In SM play, the top is always responsible
I have a really controversial point of view about consent in the BDSM scene. I believe the top is always at fault when a scene goes wrong. Yes, always.
And I don’t care what the bottom consented to before playing, or has consented to in the past, or has possibly implicitly given consent to now—if the bottom comes away from a scene feeling they have been wronged, harmed, made unduly vulnerable or put at risk, then I want to see the top accept responsibility for those errors. Immediately. Humbly. Graciously. And then ask, “What can I do about this?”
That. Even if the top had consent for everything they did (and think about the last time you played with someone—did you in fact have prior, enthusiastic consent for everything you did? How did you know that for sure?).
Even if the bottom doesn’t come forward to say there was a problem for days, or weeks, or years.
This idea is controversial because the scene assumes people play aware of the risks involved, take responsibility for their own actions, and use their words to create the experiences they want. But as a community, we don’t have much of a framework for describing what happens when well-meaning people do all of those things, but still something goes terribly, unexpectedly wrong. Abuse can’t happen in BDSM, the logic goes; if it does, then it’s abuse, plain and simple, and not BDSM. I’ve seen many community members (mostly in New York and New Jersey, but also in the Midwest) struggle with the acknowledgement that people they know, play with, love, and/or consider to be ethical humans, sometimes get accused of violations, if not outright rape.
How can one person experience a scene as 100% consensual, while another person experiences a kind of trauma? I’d wager it happens all the time—much more often than we’d like to admit, as kinksters, because admitting this requires a level of comfort with uncertainty and vulnerability that would seem at odds with the mantra that consent is what separates BDSM from abuse, dominance from pathology, and submission from Stockholm Syndrome.
Before you take issue with my use of the word fault, let me define what I’m talking about: When I say fault, I definitely don’t mean it in a legal sense. And I don’t think I mean it in a moral sense, either. I define fault as the responsibility that falls on one’s shoulders in the face of an accident, mistake, or transgression. To me, it’s the difference between saying, “I am at fault, therefore I should be held liable,” and “I am at fault, so I am bad,” and “I accept fault, and so I am responsible for acknowledging or righting this wrong.” It is the last of the three sentences that I am aiming for.
I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to bring nuance to the conversation about consent in the scene. I think we all need to have more conversations about the messiest stuff. But the buck definitely stops with the most privileged, powerful people in the scene, and that’s the people who play as tops. Anything less seems to inhibit bottoms from coming forward and in some ways deny them the agency that we expect them to have.
Here’s how I try to do that:
I’m the top in a long-term relationship with a heavily dominant-submissive power dynamic. A lot of elements of my relationship with B^2 look like physical and emotional abuse, and those elements have only intensified as the years have gone by. Those conditions give me a vast amount of power that I don’t take for granted, even though sometimes that power might not look so obvious because B^2 is really exceptional at articulating his needs and calling out my mistakes. Still, I take responsibility for B^2’s emotional well being not just now, but in the future, and in a way that I wouldn’t realistically ask him to do for me in return. That means that, if he ever decided one day that what we’re doing is abusive and traumatizing, then he’d have every right to say that. Yes, I would be devastated and heartbroken, but I would also honor his feelings and take care to do whatever I could to make amends—or even leave the scene entirely if that’s what was called for. I actually accept the premise that what we’re doing is consensual now, but might stop being consensual at any moment. It might have already stopped being consensual but B^2 and I haven’t realized it yet (but I really, really hope not!).
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe bottoms should be responsible for themselves—on the contrary, I’d like to think I make good decisions when I bottom, and when something goes amiss, I ask myself what I could have done to protect myself, not the other way around. But I feel like tops have a special privilege, as the de facto “doers” and “deciders” in a scene. If we’re not comfortable with that power, if we’re not comfortable with the notion that consent is necessary to make a scene good, but that doesn’t mean it will make a scene good, maybe we shouldn’t do BDSM at all.
I’d like to imagine a scene in which people can discuss consent violations that contain grey areas, to the point where a listener can relate to the bottom (saying, “Yes, I can see how that was traumatic”) And the top, (“Okay, I can see how he could have missed the signs that what he was doing was unwanted”), and not discount either experience while also asking, “How can we make you feel supported? How can we prevent this in the future?”
Recently a friend violated a boundary of mine during play. Without getting bogged down in details, I will say that the boundary involved unprotected genital/skin contact. As soon as I realized what was happening I told my friend to stop, and my friend did, immediately. But I couldn’t figure out quite what went wrong, or how to articulate it, until hours after it happened. And it took me weeks to confront my friend about it. When I finally did, my friend apologized immediately. My friend expressed real, authentic concern that I had been unduly hurt and offered to make amends somehow. And that was enough. No need for public shaming, no need for hyperbole, no need for: “Hey everyone, So-and-so is a consent violator!”
But here’s what disturbed me: I told other people, privately, what had happened. And I was taken aback to learn how many of my friends had had very similar experiences with this person, but apparently did not tell this person what exactly was wrong. They didn’t necessarily feel like they had the language to explain what had gone wrong, given that none of the interactions involved a clear violation of an explicit, verbal No. And even if they did have the language for it, maybe they also worried that they were at fault, for not communicating clearly enough in the first place. Maybe they didn’t clearly remember what had happened, and didn’t feel they had any grounds to accuse this person of playing unsafely. Yes, bottoms are responsible for communicating their needs, but I know lots of bottoms who communicate well about what is good and proper, but struggle intensely when it comes to communicating about something that didn’t go well. I think that signals a very real flaw in our model of consent in the BDSM scene.
That’s why I’d like to see my community do away with this model of scene consent. Let’s to do away with a model that allows tops to walk around assuming they have nothing to apologize for, when bottoms are quietly confessing to each other mistakes they made and worrying that creating a real dialogue about them would be somehow shameful. I’d like to see us come to the understanding that tops are always and ultimately responsible for the well beings of the people who bottom to them, no matter when, where, or why the violation happened. When we top, we are the people who hold the explicit power when it comes to power exchange. Even if and especially when we know the bottoms are empowered with Yes and No. After all, when we play with fear, blindfolds, bondage, chokeholds, gropes, and gags, I don’t see how Yes, No, Yellow, and Red could possibly compete.
Under my model, ideally, bottoms would have the agency to speak-up, and if necessary set better boundaries than they had before, without being shamed for allowing a mistake to happen in the first place. And tops would have the ethical obligation to accept that mistake at face value, and the opportunity to make amends for it before being, as one friend put it, morally convicted in absentia.
Of course, it’s safer for me to have this point of view than it might be for other tops; I’m white, educated, tiny-bodied, young, not poor, and female, and it’s unlikely that I would ever be convicted of any kind of domestic violence charge in court anyway. I know most tops in the scene probably couldn’t say that with the same confidence. But I don’t think that makes this argument any less important.
Two friends commenting on a draft of this essay pointed out that it doesn’t really address a two-pronged concern that many tops might have: 1) What if a bottom turns out to be dangerous, i.e. they don’t adequately communicate important information they know to be true that would ensure a scene goes safely, such as a medical condition or an emotional trigger, and 2) What if a bottom claims they’ve been traumatized after the fact just to manipulate the top, slander them, or accuse them of assault? I don’t think I know how to adequately address those concerns right now, besides to summarize a lot of points others have made about false rape accusations in the wider world: Instances of false accusations are few and far between; most people are ethical people trying to navigate a murky world (and if we don’t accept the premise that most people are ethical then, again, I think it’s foolish for us to be doing BDSM at all); and the vast, vast majority of instances of sexual assault go unreported, unrecorded, un-prosecuted, and do not result in convictions, let alone any real consequences for the accuser.
Last addendum: I can imagine at least one person reading this and saying, “That’s all well and good, CQ, but I am not really part of the scene, so I don’t have to care.” It bears repeating: If you have ever or still ever attend a munch, friend someone on FL, love a post on FL, join a group on FL, pay money to attend a public or private class/party/event/seminar/etc, then you are a part of the scene. And if it happens in my city, then you are part of my community, and I am indeed talking to you.
Communication or Lube. 