Consent

What is consent?

Consent is the voluntary, informed agreement of everyone taking part, given without pressure and revocable at any moment. It is not a signature you sign up front. It is an arrangement you make together, adjust along the way, and can stop. Without consent, what happens is no longer play. It is a criminal offense.

How consent looks in practice

Consent rarely looks like a form. Usually it is a conversation that lasts a quarter of an hour and covers what you do want, what you don’t want, and how you stop it.

A first example, and the most common one: two people who want to try something new and go over beforehand what will and won’t happen, which word stops everything, and how the evening ends. Then the session follows, and along the way you check how it is going. That is the whole mechanism.

A second example sits far from that. In their review of the literature, Dunkley and Brotto describe how the heaviest negotiations can run for weeks, with conversations and email exchanges and detailed lists of personal limits. How elaborate it gets depends, they say, on two things: how well you know each other and how risky what you are planning is.

What those two share is the structure underneath. The encyclopedic description sums consent up as “the explicit and informed consent of a participant to engage in specific activities or types of relationships”, and names four things that come up in a negotiation: the way you play, which body parts, the limits, and the safeword.

The three layers of consent

Consent sounds like a yes or a no, and that is all it is on the surface. Williams and colleagues split it, as Dunkley and Brotto summarize, into three levels that all have to hold.

Surface consent is the simplest layer: a yes or a no to the question of whether you want something. Scene consent is the layer below it, where you agree together on the frame of the session, what happens, how far it goes, what does not happen. Deep consent is the layer that gets forgotten most often, the one that asks whether the person in charge still notices whether the other is even able to use a safeword.

That third level is why consent is not a contract. It is an attitude. Someone deep in a session can be mentally somewhere else and simply not find the word that stops everything. The responsibility then lies with the person watching, not the person staying silent.

The same source names something else that keeps coming up in interviews with practitioners: that consent is given fully with a clear head, without coercion and without pressure from others, and with a mind not clouded by substances. And that anyone can withdraw it at any moment, after which the play stops at once.

What Dutch law says about it

Since 1 July 2024, the Netherlands has had the Sexual Offenses Act. Its core is that “sex must always be voluntary and on equal terms”.

There is one change everyone should know. For a conviction, according to the same source, “proof that someone was coerced is no longer required”. There is now such a thing as culpable sexual assault and culpable rape: it is also an offense to wrongly assume the other person wants sex when there were clear signals of the opposite.

For anyone who plays with power exchange, that means something very concrete. The question is no longer whether you heard a no, but whether you could reasonably have thought there was a yes. That puts the weight on the person who keeps going, not on the person who did not dare speak up.

Why consent makes all the difference

Consent is not the brake on pleasure. It is the condition for it. Without an arrangement no one knows where they stand, and then surrender becomes impossible.

• For the person on the receiving end, the gain is that you can only truly let go once you know there is a way out. Anyone who is not sure they can stop stays half on guard.
• For the person taking the lead, consent is the only ground on which you may do something firm. It is also your own protection: what is agreed is known, what is not agreed you do not do.
• For the two of you together, the conversation yields more than the arrangement itself. Dunkley and Brotto even propose using the explicit way BDSM talks about consent as a model for conversations about consent in care work and education.

The big claim from that same research is worth reading in full: “the feature that distinguishes BDSM from abuse and psychopathology is the presence of mutual informed consent among all involved”. The acts do not decide the difference. The arrangement underneath does.

How people arrange consent

In practice it happens in four steps, whether you call them that or not.

1. Talking beforehand. What you want, what you definitely do not want, what your hard limits are, and what is too much for now but maybe not later.
2. Agreeing on a safeword. A safeword switches off the power dynamic and means: this is where the consent ends.
3. Checking along the way. The traffic-light system is the best-known tool for that, with red for stop, orange for gentler, and green for more.
4. Talking it over afterward. Aftercare is also the moment when misunderstandings that went unnoticed during the session come to the surface.

How strictly that gets applied varies with the situation, and that is not sloppiness. Tarleton, Mackenzie and Sagarin put questions about consent norms to 202 BDSM practitioners and found that people broadly endorse those norms yet apply them more loosely with a steady partner than with a new one. Alcohol while making arrangements was frowned on everywhere, though a little less strictly in a long-term relationship than for a first time.

So the difference between the careful version and the sloppy one is not in how much you discuss. It is in whether you talk again when something changes.

Misconceptions about consent

“You settle it once, up front.” That is the most stubborn one. Dunkley and Brotto describe consent as exactly the opposite, “an ongoing, interactive, and dynamic process”. Cascalheira, Thomson and Wignall even found, among people who live inside a power exchange around the clock, a term of their own for it: dynamic consent, agreement that is given again and again in ordinary conversations.

“If you have a safeword, you are covered.” A safeword is an excellent instrument and no guarantee. The same authors name two gaps: the person in charge can miss it or ignore it, and the person who should use it can be in a state where that does not work.

“Everyone in the scene knows the rules.” That falls short too. In Liam Wignall’s interview study of thirty kinky men, most had never heard of the classic framework safe, sane and consensual. They did negotiate, but in plain words and without the theory.

“Consent is about sex.” It is about everything you do with another body. A smack, a blindfold, an hour spent tied up, they all call for the same arrangement.

What I see myself

In my conversations I notice that the word “consent” often gets in people’s way more than it helps. It sounds legal, and then people start answering as if they are filling in a form.

That is why I would rather ask “what would this mean for you” than “is this allowed”. It almost always brings out more. What I hear most is something no one puts on a list: that someone does not know whether she wants a thing herself or wants it because someone else does. Teasing that apart takes ten minutes and changes the rest of the evening.

The second thing I have learned is that the yes during a session says less than the yes before it and the yes after. Someone who is in deep will say almost anything. So I watch breathing, tension and eye contact instead of words, and I check out loud when I have doubts. That does not take the tension away. It is what makes it bearable to build the tension up.

What you can do yourself

• Ask about the why, not just the whether. “What is appealing about this” gives you more useful information than “do you want this”.
• Agree on a safeword that stands apart from the play, and agree on what happens after it. Stopping is not the same as pausing.
• Check along the way. One word at the right moment heads off most misunderstandings.
• Do not make arrangements under the influence. It is the rule almost everyone agrees on and the one broken most often.
• Talk again when something changes: a new act, a new partner, a different kind of evening. Old arrangements do not cover a new situation.
• Take your own doubt seriously. If you are explaining why you said yes anyway, you are probably explaining that it was a no.

More on consent

On this site, the article on consent as the backbone of safety and pleasure goes into detail on what that conversation looks like in practice, and the page on consent sets out what I go over with you concretely before a date. The piece on feedback is about the part that happens during the session itself.

Off this site, the review article by Dunkley and Brotto is the best starting point there is, and the explanation from the Dutch government takes ten minutes to read and applies to you as it stands.

Sources

• The Role of Consent in the Context of BDSM. Cara R. Dunkley & Lori A. Brotto, Sexual Abuse 32(6), 657–678, 2020. Review of the literature; supplies the claim about mutual informed consent, the three levels of consent, the description of consent as an ongoing process, the limits of safewords, and the proposal to take BDSM practice as a model for conversations about consent in care work.
• Consent Norms in the BDSM Community: Strong But Not Inflexible. Tarleton, Mackenzie & Sagarin, Archives of Sexual Behavior 54(2), 549–559, 2025. Study of 202 BDSM practitioners; strict consent norms that are applied more loosely in steady relationships than with new contacts.
• “A certain evolution”: a phenomenological study of 24/7 BDSM and negotiating consent. Cascalheira, Thomson & Wignall, Psychology & Sexuality 13(3), 628–639, 2021. Supplies the notion of dynamic consent: honesty and contextual communication instead of a single negotiation up front.
• Beyond safe, sane, and consensual: Navigating risk and consent online for kinky gay and bisexual men. Liam Wignall, Journal of Positive Sexuality 6(2), 66–74, 2020. Interviews with thirty kinky men; most did not know SSC and negotiated in plain words.
• Wet seksuele misdrijven. Rijksoverheid, in force since 1 July 2024. Sex must be voluntary and on equal terms; proof of coercion is no longer needed, and culpable sexual assault and culpable rape are offenses.

Related terms

• Slave contract. The most complete written record of an arrangement, and what the law makes of it.
• SSC. Safe, sane and consensual, the classic framework in which consent is the third element.
• Check-in. Asking along the way how things are going, which keeps consent alive through the session.
• Consent violation. What it is called when the arrangement is overstepped, and how often that happens.
• CNC. The form in which you agree to play as if there were no consent, and which asks for the most careful arrangements of all.
• Contract. The written version of the same conversation.
• Aftercare. The wind-down in which misunderstandings also come to the surface.
• BDSM. The umbrella that consent is the condition of.
• Dom list. The tool with which the conversation beforehand is held, from the giving side too.
• Monogamy. The relationship arrangement resting on exactly the same agreement, and the one most often never spoken out loud.
• Forced orgasm. A scene in which the stop arrangement has to work without words.
• Free use. The arrangement that grants consent in advance, and where for that very reason the most questions come up.
• Golden shower. An act that cannot be adjusted midway, so it hangs entirely on the arrangement up front.
• Boundary. The building material an arrangement is made of: who sets one, and why boundaries move.
• Informed consent. The demand on what you must know before a yes is worth anything, with its roots in medical ethics.
• Negotiation. The conversation itself: who brings in what, what lands on the table and when you hold it.
• Safeword. The means by which consent is withdrawn in the middle of a scene.
• Hard limit. The boundary that is not up for discussion and needs no word for it.
• RACK. The framework that puts risk first instead of the promise of safety.
• Soft limit. The one kind of boundary that carries a condition, and so the place where consent gets negotiated out.
• Tantra. The tradition built around attention and pace, where agreement step by step is the norm.
• Fight-or-flight response. Why silence is not agreement: when you freeze, speech drops away.