The Spectrum of Consent

Stoplights are often used as a visual metaphor for the concept of consent — it’s probably the most pervasive non-sexual representation of the concept.

I’m thankful for the time I had over the winter break to sit and think – there hasn’t been much of that since the semester began, and my school starts early, and we’re three weeks in. One of the things that I’ve turned my attention back to, recently, is the overlap between politics and game design. I’ve done a bit of thinking in that time about the issue of consent.

Please note: when I’m talking about “politics”, I don’t simply mean the dynamics of governance and administration, though that is also part of it. I’m also thinking about the interpersonal politics that govern human relationships. I’ve said before that I need to do some reading on BDSM, and I picked up a text to use as a starting point during our last visit out to the KU libraries – I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I’m looking for, but we had limited time to comb the stacks that day. The topic I identified up above, consent, is sort of the point of contact between these three areas.

A big part of this is driven not just by the ongoing renegotiation of sexual mores in our culture, which is a diplomatic way to say “people – largely, but not solely, women – finally speaking out against those who abused them for so long”, but also by a passage from the first David Graeber book I ever read, Bullshit Jobs:

“...of course, there is also the most important difference between make-believe S&M play—and those engaged in it actually do refer to it as “play”—and its real-life, nonsexual enactments. In the play version, all the parameters are carefully worked out in advance by mutual consent, with both parties knowing the game can be called off at any moment simply by invoking an agreed-on safe-word. For example, just say the word “orange,” and your partner will immediately stop dripping hot wax on you and transform from the wicked marquis to a caring human being who wants to make sure you aren’t really hurt. (Indeed, one might argue that much of the bottom’s pleasure comes from knowing she has the power to affect this transformation at will.) This is precisely what’s lacking in real-life sadomasochistic situations. You can’t say “orange” to your boss. Supervisors never work out in advance in what ways employees can and cannot be chewed out for different sorts of infractions, and if an employee is, like Annie, being reprimanded or otherwise humiliated, she knows there is nothing she can say to make it stop; no safe-word, except, perhaps, “I quit.” To pronounce these words, however, does more than simply break off the scenario of humiliation; it breaks off the work relationship entirely—and might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game, one where you’re desperately scrounging around to find something to eat or how to prevent one’s heat from being shut off.”

Graeber looks at the work relationship as a non-sexual iteration of sadism, which dovetails nicely with his examination of work relationship as sort of an economic expression of this sadistic tendency. Please note: I am not using “sadism” or “sadistic” in a lurid, moralizing fashion – I am using them here to express a desire to impose, for a time, a hierarchic relationship. This is what Graeber refers to when summarizing this work (going by the footnotes, this is largely in reference to work by Erich Fromm and, to a greater degree, Lynn Chancer, though it’s shot through by Foucault.)

What separates play-sadism (that described in BDSM above, and which I contend is an important component in tabletop games) from real-sadism (that found in a boss-employee relationship or their more generic form, the patron-client relationship,) is whether or not the party occupying a lower position in the hierarchy at work can equalize the relationship without fear of repercussion of deprivation.

Now that I’m thinking about it, three of the four David Graeber books that I’ve read deal heavily with this topic in one place or another. The second, Debt: The First 5,000 Years attached this hierarchization to its central object. In the subsection “Shifting Between Modalities” in the chapter “A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations” he identifies the essence of debt (taken here as the social phenomenon) to be the “agreement between equals to no longer be equal.” Taken alongside the bit from Bullshit Jobs, this makes for a strange mixture: the submissive partner does not owe the dominant partner, and despite appearances the employee does not owe the employer (from the moment the employee first clocks in, after all, the employer is the debtor in the relationship, being generously given the employee’s labor power on credit until pay day.)

Before proceeding to the third example – taken from The Utopia of Rules – I want to shift over and look at a gaming text. The reason for this is fairly transparent, and those of you not here for game design needn’t worry, because I’m not going to be quoting rules about underwater combat and weight loads to you. I’m going to instead quote from a free resource put out by Monte Cook Games, entitled – helpfully – Consent in Gaming. On the first page of that text, one finds the following:

Playing RPGs is a shared experience that is supposed to be fun for everyone involved, and part of that is making sure that everyone in the game has consented to the premise and expectations of the campaign and game genre.

Many RPGs put characters in life-or-death situations, emotional conflict and intensity with other people, or traumatic or unhealthy environments—things you might avoid or deflect if it were directed at you personally. By playing a character instead of yourself, it gives you a safe emotional distance to think about and deal with those situations.

The text then goes on to outline a number of tools to help maintain consensual participation in the fiction (which is, after all, the whole point of the exercise.) These tools include the tabletop equivalent of the safe word, the X-Card (a physical card with an “X” written upon it, that can be tapped to pause the game due to a withdrawal of consent,) as well as a number of other tools – boiling down to, essentially, the various players making it clear what they are and what they are not on board for (a technique referred to as “lines and veils”, creating a gradation between what is not allowed, i.e., crosses the line, and what is fine but which the participant would prefer not be shown, i.e., veiled.) Another important element described is Aftercare – a term lifted directly from the BDSM community but repurposed for the context it finds itself in – which advises players to be aware of Bleed, where emotions from the fictitious persona you’ve been acting as “bleed” into you, and to conduct check-ins with the participants.

I bring this up principally to show that consent is a major concern in contemporary game design (something that D&D players might be unaware of, I haven’t taken the time to crack open the 5E book lately, as it’s All The Way Over There across the room.) This connects rather handily with the point in Utopia of Rules, in section three of the titular essay. Graeber characterizes Dungeons and Dragons, for him the archetypal roleplaying game (which I can forgive — he had more important things on his plate,) as both “quite anarchistic...unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have what anarchists would call an ‘affinity group,’ a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose...with complementary abilities...but no explicit chain of command” and “the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. There are catalogs for everything…the books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics. All important qualities can be reduced to a number.”

At the beginning of the next section, he introduces the differentiation that allows this to make sense:

“bureaucracies create games—they’re just games that are in no sense fun. But it might be useful here to think more carefully about what games really are, and what it is that makes them fun in the first place. First of all, what is the relationship between play and games? We play games. So does this mean play and games are really the same thing?”

Graeber eventually lands on the idea that the two are opposites but firmly enmeshed with one another. Games are systems of rules that are imposed on play, which is a “pure expression of creative energy.” It is through the interplay of the two that something else, something more enjoyable than either one on its own emerges. It also adds some support to my assertion than the political science of the future should look to game design because he is arguing, essentially, that games lie at the root not just of bureaucracy, but also the bureaucratic state.

However, in the forms found in societies that practice monarchy, we find an interesting form of consent at play: the citizens cannot exactly consent to be governed, except by refusing to kill the king, and the king is not bound by the rules.

Our archetypal image of absolutism: Louis XIV. In one sense, this makes sense from a judicial standpoint — if a king is absolute judge, they are a judge that is impossible to coerce or bribe. Of course, there are literally all of the other problems to deal with.

It is here that I find the genesis of a potential theory of consent. I believe that there are two varieties – at least – of consent that we refer to by the same name, despite being distinct from one another. I have decided to call these “opt-out” and “opt-in” consent until better terminology presents itself.

In short, “opt-out” consent assumes a default position of yes, but the participants can say no. “Opt-in” consent assumes the opposite – a default position of no, but the participants can say yes. I believe that these two poles each have a degenerate form – the former decaying into compulsion, the latter into prohibition.

To illustrate: imagine two households, one across the street from the other. In one is a family from a stereotypical Mediterranean-adjacent culture and in the other is a family from a stereotypical north-sea-adjacent culture. Both are sitting down to dinner: in the former, a child who had eaten their fill would have to refuse seconds, while in the latter, the child who wished for seconds would have to petition for another helping. In the former, the second plate of food is opt-out, in the latter it is opt-in. The degenerate forms are fairly easy to imagine, and both would constitute abuse – precisely because the child in question wouldn’t get a say in the affair.

Part of the present difficulty regarding heterosexual relationships is a shift in assumptions. Previously, consent meant the right to say no – that is, for one party to declare that they wished to stop. This is better than the alternative, but the struggle of the past few years has been pushing for opt-in consent instead of opt-out, in short, for the default assumption not to be that sexual relations are on the table. It is, in effect, the right to say yes – which means that the default option has to be “no.”

Of course, consent isn’t simply an issue in heterosexual relationships – or only an issue in regard to sex. There are any number of non-sexual situations, or not-directly-sexual situations, in which this comes up. One of the more common examples that comes to mind is whether or not someone can “consent” to see something on the street – such as one person leading another by the leash. The passer-by didn’t opt in to this, but the leash-holder, or leashed individual, for that matter, could point out that they didn’t opt out. My sympathy, in this situation, tends to fall with the passer-by, personally.

However, this does not mean there are no situations where opt-out consent isn’t applicable or valid. If you run heedlessly into a busy intersection and get struck by a vehicle, you can’t claim that you didn’t consent to being struck – but the driver of the vehicle could certainly make the claim that they didn’t consent to strike you.

It’s unfortunate that the first person to call himself an “anarchist’ was a sexist, racist, and misogynist. Those ideas don’t really make sense together.

So what then of the employment situation? The verbally abusive manager, to whom the word “orange” is simply a color or fruit? Sure, you technically opted in by taking the job – by asking for the job – but that happened under duress. A blackmailed individual can’t be said to consent to actions undertook while they are being blackmailed, and as Graeber points out (and, asshole that he is, Proudhoun before him,) that one is essentially blackmailed by deprivation to participate in a labor relationship.

That might be a tough pill for some to swallow, but consider that there sure are a lack of non-employment options for subsistence, while ages past had a variety of options that are no longer open.

But what can be done? The most obvious answer seems to be the one Graeber highlights: to quit, though this is a non-solution at best. Another option, and one more and more American workers seem to be taking, is to organize – in short, to demonstrate what the withdrawal of consent would look like.

Surely there are additional options: as the apparent binary yes-no of consent explodes into a spectrum upon closer examination, there are doubtless an infinite number of tools and techniques with which to interact with this problem. Part of the problem is that the communities with the most well-developed tools for this – the BDSM/Fetish community and the tabletop gaming community – are dealing with situations where coercion is ideally absent. In the absence of some means of removing the coercive element, additional work will have to be done to make the issue of consent an actual concern instead of a pipe dream or a synonym for “morale.”

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