Speech ban

What is a speech ban?

A speech ban (in the scene: silence rule, also no speaking rule) is the agreement that someone stays silent for a set time, imposed by the other. Nothing goes in the mouth. The silence comes from the rule, not from a gag. The ban lasts a scene, an evening, or part of a day, and its edges are set beforehand.

How a speech ban works in practice

As a rule with a start, an end, and one exception.

The usual picture: he says on arrival that no one speaks until after dinner, and she nods. Then something happens that people do not expect. The first ten minutes are awkward and a little giggly, and then it tips over. When you cannot say anything, you start to watch. What the other person is doing, what is expected of you, and yourself.

The ban is almost never absolute. The exception is the sign or the word that stops the scene, and it sits apart from everything else. What falls away is all the things you normally use to talk your way out of discomfort: jokes, announcements, explaining yourself afterward. That is exactly the point.

Where it goes wrong is the length. An hour is long. People agree on a whole evening and notice after forty minutes that they want to say something that really matters, and then the rule is in the way instead of doing anything.

Where the word spreekverbod comes from

From the public world, and the word never left it.

Unlike most words on this list, spreekverbod is simply in the dictionaries. The Integrated Language Database lists it as a subentry under SPREKEN (to speak), and the General Dutch Dictionary gives it its own entry. So it is not scene jargon but a perfectly ordinary Dutch word the scene borrowed.

Where it comes from in public life, the newspaper archive of the Royal Library shows: 7,590 articles, about politicians, journalists, civil servants, and prisoners. One of the oldest is at once the most instructive. The Haagsche courant of 1 February 1909 describes, in a series about prisons, a women’s wing where talking is forbidden and where the warden has trouble “enforcing the absolute speech ban” during the short exercise break. The prisoners are then allowed to make their wishes known “only by signs”.

That is a hundred years old and it is still the heart of the matter. Take away someone’s speech, and you have to give something back. In a prison that was signs; in a scene it is an agreed gesture.

Why people agree on a speech ban

Because it is the cheapest way to make a dynamic felt without anything happening.

• For the one it is imposed on, attention turns inward. You can no longer steer with words, so you only notice how much you normally steer at the moment it falls away.
• For the one imposing it, paying attention gets more intense, not easier. If the other person cannot say anything, you have to read them, and that is a lot more work than listening.
• For both, it works as an amplifier. A speech ban does not make something new, it makes everything already there sharper to hear. Breathing, pace, hesitation.

This is not the agreement to start with if something between you has not yet been said out loud. A speech ban stores problems, it does not solve them. And it works badly for people who process stress by talking. Then it becomes not concentration but bottled-up tension.

What a speech ban is not

“It is the same as a gag.” No, and the difference is exactly the interesting part. A mouth gag makes speaking physically impossible, so it forces nothing: you cannot. A speech ban leaves the ability intact and forbids it. Every second you stay silent is your choice to keep the agreement, and that is a very different kind of surrender.

“So then you do not need a safeword.” The opposite. This is exactly where there has to be something that replaces the safeword: a gesture, an object you drop, or the agreement that saying that one word lifts the ban at once. Without that exception it is not an agreement but a trap.

“It is the same as duty of silence.” In the scene the two get used interchangeably, but in ordinary Dutch they are not. A speech ban forbids the speaking itself; duty of silence is the standing rule that you speak only when spoken to, and outside the scene it means something quite different, namely what you are not allowed to pass on.

What I see in it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo in Amsterdam, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Of all the agreements that cost nothing, this is the one that gives back the most, and at the same time the one most often stretched too long.

People underestimate how hard it lands when you are not allowed to say something you truly feel in that moment. Sometimes that is exactly the point. But it is not an experience you want to have by accident, so a first time I keep short, twenty minutes, with a clear end.

And one practical thing: agree on how it ends. Not “after that you can talk again”, but one sentence that I speak. Otherwise someone stays stuck in the rule and does not dare be the first to say anything.

What you agree on before you start

• Agree the length in minutes and not in events, and for a first time keep it under half an hour.
• Choose a gesture that replaces the safeword, practice it once, and agree that it always stays valid.
• Say beforehand which sounds are allowed: for most couples, sighing, moaning, and laughing stay outside the ban.
• Agree which sentence you use to lift the ban, so the other person does not have to guess when it is over.
• Do not do this in the same scene where you use a mouth gag for the first time; two layers at once makes it impossible to tell what did what.
• Ask about it separately in the debrief, because what a speech ban stirred up rarely comes out on the evening itself.

More on speech bans

Within this list, high protocol covers the wider system of behavior rules a speech ban can be one part of, gag explains the physical opposite, and ignore play describes the agreement where the silence comes from the other person instead of from you. Safeword covers the exception you absolutely need here.

Beyond that, the newspaper archive of the Royal Library is freely searchable, and it is worth seeing for yourself what company this word kept for a hundred years.

Where this fits on this site

Want to know how an evening with rules feels without having to invent them yourself? That is exactly what gets settled in the conversation beforehand. How that goes is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Newspaper archive of the Royal Library (Delpher). Searched through the SRU service on the DDD_artikel collection, sorted by date, with the OCR of the oldest hits proofread. Gives the total of 7,590 articles with the word spreekverbod against 6,671 with zwijgplicht, and the description in the Haagsche courant of 1 February 1909, in a series about prisons, of a women’s wing where the supervisor has “trouble enforcing the absolute speech ban” during the exercise break and where the prisoners may make their wishes known “only by signs”. Explicitly not claimed that 1909 is the oldest source: it is the oldest in the retrieved set.
• Integrated Language Database, WNT. Institute for the Dutch Language. Gives that spreekverbod appears as a subentry in the Dictionary of the Dutch Language, treated under SPREKEN, and that zwijgplicht appears the same way under ZWIJGEN. Unlike most words on this list, this is therefore ordinary Dutch.
• General Dutch Dictionary. Institute for the Dutch Language. Gives that the dictionary describing Dutch from 1970 onward carries its own entry spreekverbod, and an entry zwijgplicht as well. The ANW article page is built up in the browser, so this route establishes that the entry exists and not what it says word for word; the latter is therefore not claimed here.
• 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, PMID 31010393). This source also appears on safeword; here only the part about “silent safewords” is used, such as clapping the hands or snapping the fingers when speaking is not possible, as grounds for the rule that a speech ban needs a non-verbal alternative.

Related terms

• High protocol. The wider system of behavior rules a speech ban can be one part of.
• Gag. The object that makes speaking impossible instead of forbidding it.
• Mouth gag. The most common form of that, with the safety side included.
• Safeword. The exception a speech ban must not go without.
• Ignore play. The mirror agreement: there the other person stays silent, here you do.
• D/s. The dynamic in which rules like this take on meaning.
• Debrief. The talk afterward, which a speech ban makes even more necessary.
• Duty of silence. The same silence as a standing rule instead of a set stretch of time, with the professional meaning the word has outside the scene.