Kitty Stryker - Ask: Building Consent Culture

aSk

A s k

Building Consent c ulture

Kitty Stryker

Foreword by Laurie Penny

Afterword by Carol Queen

Ask

Building Consent Culture

Stories and illustrations 2017 by the individual contributors

Introduction and commentary 2017 by Kitty Stryker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Thorntree Press, LLC

P.O. B ox 301231

Portland, OR 97294

press@thorntreepress.com

Cover design by HardestWalk

Interior design by Jeff Werner

Copy-editing by Amy Haagsma

Proofreading by Hazel Boydell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stryker, Kitty, 1984- author.

Title: Ask : building consent culture / Kitty Stryker ; afterword by Carol Queen ; foreword by Laurie Penny.

Description: Portland, OR : Thorntree Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017022470 | ISBN 9781944934255 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH : Feminist theory. | Interpersonal relations. | Self-acceptance. | Mentally ill--Psychology. | Offenses against the person--Prevention. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / General.

Classification: LCC HQ 1190 . S 788 2017 | DDC 302/.14--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022470

Digital edition v1.0

Contents

Foreword Laurie Penny

Introduction Kitty Stryker

IN THE BEDROOM

Sex and Love When You Hate Yourself and Dont Have Your Shit Together JoEllen Notte

The Legal Framework of Consent Is Worthless AV Flox

The Political Is Personal: A Critique of What Popular Culture Teaches About Consent (and How to Fix It) Porscha Coleman

IN THE SCHOOL

Rehearsing Consent Culture: Revolutionary Playtime Richard M. Wright

The Power of Men Teaching Men Shawn D. Taylor

The Green Eggs and Ham Scam Cherry Zonkowski

IN THE JAIL

Responding to Sexual Harms in Communities: Who Pays and Who Cares? Alex Dymock

The Kids Arent All Right: Consent and Our Miranda Rights Navarre Overton

Just Passing By Roz Kaveney

IN THE WORKPLACE

Ethical Porn Starts When You Pay for It Jiz Lee

Theres No Rulebook for This Tobi Hill-Meyer

Service with a Smile Is Not Consent Cameryn Moore

IN THE HOME

Consent Culture Begins at Home Eve Rickert and Franklin Veaux

Bodily Autonomy for Kids Akilah S. Richards

To Keep a Roof Over my Head, I Consented to Delaying my Transition Laura Kate Dale

IN THE HOSPITAL

Giving Birth When Black Takeallah Rivera

Fatphobia and Consent: How Social Stigma Mitigates Fat Womens Autonomy Virgie Tovar

Wrestling with Consent (and Also Other Wrestlers) Jetta Rae

IN THE COMMUNITY

Games, Role-Playing, and Consent Kate Fractal

Trouble, Lies, and White Fragility: Tips for White People Cinnamon Maxxine

Sleeping with Fishes: A Skinny Dip into Sex Parties Zev Ubu Hoffman

Sex Is a Life Skill: Sex Ed for the Neuroatypical Sez Thomasin

Afterword Carol Queen

Foreword

Laurie Penny

The language of consent has never been as vital or as political as it is today. Both in and out of the bedroom, were far less free than wed like to think. Were told that we live in an age of personal freedom and erotic abundance, but everywhere we look, an architecture of shame exists to strip individuals of their right to decide what happens to their bodies, to their lives, to our collective future. We need a new language of consent. What youre holding is a travelers handbook for that new language.

Sex is where it starts, but when is anything ever just about sex? The overriding of consent has become not just a social norm but a mode of governance. We have a president who has groped and bullied his way to power, overriding the consent of the electorate just as he ignored the consent of the women he boasted of grabbing by the pussy. We have a power elite perfectly happy to let him treat the voting public in the same way. And we have a backlash to womens push for sexual and social autonomy so profound, so vicious that it has congealed into a new sort of organized misogyny: people so incensed that they are no longer automatically entitled to womens time, attention, and sexual submission that they are prepared to create political havoc.

This collection is unique in that it makes the essential links between consent at the individual and sexual level and consent at the level of law, society, and governance. The strategies of political coercion learned and employed by the new right were first ritualized as a way of working around the new trend toward respecting womens sexual consent as a thing that might actually matter. The game playing, the gaslighting, the various methods of intimidation and taking by force the power and pleasure you feel entitled to by right of birth: this is how the new fascism operates at every level.

The rage that is rolling nationalists, misogynists, and white supremacists into power across the world is the rage of those who are prepared to tear apart the very fabric of civilization rather than face the possibility that women, queers, and people of color might have a right to agency. To autonomy. To dignity. It is the rage of spoiled children who hate to be told that they might have to earn their candy.

Over the past decade, the naming of rape culture in the popular imagination has been vital. Finally, we can understand that sexual violence not only is about isolated incidents of rape and abuse, but is an attitude that extends throughout culture, perpetuating and enabling that abuse. Its not just the frat boys who violate the freshman girl at the partyits their friends, and her friends, whose first questions are how much she had to drink, what she was wearing, and whether she deserved it. Its not just the Hollywood star who abuses young girls for years with impunityits every aide, handler, and co-star who knew it was going on and said nothing, assuming that powerful men simply do these things, and why would you rock the boat?

Naming rape culture, however, is not enough. It was never going to be enough. The liberation of women, queers, femmes, and female-identified people is about more than negative libertyit is about more than freedom from. Its not just freedom from rape, freedom from abuse, freedom from fear. It is also freedom tofreedom to express desire, to explore pleasure, to seek intimacy and adventure. Perhaps what we should be asking of sexual liberation is not the mere absence of violence. Perhaps we should be going for something beyond Lets not rape each other. What if we can do better?

I met Kitty Stryker at a fetish club in 2010, and it was Kitty who introduced me to the concept of consent cultureand who was, in fact, one of the first to articulate it when she bravely called on the kink community to clean its own house. The first thing she taught me is that consent culture is not about being sex-positive or sex-negative. Those are worn-out ideas, requiring us first to believe that sex is a monolithic concept, something defined for us by patriarchy that we have to either accept or reject on terms other than our own.