Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook

By Wagatwe Wanjuki and Kitty Stryker

What does “ consent culture” mean to you? Navigating the complex, never-ending work of culture change can be overwhelming at times. Whether you' re exploring what consent means in your personal life or as part of your work in the world, Ask Yourself guides you through the introspection necessary for lasting change.In Ask: Building Consent Culture, consent culture activist Kitty Stryker compiled a diverse collection of essays from people working on questions of how to build a culture of consent in our everyday world. This timely and practical companion workbook invites you to take a journey through your own thoughts on consent and consider how you can help build consent culture. Ask Yourself guides you through a structured exploration with prompts for 28 days of journaling, conversations and other work. The prompts are split into four sections on distinct themes that allow you to explore consent at your own pace and in your own way. This thoughtful book also features short contributions from consent culture activists to help inspire reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thornapple Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778242014

Book preview

Introduction

Content warning: this book contains discussion of sexuality, boundary violations, substance use, sexual assault, abuse, trauma, and other complicated topics

I can’t fully remember when I started to rant to my London friends about the need for some sort of opposite to the phrase rape culture. This is in part because it was over ten years ago, in part because the beginning discussions were offline (back when we talked to each other face to face), and, frankly, in part because my rants were usually fueled by wine. I do remember, though, that I felt in my gut that the way in which we were discussing consent prioritized violations of it—behaviors and situations we wanted to move away from. There wasn’t really a pithy way to discuss what we wanted to move toward, what we wanted to center. As a second-generation anarchist (thanks, mum and dad), I was accustomed to having big ideals that were hard to materialize, but I felt like when it came to this issue, a framework was possible and necessary.

I never could have guessed how far we would come, and yet how far we have left to go.

The History

As far as I can tell, very few people who write about consent culture as an ideal now know that it came from the BDSM community. I’m rarely mentioned, and Cliff Pervocracy, another early adopter, isn’t mentioned at all despite writing one of the first online explanations of what a consent culture could look like on his blog, The Pervocracy, in a post aptly titled Consent Culture.

That I am rarely mentioned isn’t terribly surprising given that much of my writing on the topic was devastated by online censorship pushes—Blogspot and Tumblr both ended up nuking a lot of my work in their widespread anti-obscenity cleanups. One of the first mentions I can find is in a 2012 Salon article, When Safewords Are Ignored, which covers a consent culture fundraiser that M.M. (who no longer wishes to be connected with the project) and I threw to fund an educational tour for our Safe/Ward workshop. With some hardcore digging, I found an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian titled The bad kind of pain: Kitty Stryker talks sexual abuse in the BDSM community that mentions our first workshop in August 2011. Thomas Macauley Miller credits me and M.M. with really pushing the conversation forward in the post There’s A War On Part 1: Trouble’s Been Brewing on his blog Yes Means Yes. Today, the Google alerts I get that mention the phrase consent culture are often schools or workplaces who would likely be horrified to know the origin story.

Well, here’s the real history, as best I can piece it together.

I was eighteen when I went to my very first kink event. I had read several books about BDSM (an acronym for bondage, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism) and felt excited, inspired, and secure in how often they discussed consent as a cornerstone of the lifestyle. Safe, sane, and consensual was the phrase used in the workshops and on the websites.

I was nineteen when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the epicenters of leather culture. I volunteered for events and was soon running my own. I became a professional dominatrix and full-service sex worker in my early twenties and a sex educator by my mid-twenties, throwing events in San Francisco and London, touring and