When Subs Violate Consent

You know this feeling. You've been here before—bent over the kitchen counter biting down at every strike of his cane. You can do this. You feel you might snap in half, but calling red feels like a personal failing. Besides, you started this. You owe it to him to finish it, and so you clench your teeth until physical pain turns into emotional pain, and emotional pain turns into trauma, and trauma turns into flashbacks.

He's told you to use your safe word at times like this, but your sub-cred could use a little improvement, so you swallow your screams. You wish away your tears. You count back from a hundred. You wonder how long this is going to last, but you'll be glad you did this in the end. When it's over, you'll be covered in the most vicious marks you've ever had, and that's worth its weight in masochist's pride.

BDSM has stopped being a compelling way to engage with your partners. Now, it's an Olympic Sport, and you win if you can post the goriest bruises on Fetlife tomorrow. I've been there; standing in front of a mirror admiring my blackened body. I've told myself the marks were worth it. No harm, no foul, right?

Except there was harm. I’ve thrown myself into situations I knew might turn me into a triggered, weeping mess. H and I were involved during the most harrowing years of my life. I was still traumatised by my rape, but I refused to let the past limit my kink life. Sex triggered me often, but I played the hero until I was utterly traumatised. He only told me how guilty it made him feel years later. I had put him in a position he hadn't consented to, and in so doing, I had made him feel like a rapist.

By the time I got involved with E, I’d recovered from my rape, but my desire to explore the most extreme parts of D/s ignored his right to decide how much regret he was willing to inspire in me. Many dominants feel perfectly au fait with that risk, but E was not one of them. He needed me to choose my limits carefully.

And I didn’t.

When we play with tops who like strict limits, we owe it to them to draw defined boundaries instead of vague-booking through our capacity for pain. Safewords protect us from lost limbs and scars. They also protect tops from causing them.

Limits and safewords aren’t only protections for bottoms. They give our tops an out before we trample all over their right to consent. They preserve trust and give sadists a sense of safety. I had to learn that lesson on my own because on Fetlife, we’ll teach you the A’s to Z’s of abusive tops, but we won’t discuss subs who violate their tops’ consent.

Sure, we’ll occasionally allude to rapes that are perpetrated by bottoms, but subtler consent violations remain under the skin of things, muddying everything.

That’s why I speak about self-awareness as often as I do. It keeps us all safe. People-pleasing subs can traumatise their tops. So can triggered subs and masochists who take pride in the meagre limits of their pain thresholds. In a healthy D/s relationship, all parties are responsible for consent.

Saying “yes” can quash a top’s right to say “no”. We usually call that coercion, and it's an unacceptable way to engage with others.