The Consent Social Contract
I will ask you for your consent. This is necessary to establish consent.
You will, after introspecting, give it or withdraw it. You will trust that I will gracefully accept it, and honor yourself. This is necessary for us to establish true consent.
Whether you give or withdraw it, I will gracefully and with love accept your choice. This is necessary for me to reinforce your ability to make the choice freely.
We both agree that consent can evolve. Both of us can change our minds: we can extend consent further, we can withdraw it.
We both agree that consent cannot be retroactively changed. It can be withdrawn, affecting the future, but it cannot be retroactively withdrawn, changing the past. This is necessary for my ability to trust the consent you give me, so I can proceed with it.
We are both responsible for our own actions. Sometimes we will regret times we gave consent, or acted on consent, or withdrew consent, or didn’t give consent. This is necessary for us to be able to have activities based on consent.
Our mutual goal is our dual wellbeing: we strive to maximize our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing. But we are not responsible for another person’s wellbeing if things go wrong, we are responsible to do our best to ensure our mutual well-being, but we are not held responsible for it. This is necessary for us to be able to explore an interaction that we don’t know if we’d enjoy, and when we realize we don’t, we can freely and with good grace withdraw from it, without punishing our partner for exploring with us.
I will do whatever I can to establish consent. You will do the same. Once we have established consent, we can proceed under the goals of mutual trust and wellbeing. At any point we can withdraw consent, but this does not invalidate events that happened during our consensual time. This is necessary for us to be able to trust the consent given us.
We are responsible for the times we extended consent to someone else, even if we regret it in retrospect. Else consent becomes an intractable problem that cannot be solved at all. There’s no way to go backward, we learn and move forward.
