfare of our partners is way more important than our particular fantasy or getting our rocks off – and that goes for dom/mes as well as subs. Aftercare and check-ins are fundamental to safe and consensual play, both ways around.
To bring it full circle back to those old erotic stories again, the fantasy idea of being chained up in a basement and used for fun – or whatever – is more common than you might think. CNC, bondage, and the loss (or temporarily giving away) of control can be fun, if they’re done within the right situation and context.
The kind of content Tate was peddling to millions of boys and young men across the world, though, normalises the misogynistic, violent, oppressive view that they really have a right to take away women’s consent, control, and agency. In a world where one in three women and one in four men suffers some kind of intimate partner violence, and where over 130 women are killed by a partner or family member every week globally, that line between consent and coercion should be at the forefront of our minds in any interactions – regardless of what the Tates of the world would have us think.
You can find Alex on Twitter @AlexJH1973, on Facebook @alex.holmes.96780, and on Instagram @alexh1973. In lieu of accepting payment for this piece, Alex asked me to make a small donation to Studio Upstairs, a mental health arts charity. You can learn more about them, and donate if you feel so inclined, here.
