How To Negotiate a Scene in One Minute Flat
Added 2024-07-08 09:42:56 +0000 UTCMeet June. She's allergic to everything: Nuts, fish, lactose, eggs, seeds, soy, and approximately a million other things. When she goes to a restaurant, she sends her five-page list of allergens to the chef to get a recommendation of what to eat. Then the chef sends back some suggestions and June sends back a bunch of noes and the waiter runs back and forth getting very, very tired.
Meet Jessica. She’s also allergic to everything, but she has a different strategy. She knows a few dishes without her allergens, so she asks for one of those. This takes considerably less time than June’s strategy, and Jessica is a lot less likely to run into problems.
June chooses what to eat by a 50-page list of exclusions.
Jessica chooses what to eat by a three-line list of inclusions because June's strategy would take too bloody long and require more trust in the chef than she’s ready to offer.
We use the same two approaches with kink. When Jessica plays with a new partner, she doesn’t need to present a 20-page list of limits. She speaks to her top, and together they decide what to include in the scene. Everything that’s not included is considered a hard limit.
In the vanilla world, we call this “getting to know each other.” Learning one another’s limits can be an exceedingly complicated affair.
It's worth the time if you’re forging a new relationship and are invested in creating a sense of freedom. Bloggers have gone to great pains to create long checklists for people who want to play on an opt-out basis. Fetlife has a hard limits tool, too.
But if you’re playing with a new or casual partner, it’s a lot easier to list three things you want to do than 50 that you don’t. It leaves less space for confusion and gaslighting. If your top violates your consent, they’ll have no excuses, and you’ll be clearer about what has actually happened to you.
This post is short because it’s so simple I wondered if it was worth writing at all. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
