Negotiation

What is negotiation?

Negotiation is the conversation where two people set down before a session what does and does not happen. Both sides bring something to it: wishes, limits, health, the safeword and the aftercare. It is not asking permission but making a frame together, and it comes before every arrangement.

How a negotiation goes in practice

A negotiation takes ten minutes to half an hour and is about four things: what you want, what you do not, how you stop and what happens afterward.

Dunkley and Brotto lay out in their review in Sexual Abuse what comes up: what people are in the mood for, health complaints, acts that are out of the question, emotional triggers, and the aftercare. Arrangements, they say, must be explicit, not tacit.

A common example. Two people who met at a munch meet an hour before the session. She names three things she wants to try and two that are not on the table; he says what he does not do himself, and that list is shorter than she expected. They agree “red” as the safeword and “yellow” to make it softer, and stay sitting together for half an hour afterward.

Where the word comes from

Negotiation carries a trap in English: it suggests haggling, bargaining a price down, while in a scene nothing is bargained away. The Dutch word for it, onderhandelen, makes the other reading plain, because it literally means “to talk back and forth.” The Etymologiebank gives onderhandelen as a compound of onder “mutual” and handelen “to talk about something,” with the oldest Dutch attestations between 1845 and 1849; handelen is itself an old derivation of hand, base meaning “to touch, to take in hand.”

The mutuality is thus already in the word. Anyone who only asks whether something is allowed is not negotiating but asking permission. That is why the dominant side is just as much up to bat as the receiving one.

Williams, Thomas, Prior and Christensen hold in their proposal for the 4C’s framework that acceptable play stands or falls with careful negotiation, and alongside consent and caution they hang two things the older slogans missed: caring and communication. Of the three layers of consent the same authors distinguish, negotiation is the middle one.

What negotiation is good for

For many people the conversation is already half the fun: you hear someone say out loud what they intend to do with you.

• For the one undergoing something, the biggest distraction disappears: not knowing what is coming. Anyone who knows the program keeps their attention on it.
• For the one steering, the gain is information. Without negotiation you play blind and sit guessing what you could have known.
• For two people together, it is the skill that pays off most. Cutler interviewed 33 active BDSM practitioners; 19 of them named communication the most important skill for a good relationship, above technique and experience.

Negotiation alone does not solve everything. Dunkley and Brotto note pointedly that misunderstandings arise even with a negotiation: it rarely goes wrong on whether something is allowed and almost always on what that something means. Two people who agree to “hard spanking” sometimes have a very different picture of it.

How people negotiate

The most common form is a spoken conversation in this order:

1. Wishes. What do you want to try, and what have you wanted to do for a while.
2. Limits. What does not happen at all, and what may not right now.
3. Body and mind. Injuries, medication, subjects you avoid.
4. Stopping. Which word stops everything, and which word only makes it softer.
5. Afterward. How long do you stay together, and who gets in touch when.

There are also two variant forms. The written one: you both fill in a kinklist and the conversation is only about the rows where your answers differ. And the ongoing one, with people who play together more often: only what has changed.

What negotiation is not

“Negotiation is asking permission.” That is half of it. In asking permission one person puts something forward; in negotiation both put something down, including the one who takes the lead.

“If you discuss everything beforehand, the tension is gone.” What you agree is the frame, not the order or the moment. You know that there is a whip; when it gets picked up you do not.

“Negotiating once is enough.” Limits shift with time, mood, experience and play partner, write Williams and colleagues, and that is why they advise holding the arrangements up to the light each time again. Dunkley and Brotto add that there is communication during and after the session too. That is what the check-in and the debrief are for.

“Negotiation is for beginners.” The other way around: with edgeplay the negotiation is the longest part of the evening.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, in the BDSM world since 1990 and trained as a psychotherapist. I read and answer my messages myself, so the negotiation begins with the message someone deletes three times before sending it.

People have prepared the wrong half. They come with a neat list of what is not allowed and have never said out loud what they do want. Understandable: the first feels like protecting yourself, the second like exposing yourself. Only then I know where the walls stand, not where we are walking to.

Beyond that, almost always the same question comes, often with an apology attached: is this weird? Everything can be discussed and nothing has to happen. There are things that are not for me, and I just name those back. That belongs to it just as much as your list.

What you can do yourself

• Negotiate sober and well before the session. Among 202 BDSM practitioners, Tarleton, Mackenzie and Sagarin found that drink while making consent arrangements is generally seen as unacceptable. So talk before the first glass, and while calling it off is still possible.
• Write your wishlist before your list of limits. The second is already in your head, the first you have probably never written down.
• Ask at every word what it means to the other. “Hard,” “rough” and “humiliation” have no shared measure; have it described in acts.
• Ask the other what they do not do. A negotiation where one side names limits is not one.
• Set the outcome down in one message and send it back: what happens, what does not, which word stops it, what time you are done. Then you see whether you heard the same thing.
• Negotiate again at every change: an act that was not in it yet, a different place, someone else joining.

What beginners get wrong most often: nodding at an unfamiliar word. Ask further.

More on negotiation

On this site, consent explains the principle under this conversation, kinklist gives the list you prepare it with, and the article on communicating beforehand shows how such a conversation builds connection instead of breaking the mood.

Beyond this site, the piece by Williams and colleagues on the 4C’s is the best starting point: it explains why “safe, sane and consensual” falls short as a negotiation frame. At Dunkley and Brotto the literature is gathered together.

Where this fits on this site

If you find it hard to have such a conversation with someone you do not know, then with me it is not a separate lead-up but the first half of the BDSM date itself. The preparation shows which questions I ask; afterward you can still say no.

Sources

• From “SSC” and “RACK” to the “4Cs”: Introducing a new Framework for Negotiating BDSM Participation. D J Williams, Jeremy N. Thomas, Emily E. Prior & M. Candace Christensen, Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality 17, 2014. Read via the web archive; ejhs.org is offline by now. Yields that acceptable play stands or falls with careful negotiation, the 4C’s framework (caring, communication, consent and caution) as successor to SSC and RACK, Cutler’s finding (2003) that 19 of 33 interviewed BDSM practitioners named communication the most important skill, the observation that limits shift with time, mood, experience and play partner, and the recommendation to hold arrangements up to the light each time again.
• The Role of Consent in the Context of BDSM. Cara R. Dunkley & Lori A. Brotto, Sexual Abuse 32(6), 657–678, 2020 (DOI 10.1177/1079063219842847). Review of the literature. Yields what comes up in a negotiation (interests, health complaints, excluded acts, emotional triggers, the scope of the scene and the aftercare), the requirement that arrangements be explicit and not tacit, the fact that misunderstandings arise even with negotiation once two people define the same act differently, that communication during and after the scene belongs to it, and the proposal to take this way of agreeing as a model beyond BDSM.
• Consent Norms in the BDSM Community: Strong But Not Inflexible. Hannah L. Tarleton, Taylor Mackenzie & Brad J. Sagarin, Archives of Sexual Behavior 54(2), 549–559, 2025. Study among 202 BDSM practitioners from 18 to 83 years old. Yields that drink while making consent arrangements is generally judged unacceptable, and within existing relationships less strictly than with newly met partners.
• onderhandelen. G.J. van Wyk, Etimologiewoordeboek van Afrikaans (2003), via the Etymologiebank, with the entry for handelen from M. Philippa et al., Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (2003–2009). Yields that onderhandelen is a compound of onder “mutual” and handelen “to talk about something,” with the oldest Dutch attestations between 1845 and 1849, and that handelen is an old derivation of hand with the base meaning “to touch, to take in hand.”

Related terms

• Consent. The principle a negotiation makes concrete.
• Boundary. What a negotiation is about the longest.
• Kinklist. The filled-in list you prepare a negotiation with.
• Check-in. How the negotiation continues during the session.
• Debrief. The conversation afterward, where the next negotiation begins.
• House rules. What is already set before you agree anything.
• Pick-up play. The same negotiation in ten minutes with a stranger, and what falls away there.
• Pro Dom. Whose negotiating before the appointment is the largest part of the work.
• Trigger. The part of that conversation where the scene use and the clinical use of the word diverge.
• Veto. The arrangement between partners that is made, or rejected, in this conversation.