by Davey Davis
While they might look the same to the untrained eye, BDSM is the opposite of Fight Club: The first rule of BDSM is that you talk about BDSM. A lot.
One of the many things that annoys me about mainstream depictions of kink is how infrequently you see negotiation—the actual conversation—between kinksters in movies and TV. In the real world of BDSM, communicating about what we want to do, how we’re going to do it, and what our limits are before, during, and after a scene is the norm among experienced players—and should be the norm, period. In most mainstream depictions of the subculture, however, we usually see kink without preamble (and often it seems to play out in a world where consent is murky at best).
While non-negotiated kink and non-consensual harm (otherwise known as assault) do occur in the BDSM community—that’s another essay for another time, my friends—these limited and unrealistic depictions portray BDSM as an inherently dangerous activity and lifestyle. But in BDSM, there’s only one bad fantasy: that responsible play can be self-centered, unintentional, and unaccountable to a greater community. When responsible players put that fear aside, kink can be emotionally and physically sustainable as well as, you know, really fucking hot.
To be clear, I have no interest in whitewashing or defanging BDSM. It’s not a mainstream pastime! But what I do have an interest in is making sure that all players, especially new and inexperienced ones, have the tools they need to play and participate in BDSM—and all sex, more broadly—in ways that are the most responsible.
So what does it mean to be responsible about something that, to the uninitiated, might seem so very irresponsible? In the community, we have three helpful acronyms used as shorthands for talking about just that.
SSC—Safe, Sane, and Consensual
The oldest of these three acronyms, SSC can be traced back to the 1980s, when gay S/M clubs were trying to promote what we now call informed consent, both within their circles and beyond.
In broad terms, “safe” means that the risk of any kink activities should be understood by all participants and either eliminated or reduced as much as possible. “Sane” refers to the need to approach these activities in a commonsense way, with all parties able to discern between fantasy and reality (this could apply to mental state as well as to levels of inebriation and/or mind alteration from substances). “Consensual” means that everyone has freely consented to the activities on the menu and can alert other players if that changes at any point during the scene.
The growing popularity of the leather scene within the broader gay community meant that these organizations—namely Chicago’s Hellfire Club and New York’s Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA)—needed a slogan that communicated their values to other kinksters as well as to a world hostile to their rising profile. According to David Stein, a GMSMA committee member, the club wanted to differentiate themselves from stereotypes of S/M as “harmful, antisocial, predatory behavior.”
RACK—Risk-Aware Consensual Kink
Around the turn of the Millennium, a new evolution of SSC was born with RACK. RACK is both in conversation with SSC as well as a challenge to it; “safe” and “sane” are subjective terms that don’t mean the same thing to everyone. “I don’t know about you, but most of the BDSM I participate in would not be considered safe,” writes BDSM educator Daemonumx in her newsletter.
A leather associate of mine, Daemonumx shares with me an interest in play that is risky by any standards, and certainly by vanilla ones. No matter how cautious we are, there are inherent risks to these (very fun) activities. This means that RACK suits our purposes better than SSC does.
We go into a scene having educated ourselves, to the best of our ability, about the risks we and everyone involved are taking on; like participants of skydiving, mountain-climbing, and childbirth, we are taking part in something that can be fun, pleasurable, transcendental, or worthwhile without requiring that it be “safe.”
“‘Risk-aware’ means that both parties to a negotiation have studied the proposed activities, are informed about the risks involved, and agree how they intend to handle them,” writes Gary Switch.
In a subculture in which learning is self-taught or taught via apprenticeship, skill share, or workshop, skill-based knowledge is diffuse and often difficult to access, period. Add that to the natural diversity in “risk profiles” and desires, and one size simply doesn’t suit all. Writes Cross for XCBDSM, “RACK puts the responsibility… on the individual. It empowers each person to define their own risk profile.”
Finally, the “sane” in SSC stigmatizes mental illness—something that us paraphiliacs, with our history of pathologization, could stand to be a little more sensitive towards.
PRICK—Personal Responsibility Informed Consensual Kink
Which brings us to PRICK, a newer acronym I’ve only seen more of in the last few months. As a player who came up in the time of RACK, at first I was mildly annoyed to discover an acronym that didn’t immediately seem to add anything new to the responsibility framework. But the more I thought about it, the more it began to make sense.
What does PRICK do that RACK doesn’t? It makes a space not only for risk awareness but for personal responsibility regarding the risky choices we make—a useful distinction for a practice that very often exists within an unequal power dynamic. As a masochist, the physical risk I am taking when I submit my body to pain and even damage is much greater than that taken by the sadist wielding it—but the sadist is taking risks too, including the emotional responsibility of potentially harming me, as well as the legal responsibility for that harm should something go awry (not that I would personally involve the authorities, but the possibility of their involvement is one of the unfortunate risks that we take when we play!).
Within the PRICK model, my partners and I go into our scene not only aware of the risks, but with the intention of taking responsibility for our decisions (this does not include consent violations, of course, which are something for which only violators are responsible). There are experiences and even a few kinky relationships that I regret, but where there was consent, I don’t have bitterness or anger. The consent feels empowering, even in retrospect.
The need for acronyms like SSC, RACK, and PRICK conveys the high-maintenance nature of our hardware-heavy lifestyle—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My wish is for this approach to desire to be more normalized in the broader culture, too. While discourse around enthusiastic consent, sex positivity, and #MeToo has attempted to address the need for communication, “vanilla” people, straight or queer, can learn a thing or two about safety, consent, and desire from BDSM frameworks.
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