Consent as Methodology.
I’ve been thinking about how the infrastructure around Consent is not typically coded as Collaboration, because our socio-economic-political system is built upon the pillars of Competition, and competition implies Permission. Making Permission a binary metric: Yes/No, Grant/Deny, Win/Lose. There must always be a winner, otherwise how would we know who is at the top of the dominance hierarchy?
We are a culture subconsciously obsessed with hierarchy, and within that paradigm, Consent implies a dominant-victor and a submissive-loser: The one who asks for Consent is already coded as submissive, already perceived as permission-seeking, and the one who takes action first, and ask for forgiveness later, is cast as dominant. And this is the root rot.
Part I.
There was a man that I had been talking to on the phone. He had been kind to me, understanding, genuine, encouraging, insightful, and a great listener. I have always loved the beautiful way the men in my life have treated me as an equal in friendship. That is, at least when nobody is triggered.
I had known this new friend for a few months while I was in the middle of filing a domestic violence restraining order against a very unpredictable, manipulative, and potentially violent ex-partner (more on that another time). He would call almost daily to check in on me, giving me a safe space to share my feelings on the process. He offered me a place to stay during the court proceedings. I felt very safe with him, and he was someone I wanted to trust. So, I did.
Soon after I arrived at his home, I discovered another version of him, one that surfaces when he drinks. Lately, he drinks a lot. His wounded identity, buried deep inside the man.
After a few days at his place, I realized that the only way he knew how to support me was to perform dominant masculinity for me—on me.
He wanted to be the Protector, the Provider, the Man in our dynamic (the dominant one). But in order for that to work, I had to be the submissive one. The little damsel. The rescued, grateful thing who let him feel strong and needed—coded subconsciously as good and wanted.
Ultimately, we are all mirrors for each other.
What I saw in him is in me too:
His morality had become performative. His empathy had become domination disguised as virtue. He had built an identity around his wound, one of masculine savior to a girl in need.
I told him I didn’t want to play that role. I told him, plainly, that I wanted to provide and protect for myself. He didn’t really know what to do with that answer. You could see him wrestle with it, the disappointment creep in. Then surfaced the wound. The rage of competition began to infect every interaction. He was clearly unsure how to establish closeness without the crutch of a role which he needed to play. All the while drinking and drinking.
Suddenly, it became painfully clear. I was no longer dealing with my friend, I was dealing with his wound.
His wound which had forbidden closeness, vulnerability, equal exchange, and most importantly, submission. Equal Exchange made no sense to his wound. He had no skills for that.
What the wound wanted was Toxic Dominance — which is unlike the Ethical Dominance of a fluid power exchange between two people both identifying somewhere on the spectrum of dominance and submission at any given point in time.
The wound wanted revenge on that person, whoever they may be, maybe even a past version of himself, who had made him feel small and weak for being soft.
He couldn’t give an inch, because if he did, he’d be the submissive one, the loser, again.
He demonstrated the contents of his subconscious when he chased me around his house, drunk, trying to coerce a kiss from me. In moments pinning me down. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it was clear to me now that subconsciously he understood our dynamic to be a competition, and seeing himself as the dominant one, winning was the only option.
In his actions he revealed his true belief, that there can be only one dominant and one submissive. One winner. One loser.
His wound wanted, needed, to prove its host superior, and in so doing, he revealed the fragility of his identity: that his sense of worth depended on the subjugation of mine.
Again, we are all mirrors for each other.
I played that power game with him for a moment. I won’t even bother to explain myself beyond that my own wound was knocking at the door, and though I didn’t answer at the first knock, eventually I did.
My wound wanted to win, wanted to get revenge on that person, whoever they may be, maybe even a past version of myself, who had made me feel like an object, a small toy, a possession, inferior, not even a real girl, one you could use and discard.
I needed to be strong for all the “other women” out there. Rather, I needed to be strong so that I was not perceived as weak. But that is not feminism, it’s more competition and internalized misogyny with a deep bench in the footnotes, therapy-speak, and better branding.
I left his house gasping for air. How easily we are consumed by the human condition, I’d thought.
I saw so much of myself in him, and my wound in his wound, it was terrifying. And I saw him in there too, whoever he was, before he got lost.
But to be honest, I’m down to chill on vicariously rescuing abandoned parts of myself through other people. And I have the ex-partner I mentioned earlier to thank for that lesson.
I told him that we have a lot in common, that we are more similar than he may think, that we could very swiftly recover from this together if he was willing to meet me in that mirror, but he had already buckled down and armored up. “You misread me,” he said. He said it over and over again.
And it’s that compulsion not to lose, not to give an inch, not to admit any culpability, more than anything else, which was the real heartbreak. Because our intentions were there and they were clear. The desire for closeness, intimacy, connection, to be seen and known, it was all there. And so was the trigger and the wound.
Part II.
After the court proceedings were over and the restraining order was granted, I confided in another woman some weeks later what had happened during my stay at my friend’s house. She had been kind to me during the court proceedings. She approached me with genuine understanding, encouragement, and insightful banter. She was a great listener and I felt very seen by her. I have always loved the beautiful way the women in my life have treated me as an equal in friendship. That is, at least when nobody is triggered.
I hadn’t communed with another woman in months, and her attitude toward me was one of real understanding. She reached out consistently to check in on me and gave me a safe space to talk about my process. This established a dynamic between us. She appeared in my life in a time of genuine crisis and thus was associated with the solution to next crisis of a similar nature. I had it in my mind that she would be interested to know considering she had reached out so consistently during the weeks, surrounding the court proceedings, and had presented herself to me during that time as someone to go to in moments like this. It felt like the safest thing to do and an opportunity to further develop the friendship. I wanted to trust her. So, I did.
I asked her if she knew the friend I had stayed with, and when she responded by confirming precisely what I had feared, I told her vaguely what had happened during the weeks spent at his house during the court proceedings. She was clearly triggered, even said so herself, and within an hour, she had taken action.
She told his ex-girlfriend, whom she looked upon as a little sister, about what had happened and gave my name. The other woman proceeded to troll me on Instagram, commenting sad faces on my photos as if I had personally wronged her, a very complex neuroendocrinological association, occurring within milliseconds of unanticipated or upsetting stimuli, which approximates the original feeling of having been blindsided and/or betrayed. She then blocked me.
The new female friend I’d told my story to fed me a coverup. She clearly was not expecting her to do that. She must have felt awful, but it seemed by the way she was explaining PTSD reactivity to me, that she was both uncomfortable accepting accountability for how her actions had impacted me and simultaneously neglecting how, in the present moment, I may also be experiencing PTSD reactivity. In fact, and as far as I know, she also lives with PTSD, and was more than likely also experiencing PTSD reactivity.
I told her we have a lot in common, that we are more similar than she may think.
“Explaining PTSD to me, when I have lived with PTSD for 15 years, or any other mental health related diagnosis, implies a distance in lived experience that just isn’t there.”
And just like that. Gang’s all here. Three abused (hate that word) women, living with PTSD and mental health conditions as the result of severe trauma, taking shots at each other in that strange, nebulous dreamscape that is Instagram.
I told her that I understood why she had shared my information with her friend, and conveyed to the best of my ability that the upsetting bit wasn’t necisarilly that she’d told someone, it was that she’d told that someone without consulting me first, without including me in that decision, without my involvement, without my Consent. She took my narrative and used it as social currency, as a gesture of moral authority. And in so doing, she stripped me of agency all over again.
She continued to deny any wrongdoing, but threw me a bone when she replied in a message, “I should have asked.”
It felt like the old, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
It didn’t hit like Accountability. And it continued to not hit like accountability when she was unresponsive to my invitation to repair that impact together. In fact, she went on to justify herself further, describing the other woman (the ex-girlfriend) as “a baby.” A baby she was very protective of. A baby who reminded her of a younger version of herself that she had taken “under her wing.”
And that’s when something clicked.
Even here, between women, in feminist community, the same old story was playing out: provider and dependent, protector and damsel, dominant and submissive, mother and child, winner and loser, superior and inferior. I realized that she didn’t actually know how to support me, she wanted to perform dominant femininity for me. She had built an identity around her wound, one of strong feminine savior to a girl in need.
I told her that 26 is not a baby. That shielding someone we perceive as weaker than us (a baby), or bearing the emotional responsibility for their decisions + our absence or shortcomings, creates a scenario where we try to reconcile our own perceived culpability, but at what cost?
I know this because I literally just did this in my last relationship, and got my ass handed to me. And now, in this moment with her, I got to see the impact of assuming that role in interpersonal dynamic from a new point of view. This time I was on the receiving end, and her decision came at my expense. Whose best interests did her actions serve?
What about my actions? Should I have continued the discussion with her after she’d told me she was triggered? Was I not triggered also?
I begin to share more of deepest secrets with her, against all reason, trying my best to maintain a center of gravity, but slipping fast. This is something which happens to me often. I say “happens to me,” because it feels something like falling into a black hole. A black hole that wasn’t there before, until suddenly I’m falling down it, or it is swallowing me, take your pick.
It happens when the rage in me, which is otherwise on a consistent low-n-slow temperature, shifts from bubbling to boiling. If not a black hole, it is the anthropomorphization of a virus, which seems to appear out of nowhere, from somewhere dark and low, infecting the interaction in a manner which is referred to clinically as the Fawn Response.
I started to share more with her. Started to prove to her that I was qualified to speak on this matter. But she didn’t seem to budge.
Suddenly, it became painfully clear. I was no longer there. I was up high somewhere watching it all play out.
I was no longer in conversation with my new friend, I was dealing with her wound and she mine.
My wound which has forbidden real closeness, vulnerability, equal exchange. Her wound which is prepared for war, always. Neither of us could give an inch, because whoever did, she’d be the submissive one, the loser, again.
And here we have two very well read, and well meaning, women cloaking our wounds under the veil of Feminist Vigilante of the High Desert.
Ultimately, we are all mirrors for each other.
I saw it in her because it’s in me too. But that is not feminism. It’s competition.
I told her that we could very swiftly recover from this together if she was willing to meet me in that mirror, but it seemed that she had already buckled down and armored up.
She told me she wasn’t in the headspace for the conversation and would reach out when she was. Days passed. This felt dismissive, like a rejection, like I was that inadequate, inanimate toy, discarded again. I was tired of aiming for empathy and feeling like a doormat. I wasn’t going to be the submissive one this time.
After I didn’t hear from her for several days, I sent her an angry, poorly worded, and intentionally combative message demonstrating my very high quality conflict resolution skills.
She told me she had already apologized and that she didn’t ask to be put in this position. But is that true? Didn’t we both ask to be put in this position?
And then I blocked her.
At first, I thought: Phew, now I’m safe.
And immediately after that, I thought: Oh, fuck.
More heartbreak, and for why? What happened? Because the intention was there, yet so was the trigger, the wound, and the internalized misogyny.
I have another dear friend who likes to say that some things are just, “baked into us.”
So that’s it, then? Black and white? Yes or no? Win or lose? More binary metrics?
Reworking Consent.
Do you see where I’m going with this? This is how patriarchy sustains itself.
What I’ve realized since then is that the work of Fourth Wave Feminism is not to police consent. We need to redefine it.
Consent as Participation.
Consent as Collaboration.
Consent as Methodology.
Consent as ongoing exchange of equal power between equal people who choose to co-create a dynamic.
I don’t know, throw one at me.
What I do know, is that when we reduce Consent to a binary, we make it a transaction (yes or no), and what’s more, we wind up replicating the same hierarchies that make abuse possible. We wind up wounding others in the same ways we have been wounded.
Permission presupposes inequality.
In the same way capitalism measures value through production and patriarchy measures worth through dominance, permission frames consent as a product, not a process.
To truly practice Consent as Methodology is to engage in mutual authorship. To say, “We are co-writing this moment together.”
And this is where I think Kink has something to teach the mainstream: dominance and submission can be conscious, ethical, and collaborative.
Accountability and Power.
What terrifies people most about Accountability is that it exposes the myth of control.
To be accountable is to admit interdependence: “My actions affect others. I am not autonomous, I am relational.”
But in a capitalist patriarchy, dependence is humiliation. Vulnerability is weakness. Submission is failure. So instead of being accountable, people defend, deflect, deny—anything to avoid the appearance of being beneath someone else.
We are conditioned to see power as a finite resource. But what if power were not about control, and instead about connection? What if it multiplied in the space between us…
When we frame Consent as permission, we reinforce a vertical power structure: one person above, one below. But when we reimagine consent as collaboration, the structure collapses.
In turn, accountability is not submission, it’s self-respect.
Coda.
Both of those experiences reflected shadow parts of myself back to me, reinforcing the conviction that patriarchy lives in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It lives in the roles we are assigned based upon class, race, gender, and labor that we internalize and reenact even when we choose roles for ourselves.
Dominance without accountability isn’t power at all, it’s fear of inferiority all dressed up.
And so I’ll leave you with this final thought:
Consent is not about who’s allowed to do what. Consent is a methodology for how we meet each other in exchange of power.
What happens when two people stop performing power and start sharing it?
The system collapses.