Non-Consensual Consent

Lie back and think of England

Are there times when two poeple can seem to be consenting, but this masks a deep ambivalence or lack of connection?

Much has been said about Consensual Non-Consent. About parties where people give consent for a range of sexual acts and then take/resist in the moment. About how the momentary struggle is masking a deep connection of two people getting what they want. But what about the opposite?

I have paid for sex. But it was with someone I am friends with and who has reasons to be honest with me. As I say in the article “I wanted to buy a level of desire I didn’t think she had for me.” But she did have some feelings for me, I hope¹. What about when I think of paying a random sex worker? Somehow it feels utterly dead.

I know sex workers and they talk about faking intimacy. About faking attraction and orgasms. About faking connection and making the client believe what the client wants to believe. This seems to be a norm in the industry, a bit like journalists quoting everything or lawyers arguing things they don’t believe in order to win. Oh it’s just what you do.

I guess the steelman here is that no-one really wants to do their job. Does the barista really want me to have a lovely day? Are Stripe payment systems coded with deep connection? And sure, a bit, but first, this seems such a dead view of the world. I expect many people do actually like their jobs and want to do them well. And secondly, here, intimacy is the whole thing. For me, it’s the point of romance, whether that’s on a date or with a sex worker.

And I find the notion that someone might not actually want something deeply unsexy. If I wanted experience, I could find porn. If I wanted sensation, I could use my hand. What I want is connection with another being. And I don’t mind paying or pretending to ease the process, but the notion that actually they don’t want it is inimical to that. During even the sexiest encounters, the knowledge that my partner isn’t enjoying it would kill my desire stone dead.

I guess the worst form of this is a loveless marriage where the sex is still happening, not even out of some hope of rekindling the attraction but out of pure indifference. It’s easier to fuck than for him to keep bothering me. That makes my gorge rise.

And so it seems there is a kind of counterpoint to Consensual Non-Consent, which is non-consensual consent. Someone who in the moment seems to be totally consenting but with whom there is no emotional connection. Perhaps I’ve had sex like that before, but I don’t want to again. Why not just make out, or dance, or talk, or leave?

Increasingly, I want encounters with people were we engage, connect, disengage. That might be for an evening or a compliment on the street. We meet, have a time of two (or more) people sharing and bouncing off one another, then a mutual separation. And sex often is formed of multiple of these, even in a single evening—moments of heightened flirtation and then reduced, the restaurant, the journey home, the sex.

Often the issue is a bad engagement—a clumsy line or a misunderstood look—or bad disengagement—someone staying too long and damaging the whole memory—but I think that when connection itself is fake, the whole thing is poisoned.

Which is a long way of saying that much of what I find tiresome about sex work, porn and erotica (and perhaps content in general) is a lack of attempt at genuine connection. Just write another piece of erotica like the last one. Produce some more OnlyFans messages. They are just a client. What seems like genuine connections is a mirage, it’s me playing with myself. You can kiss yourself in the mirror, but only on the lips.

I don’t know how we get to better sex work, but there do seem some porn and erotica where a creator isn’t just churning stuff out. I love Daisy D Duncan’s work for how she seems to want a genuinely different story each time. I feel like I am engaging with a person, even as I stroke my cock. And I think I can get better sex and dating by pushing here too, by developing a taste for genuinely meeting another consciousness in this strange world and attemping to share something real.

1. In some sense, the fear that she didn’t is a huge emotional fulcrum for me. Not sure we’re gonna engage with it here, but perhaps it’s what’s driving the piece.