Consent Counts!
www.Consentcounts.org
It is important that we talk about where we go from here to make sure that laws that protect people from things like battery aren’t used against the BDSM/Kink/Leather (add any others that are appropriate) communities. Click here to read and download a free copy of the discussion guide that you can use to gather input from your local community.
The resource is a series of discussion questions for your local community. It can be used at meetings such as a munch, workshop, club meeting or discussions within your own leather family. This might take an hour or could be a series of discussions. The answers your community arrives at begins to build a community or a grass roots view of what it will take to work towards the goal of decriminalization of BDSM. The public process will also create an infrastructure that can be used a resource as the decriminalization work continues over the years.
Workshop Template: Here
To report your findings: Here
You can download the Consent Counts stickers. You can print them on Avery stickers #8462 or equivalent. Here
~ by Klawdya Rothschild on November 11, 2008.
Posted in Musings, Presenting
Tags: BDSM, consent, Kink, NCSF, polyamory, sexuality, workshop
Klawdya Rothschild's Vortex 
I would say my immediate friends would think BDSM as freaky, kinky, not for them, but I doubt they would want to see it criminalized. Hey, so what is the law in Baltimore about such things?
Hi. The problem isnt that it is going to be criminalized, the problem is that it is ALREADY a crime! Can you believe it? So medieval!
More than anything, I think the issue is about consent, and Id personally like to see consent conversations go more in depth regardless of alt-sex. For example, I think people often engage in riasky/edgy sex practices whether they go all out with the whips and chains, and even casual sex should be handled a little bit more friendly style in the vanilla world if you ask me.
I encourage any group of people, kink or alternative lifestyle or no to do one of these. The more info about consent the better for everyone!
…so a consent form for any sexual act? that might work.
hahahahaha….not exactly what I meant….some might argue that that is a worse mood killer than the condom (although have some suggestions for that, but that, as Alton Brown says, is Another Episode).
So I think many people take each other sexually for granted, not considering that we all have difference experiences, likes and dislikes and what is totally normal and commonplace sexually to one may be totally alien and daunting to another. I think this is LESS SO in the kink world, because we are specifically socialized and have a feedback mechanism in place within our sub-culture that talks about this: Negotiation, safewords, kink categorization and declaration etc etc. However, even within this community these terms we use to ease the discovery process have a wide spectrum of interpretations.
But in a “normal” or hetero-normative, or new-wave homosexual normative scenario where sex and sexuality is considered ‘average’ and that my average and your average are similar I actually think that the most problems emerge, and the least openness and communication is experienced between people- leading to more feelings of betrayal, abuse and trauma.
Dialogue, and not necessarily pre-coital dialogue, but continual dialogue with friends lovers and family is the only thing.