Radiolab - In the No Part 3

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

In the final episode of our “In The No” series, we sat down with several different groups of college-age women to talk about their sexual experiences. And we found that despite colleges now being steeped in conversations about consent, there was another conversation in intimate moments that just wasn't happening. In search of a script, we dive into the details of BDSM negotiations and are left wondering if all of this talk about consent is ignoring a larger problem. Further reading: "It's all about the Journey": Skepticism and Spirituality in the BDSM Subculture, by Julie Fennell Screw Consent, by Joe Fischel   This episode was reported by Becca Bressler and Shima Oliaee, and was produced by Bethel Habte. Special thanks to Ray Matienzo, Janet Hardy, Jay Wiseman, Peter Tupper, Susan Wright, and Dominus Eros of Pagan's Paradise.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

A quick note before we start. This episode contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual situations may not be suitable for all listeners. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab.

From W-N-Y-S. C. See? Yeah. I'm Chadabum-Rod. This is Radio Lab, and this is the third and final part of our series In the Know about sex and consent. And we started a couple weeks ago with some excerpts from a podcast called The Heart, produced by Caitlin Prest. And then last week had a long, at times difficult conversation with education consultant Hannah Stotland.

Heard a bit from some college-age men in that episode. Today. Yes. Anyone want to take up their shoes. Get comfortable. We're going to start with some college-age women. If you need to stretch, you can be like, hey, it's been too long. Like, we can do yoga.

No. Because what we ended up doing sort of midway through the process was gathering together a whole bunch of different groups of men and women, college-age men and women in three different cities, and just asking them general questions about how they're thinking about this stuff. Are you excited? No. I ended up interviewing the men, so I'll turn this part over to Becca Bristler and Shima Oliawi, who were with the women. Okay, so I'm just going to dive right in. Yeah, so the average group that we talked to was maybe a dozen women. We tried to make it as diverse as possible.

You saw it? You saw it coming? Why did you see it? How'd you see it coming? The first thing that really struck us, I think, Shima, tell me if you agree, is there was sort of a disconnect. Like, on the one hand, it seemed like affirmative consent for almost everyone we talked to seemed like second nature. Yeah, so I actually teach, like, a workshop on consent for high schoolers. Some of them are even teaching classes on it.

Yeah, P-A-G. Yeah, okay, so you know, like, CA-2, yeah. So, like, a clear and concise yes at every step of sexual activity, I think. I think that's amazing that we're teaching kids that now. And I do feel like it's my generation's problem to change it and change the narrative about it. So a lot of them were really committed to actually changing the way consent looks, the way that these sexual experiences go and how they're navigated. But then when we would focus in on what they were actually experiencing in their lives,

what we saw was much different. My friend and I ended up at a bar and the bartender was really cute. and we were like flirting and he like, I don't want to give any identifying information, but we were just like vibing and I like hooked up with him and then like immediately after I started hooking up with him, I was like, oh, this is not what I want. But like at that point it's kind of like saying no

would be like much more of an uncomfortable situation than just like going through with this and like understanding that I already regret it kind of. I don't know why I didn't leave, but eventually I was just like, okay, fine, like whatever. Because they would just be like, please, like come on, please. Like you know you're turned on a little bit and I would be like, fine, whatever.

like, let's fine, let's fuck. I think he was going down on me and, like, had asked me if I went out sex and I said no. And eventually, like, I just, like, kind of wanted to be, like, over with, like, the entire interaction and I was just uncomfortable. And then I was like, okay, like, let's have sex just because I thought that, like, that was the easier way to, like, make him happy, make, like, get done with it and then, like, it be over. We just heard a lot of stories of people having sex that they didn't want to have, you know,

where maybe affirmative consent was in effect. They did say yes. But it was either because the guy wore them down or, They were way too concerned with how he was feeling. Like, it would make him feel really, really bad. I know that, like, if he would have known that I felt that way, he wouldn't have gone through with it. And, like, I just didn't want to, like, hurt his feelings

and be, like, and make him feel like he, like, took advantage of me or whatever when I knew that there would be no possible way that he would know that I was feeling that way. Some women told us that they say yes sometimes when they don't want to because they're scared. Part of the fear in saying a hard know is that that hard know can then be violated and that's like that's like a terrifying thought like to say like a hard no like that's more traumatizing to me like in my head almost than having like a soft no just sort of like

slid past. Like having fear of future trauma. Wait say it again. It's like having a fear of future trauma. I take that to mean if your aim is to stay in control and you feel like you might be out of control then the best way to still be in control is to. to convince yourself that you are cool with what's going on. Wow.

I walked away feeling like many of the young women felt frustrated both with their world but also with themselves. Yeah. Afterwards, I would feel like very disappointed in myself because I would feel like I would compromise my own needs for other people. That they would walk away from a situation and they would have regretted how it went. They maybe didn't actually want to do it but didn't stick up for themselves. And then I, and then you fight like a battle with yourself because it's like, wait a minute. Like I'm like strong. Like I know I can like just stop it or like why, but it's so hard. Like in that moment to find like, I don't know like the the words just to say it.

You know, because then it is sometimes you're just like yeah, it is just easier just to be like let it like just like let him finish. That's it. Like it was clear for most of these women that in the moment of these encounters there were some conversation that needed to happen that was not happening. But then there actually was this one young woman that we spoke to. Some people, I think a lot of people talk about consent as if it's like awkward and weird. And like, like, she just said consent has really become popularized and is really well advocated for by the BDSM community. BDSM is an abbreviation. So it abbreviates bondage, discipline, or domination, sadism and masochism.

Because you constantly have to make sure that somebody is okay and be like, this is rope too tight. She told us, I mean, the BDSM community has this figured out, and then she started talking about her own experience. So we were sort of like, hmm, what does that mean that the BDSM community has figured that out? Whoa. Hello? You got a buzz there?

Oh, yeah. It's like the B-52 bomber buzz. Oh, that sounds better. All right. Okay, hi. Yay. Hi. We did it.

We did it. Don't you feel like we're, I always feel like after these technical snafus, there's like a bonding that happened. I feel bonded to you guys. Well, it's actually a statistically true thing that people suffering together feel bonded to one another. Well, there you go. Who are you, by the way? What do you do?

My name is Julie Fennell. I am an associate professor of sociology at Gallaudet University. And I've been studying the BDSM community since about 2012. We called up Julie because she is one of the, I think it's safe to say, leading academics. When it comes to the BDSM community and all of its subcultures, she has written papers, she has done surveys, and she has done it from the inside. A lot of kinksters like me pretty much feel like we were sort of born this way. And it's really common to talk to a lot of kinky people who will tie you the same thing. Like, I was five and fantasizing about tying up people's genitalia.

Whoa. It's deep stuff, right? I didn't know what genitals were. Anyhow, one of the things that we heard from Julie, and we saw, subsequently heard this also from a lot of academics that we talked to after her, is that the whole consent conversation in many ways grew out of BDSM. A lot of people will trace, like, the history of BDSM in the United States, to the Leatherman community. This is World War II era, by the way. These gay men would hang out in biker clubs, at bars.

They would socialize. They were a really tight-knit brotherhood. Over the decades, the brotherhood grew into this much big, community, and then it really exploded in the 80s, but there's a problem. At the time, no one had ever really formally distinguished between BDSM, a practice between willing participants and violence. BDSM, I think, had to make the case to the vanilla community, to the non-Kate community, that they were not insane, but people were not getting off on hurting people, that it was

about roles and role-playing and power. This is Joe Fischel. He's an associate professor of women's gender and sexuality. studies at Yale. Consent was a slogan to convince non-kink people that what they were doing was not violent or a crime. The full slogan they came up with, and this is in the 80s, was safe, sane, and consensual. And it really stuck. To this day, you can find it on T-shirts, at any BDSM community event or play party. Parties that are organized at formal spaces. They're called dungeons, right? So getting back to Julie, we asked her, okay, if it is true, as that one woman said, that the BDSM community, if it is true that they have figured something out about how to do it better, well, what is it?

And she told us a couple things. First, drinking. To my way of thinking, that's incredibly risky. Very frowned upon in the BDSM world. And the BDSM scene in my mind, that's what we'd call edge play, which is like kind of the things that people do where you're like, ah, it seems like a bad idea. negotiating sex when both people are really, really drunk with somebody that you've never met before qualifies is really, really risky. And speaking of that negotiation, another thing that was an interesting contrast between the, quote, Vanilla World and BDSM, is that when two people are negotiating, they're trying to figure out if they're going to get down, in BDSM, that conversation is formalized, and it's often public. Generally speaking, most of what's happening is out in the open.

These days, you have people called consent monitors that sometimes rum around these parties. It's also not uncommon to be standing there negotiating with someone where your friend or their friend is right next to them. The idea is that that kind of social monitoring makes things safer. Anyhow, I asked her to zoom in on a specific consent conversation. How does it usually go? People with different experiences levels are better and worse at this typically. Like, let's say I was going to play with you, right? Like, you're telling me you've never done anything like this before, right?

Yeah, zero. Zero. So I like to knife top, which is a... way of describing the fact that I like to do things with knives onto people. Actual cutting of people or like threatening of guns or no. No, this is just dragging knives along people and sort of threatening with them, like playing with the knives. And in truth, the thing that I do to make it more interesting is I like to cut people's

clothes off of them. Okay. I teach a whole class on how to cut people's clothes off of them with knives. Are they like serrated? They can be. So some of them have rough edges and some of them don't. And that's actually one of the questions that I would ask you. So I would ask you if you maybe would be more interested in sort of a poking-type sensation

or more of a scraping-tight sensation based on just hearing that. All right. I'm going to go with dragging. I would select my knives accordingly at that point because I have separate knives for these purposes. Okay. And then I would, if I was going to cut your clothes off, for example, I would ask you, I would let you know that there's, I'm pretty good at it. what I do, but there's no way that I can guarantee that I won't cut something that you don't want

me to. So if possible, it would be great if you could take off the thing that you wouldn't want me to cut, right, like a necklace or your socks or whatever. Okay. And I also like warn people going into them, like, I'm pretty experienced of this, but I definitely have accidentally cut people before. So, you know, I just need to let you know that this is not a 100% guarantee. If that's something that you absolutely cannot tolerate, then we'd probably can't go forward with this. Or if you say, well, I mean, I'm fine with it as long as it isn't on my arms because I don't want to show up for work. Then I say, great.

Like, well, I'll just restrict what I do to knot your arms. She says sometimes she'll even get a pen and make a tiny little dot on all of the places the person says are off limits. Just so she can be super duper sure she's respecting their wishes. There are actual classes. Hello, everyone. Most well-organized BDSM scenes in the country. You guys are allowed to talk here. Believe me. I know we have mics around. Have weekly or at least monthly classes.

And we actually went to one. How many people here have taken any of my events before? Raise of hands. There we go. Everyone else is new. It was in Manhattan, a small studio space. About 15 people were there. And the instructor, a guy named Domitus Aros, was sort of at the front of the room in a leather quilt with these two leather straps across his chest. Now, is everyone here familiar with consent? Please?

All right, good. Does everyone know the difference between consent and an enthusiastic consent? One guy in the back raised his hand. That's sort of a new thing that's sort of coming up in a lot of clubs. If there's a moment of hesitation in that person's brain, you should automatically be picking that up and be like, do you actually want to do this thing with me? And generally within the first 10 seconds, someone can tell if they want to have sex with you. You're not going to convince someone otherwise.

You're not going to be like, I'm going to wear them down. The wearing that technique is pisses me off. At a party, nobody owes you anything. Everyone on board so far? A lot of nods. Good. And then he sort of demonstrated how all of this works in action. First.

Look at the table. He took everyone over to this table, showed them the toys, different kinds of whips, floggers, a little stick with a feather on the end. Let me grab what is going to be my little tool to play around with. He grabbed one of the floggers. And then he and a woman named Bella, who is in black lingerie. They walk over to this giant cross-looking thing in the corner of the room. she then leads against it. Good.

So I currently have Bella with our arms spread on the St. Andrew's cross. The leg's going to be a little bit wider. Bella is not that tall. Now we've already had our talk. Hey, what's cool? I just met you. Am I allowed to put my hand on your ass? Shoulders? Your skin. Do you want to keep your clothes as is?

Or do you want to sort of slowly undress as we play? Get all your things because you don't know where they're at. They can totally just want to be like this. Bella has told me she just not want to take. any more clothes off, correct, Bella? Bella also doesn't like a huge amount of pain. So then we go with that. You feel alright?

Looks like your shoulders is a little funky. You wanna warm them up. You don't go to the gym and do your heaviest set right away, correct? You're going to sort of warm up the muscles. I do light touching, light hitting. Start slowly whipping her shoulders. Sort of just observing. Waiting for their body, sort of tell me some notes.

When I do impact, their body's going to tell me something. If I go a little heavy, there's a little bit of a turtling in. so you the hips crawl in. If the ass comes right back out right away, that's saying, Daddy hit me again, right? If the stays turtle in, I went a little hard. I can come in and stay and again, your talking can be sexy.

Is that too much for you, baby? Is that I need to go lighter? Yes, please, Daddy. Keep it sexy. You don't have to say, hey, was that too hard? You can totally keep it in very sexy and see how it goes. Staying engaged is very important.

If you're in a space that's loud, you can't fucking hear anything. because I can't hear if she's moaning or if she's like, oh, you know, so I want to be able to get my ears in close, say how they do. Then I create the sort of cadence, play around a little bit more. And from there, I'm combining between using impact play and sense play. We'll go a little more in depth once you guys start playing around a little bit.

And I'll go around the room because I want to get to the workshop aspect. Domit has spent the next hour sort of moving around the room, helping people as they paired off with their whips and their floggers, learn how to better read each other. And for a moment, it felt like, oh, we should all be doing this. I mean, maybe not using whips and having sex in public, unless that's your thing. But finding ways to help each other be explicit and communicative and to have a code for what words mean. When we talk to college age men and women, a lot of them are like, we need a script.

We need something written down. Because one of the things that's been found in surveys is that there's very little agreement. read upon language. For example, a phrase like, slow down. When surveyed, many college-aged women will tell you that means stop. Many men will say, no, it just means goes slower. Well, in the BDSM world, they seem to have sorted some of this out. So, like, I was at a play party, and it said on the thing, house rules say,

yellow means you should check in or pause. Red means stop. And if somebody says safe word, that means that you're calling for help from one of the people that's around. It all seemed so clear and sensible and, dare I say, uncomplicated, but Julie was like, yeah, no. Not really. When we come back, Julie reigns on the parade that we were throwing her. This is Callie calling from San Francisco. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hey, I'm Chad. We're back. Third installment of In the Know. And Julie was about to tell us, Julie Fennell, that even in the BDSM world, with its very clear rules and safe words like red and yellow, things go wrong. The actual real problem with that yellow of red situation, is that in public, people almost never end up using red. Like, there's one of the huge problems that the BASM subculture basically has is that there's massive, massive social repercussions to calling red in a public place, basically.

And as we talked about this more, it started to sound a lot like what we heard from the college-aged women, that saying no, even, you know, when it's buttressed by all of these rules and norms, can still be really hard. There's a cost. One of the worst situations that I ever personally found myself in was I was tied up and suspended. And so all of my feet are off the ground. And I'm having a great time. I had negotiated ahead of time that there was to be nothing genital happening. I was very clear about that. I was like, nope, this is not a thing.

Then she says the person who she was playing with who tied her up decided to try some genital stuff. And I was really caught in that moment because we're in a very public place. I could yell red, but in that place, yelling red means the whole scene has to stop. And I didn't want the scene to stop. I liked being tied up. And I'm also cognizant of the fact that this guy is my friend. I really like him. And I don't want him to get in a ton of trouble.

But if I yell red really loudly in this public place, there's a pretty decent chance he's going to get banned from the event. There's a pretty recent chance he's going to get banned from a lot of events. What did you do? I kicked him in the face, and he stopped. Because I was going to say you're tied up. That's very, the whole point is you're in a compromise situation. I am in a compromise situation, but it turns out it puts my feet a lot closer to his face. Even though she navigated that one fine in the end, she says, generally speaking, the BDSM community is in terms of the consent negotiation, not a utopia.

in fact, what she experienced in that moment was for a long time not uncommon. So I should explain that the scene actually got its own Me Too movement about three months before the Me Too movement hit. Like I didn't have that hashtag, but exactly the same thing happened where a bunch of high status people got outed as consent violators in the scene. These are a bunch of dudes? Yeah, they're all men. There's definitely a lot of consent violations that happen with women, but people don't pay attention to it. And I have a whole other rant about that. But people who got a lot of attention on them were men and pretty much everything.

everyone that they had hurt was women. And that's part of the reason that Julie is, in the end, a little suspicious of all of the rules that we were just enamored of. Or I should say she's a little suspicious of placing too much faith in those rules. It's not foolproof, right? So, I mean, I definitely know people who they don't want to tell you anymore that they're not having fun. So there's a real sense of, like, I don't want to disappoint this other person. So one of the things that I also will ask in these types of negotiation, my version of negotiation is like, do you feel reasonably certain that you will be able to tell me if you don't like what's happening?

The more I thought about that question, like after we done the interview, the more I was sort of noodling on that. It occurred to me like, what? That's a key question. Can you say no when you need to? Some of us just are people pleasers. I am one of those people. It hurts to say no If you know it's going to bum someone out

Others have no problem with that So she asks which kind of person are you right now It is situational Who are you at this moment if they say yeah right now I'm not a good with the no She goes one direction if they say No no I can tell you Then I'm like all right can we both agree that we are

Adults That we don't have to get into all the stuff About what we don't want to have happened And that we will take responsibility For actually communicating How we're feeling in the situation and if we fail to communicate that, that we will also take responsibility for that.

So are you okay with kind of whatever? And you're going to tell me if you're not? And the other person goes, yes, that's how I want that to go. At that point, our conversation changes from what am I not allowed to do, to what do you find hot? One of the things that we kept running into again and again was this sentiment that was maybe best captured by a guy that Becca and Schema spoke to. I'm Michael Lysak. I'm the director of empowering victims, and I'm one of the people who came up with the concept for the weak consent app.

That app was actually the one that a guy last episode sort of jokingly referred to. Hello, would you be, like, can I record you on my cell phone of you saying you're down to make out right now? Turns out it's actually a real app that this guy made. There's no really good. The problem is that we've got a meme, and the meme is already well established, and the meme is consent. Unfortunately, that meme frames the entire question the wrong way. Consent means that you're giving someone permission to do something to you. We don't do sex to someone else. We have sex with someone else.

Are you saying that that's the dictionary definition of consent? It's interesting because I'm curious if this is just like a semantic issue. The dictionary definition of consent is giving someone permission to do something. to you are on your behalf. Yeah, I just looked it up and you're so right. Compliance and or approval of what is done or proposed by another. It's a wrong word. And Joe Fischel, the academic that we heard from earlier.

It doesn't capture. Agrees. What I think is probably the biggest problem for young people and for sex on college campuses, which is all of the sex is consensual but unhappy and unpleasant and people typically women endure. The core issue may not be non-concernial. consent and it may not be sexist commission. It might be the fact that men are leveraging their positions of power to extract sex from women that don't want to be there. And I think it's hard to

target that problem if you call it non-consent. I was a second date. I went home with him and I wasn't really sure if I wanted to sleep with him and I was kind of going through the motions. And at one point he pulled away because you could tell that I was like not entirely there and he's like, do you want to have sex? And I kind of said like, uh, like I didn't even say yes or no. And he just stopped entirely and we just like and that was it and I remember being like like relieved first and like really surprised because he read my body like second date like read my body language respected me and like didn't push I was at a bar a couple weeks ago and I was at this girl and you know she was we were both you know we're both pretty drunk and she was like you know hey you want to go back to my place and I was

like I can't do that like I'm drunk you're drunk like she was like you're right and just kind of like move on we continue like dance it was fine and it was we had a fine night and then like I woke up the next morning and she had texted me and was like hey thank you so much for like not taking advantage of me like that means a lot I was like that was really easy I've been lucky in the regard that like if I'm uncomfortable having sex with like my partner like like right when I'm about to be like I can't like I don't want to do this right now he always catches like my eye and is like like like like like Like he'll stop immediately and like, you know, I've had like my own sex trauma stuff and he like, I'm going to cry. But like he will stop. It's so nice to have a partner that can like read your body language and be like, this doesn't feel like, feel right. Are you okay? This episode was reported by Becca Bressler and Shima Oliawi and produced by Bethel Hoppe. Very special thanks to Caitlin Prest and the team she worked with at the heart to produce that series that inspired this whole thing for us.

to all the men and women who shared their stories with us. Thanks to Hima Prieto, Roy Volchek, Samantha Shahi, Laini Goodwill, Don Black, Margo Weiss, Dominus Eros, and Pagan's Paradise. I'm Chad Abumrad. Thanks for listening. To play the message, press 2. Start of message. Hi, this is Julie Finnell.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becker Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hoppe, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Krollrich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Arienne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help, Frinsima Oliai, Katzloslo, and Mo Ace Diomo. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. End of message.