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Beware the violence of intimacy: On consent and safe spaces

Beware the violence of intimacy: On consent and safe spaces
New year's eve party at House of Yes (Photograph by Kenny Rodriguez @KennyRodz ; supplied)

‘Until violence is exceptional, we might need not consenticorns per se but consent compacts may be necessary’, says Professor Kopano Ratele.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), it is estimated that one in three women will experience physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime. In South Africa, gender-based violence (GBV) remains a humanitarian crisis which continues to get worse. In addition, City Press reports that from the time South Africa’s lockdown was instated, the number of GBV-related calls to the GBV command centre rose from 393 between 1 January and then, to 3 860 between 27 March and 21 September 2020.

As we approach 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children, matters surrounding GBV and femicide are brought to the fore including the microscopic line of ‘consent’ and the importance of policies, programmes and regulations informing consent culture and re-forming something fundamentally flawed in our society’s behavioural make-up.

South African psychologist and research professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS) in the College of Graduate Studies at Unisa, Professor Kopano Ratele says that in countries like South Africa ravaged by rape and violence, coerced and nonconsensual sex, consent is paramount.

“Consent is important because ours is an unjust, unequal world. Show me a country in the world where there is perfect equality among the genders, and I will show you a place where consent is not important. The basis of consent is negotiation, negotiation assumes equal ‘negociants’. Only if we are sexual equals can we give consent freely,” says Prof Ratele.

Known for his work in the psychology of boys, men, masculinity, fatherhood, identity, culture, sexuality, and violence, especially in the context of our continent, Prof Ratele says, “In relation to sex, consent refers to voluntary, verbal, explicit, and freely given agreement to have sex. That should be normative. What should go into laws, policies, and codes. What teachers and parents ought to teach and impart. In practice though, things can get very complicated. And in real life there are many such situations where an explicit yes is not uttered.”

While more debate and discussions need to happen, novel concepts are coming to the fore aiming to encourage a culture of consent and sexual ethics; and they are emerging out of the nightlife and ‘play party’ (fetish or sex party) scenes in Europe and more liberal parts of the US.

House of Yes, a New York night club and rabbit hole of self-expression and consent, was founded 11 years ago by Anya Sapozhnikova and Kae Burke who initially ran a circus theatre and creative events space. They describe the space as “a collective of creatives, performers and innovators who live to support artistic expression, performance, nightlife and community… intimate experiences, spectacular entertainment, killer parties and outrageous events anywhere and everywhere”.

“This is actually the third House of Yes. There were two venues that came beforehand but this is the one that is a legal venue and gotten the most press. The previous two venues were quite ‘underground’,” says House of Yes marketing and cultural director and safer spaces co-director, Jacqui Rabkin.

Rabkin started working at House of Yes five years ago when she became fed up with the amount of sexual harassment and exploitation she witnessed in the nightlife.

“I have been to clubs and experienced men — I’m not just limiting it to men because I have experienced it at lesbian parties too — following around women who seem intoxicated and it felt like they were looking to ‘pick’ someone they could take advantage of. I noticed this on too many occasions to count and it always made me so upset to the extent that I would start going over to women and asking them if they knew the men following them around. I would offer them water or to order them a cab home. And this is essentially how I got into ‘safer spaces’ work’. I just couldn’t watch my peers in a blatantly vulnerable position with a bunch of ‘sharks’ swimming around the room and not do anything about it,” says Rabkin.

House of Yes gained traction shortly after the opening of their ‘third-time-lucky’ venue. A tsunami of new party-goers began attending House of Yes events but who were not fully aware or understanding of the community’s values.

“There was this narrative that ‘oh my god there are hot naked women everywhere’,” says Brooklyn-based sexual healthcare expert and safer spaces co-coordinator at House of Yes, Emma Kaywin.

Kaywin has a background in healthcare and wrote the weekly sexual health column for a publication called Bustle for several years. She recounts “I know and wrote about everything bad that can happen to a vagina, it was really fun!” She joined the safer spaces team three years ago after she was groped at a House of Yes event in 2016.

“I had had enough of being groped. I don’t like being ass-grabbed every time I am walking somewhere. So I reached out to Jacqui about it in this online community we’re in. She found out I worked with safer spaces and consent programmes and that’s when she said I could do something about it.

“I share the role of ‘safer spaces’ co-director with Jacqui Rabkin. When we started and built the programme, it was very much focused on touch-consent but then House of Yes grew and started to do bigger parties, we started to also programme other things around other types of safety like substance use and raving.

“At the time, I had been running another safer spaces programme in a community I am a part of called Meso Creso which is a world DJ and music community-based in Washington DC and Jacqui was starting this party called “House of Love” which is one of their more expensive, costume mandatory parties and wanted to hire some people for the door to talk about consent on the way in and so one of my partners and I started doing that about three or four years ago. I submitted a proposal for a more in-depth consent safety, trauma-informed programme that would train everybody and would be all-encompassing and then they eventually brought me on as the co-director”, said Kaywin.

Enter the ‘consenticorns’, a specific team of people that work at House of Yes’s ‘play’ or ‘fetish’ parties, which fall under the House of Love umbrella – before the pandemic, the parties would happen once a month.

These consent guardians wear big, light-up horns on their head, to make them easily identifiable in a crowd. Kaywin explains that consenticorns are all genders, races and ages, with the House of Yes’s oldest conseticorn being over 50 years old. House of Yes’s safer spaces programme is expensive to run – all members of the consent team that work the door (‘Greeters’ every Friday and Saturday, and ‘Consentrix’ on House of Love nights) are paid the same rate as other door staff. Consenticorns who work the late shift (after midnight) are paid as well. However, the Consenticorns who select the early shift (before midnight) are on volunteer-basis.

Pre-Covid, there were usually eight consenticorns on duty at one time at  House of Love’s play parties, dotted around the four main spaces from the drinks parlour, to the theatre and famous disco bathrooms which are usually festooned in glittery, Cirque du Soleil-come-steampunk themes. They party hard but remain sober so as to blend in but ‘be there’ in the event someone needs help.

Kaywin and her safer spaces team teach nonviolent communication and best practices to consenticorns. “If you are in trouble, you will approach a consenticorn and explain what has happened. They will then ask you a range of questions like, ‘what do you need right now to make you feel safer?’ and ‘Do you want to get some water and go for a walk?’ – removing people from the situation to talk about the situation helps. Then, the consenticorn will ask you to identify the person that didn’t receive consent to touch you or, who made you feel uncomfortable,” explains Kaywin.

Consenticorns are not authorised to eject anyone from the club so they are required to call over a security guard on duty. In a defused, calm manner, the security guard reminds the ‘offender’ of the rules and informs them that their night will have to be over for now and will have to appeal via the consent team’s email to be allowed to come back.

“That is how it works in a very black and white way. But it can be very much more nuanced than that,” she adds.

Kaywin who devised the training programme for House of Love parties, coaches teams in de-escalation techniques and non-violent communication and how to be proactive hosts of the party.

House of Yes (Photograph by Kenny Rodriguez @KennyRodz ; image supplied)

Unicornicopia at House of Yes (Photograph by Kenny Rodriguez @KennyRodz ; image supplied)

‘F*** Love’ at House of Yes (Photograph by Kenny Rodriguez @KennyRodz ; image supplied)

Kaywin explains that the safer spaces protocol and best practices is structured as a three-tiered system: Bystander intervention includes consent concept models like the consenticorns — easily identifiable by people who can approach safely and comfortably if need be. De-escalation training which Kaywin has adapted from the FBI hostage protocol as she mentions, “there are not actually that many ‘best practices’ protocols tailored to what we do so we have to adapt practices from other places and then test them.” Lastly, trauma-informed best practices which involves training to support someone in a trauma-informed way and to help them re-establish their safety. All staff, security staff and House of Yes performers are trained in the safer spaces protocols.

“Our safer space programme involves policies like general policies around touch and discrimination and how we expect people to act in the venue. A disclaimer is written on all of our ticketing pages so when you buy a ticket, you have to ready our policy. It is compulsory to read every individual part of the policy and tick ‘yes’ at each part before ‘checking out’.”

House of Yes estimated that the policies on their website were only being read by 70% of their attendees as the other 30% were purchasing tickets at the door, so they decided to add a dedicated door-person to facilitate their policies and protocols on touch and consent for walk-ins.

In 2018, shortly after Kaywin started developing House of Yes’s safer spaces and consent policies and protocols, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who, in an ironic twist of fate (unbeknownst to him) happened to be Kaywin’s philosophy lecturer during her undergraduate studies, published a critique of the consenticorn concept in The Independent.

Žižek argued that consenticorns were “creating spaces that failed to acknowledge the nuances of intimacy and pleasure.” Dusting off Freud, Žižek further criticised House of Yes and their idea of consenticorns for inhibiting the sexual experience and dubbed the idea “commodification of intimate life” — “one of the clearest imaginable examples of cultural capitalism”.

“Žižek was actually my undergraduate philosophy professor — I took his class twice at NYU (New York University). There is an argument to be made that House of Yes and a lot of other similar party spaces are capitalising on Burning Man culture and one of the tenets of Burning Man is de-commodification of culture. However, this is slightly ironic because it is actually a high-commodity, high-capitalism event.

“In terms of Žižek’s comment on commodifying intimacy, I have noticed that, within a club-context, a lot of people will feel concerned about their behaviour being ‘policed’ so guardians can feel threatening to people almost like they are being watched which is why giving consent guardians non-threatening names and dressing them up helps people understand that it is not a policing function.

“So to me, saying that House of Yes  is commodifying intimacy makes me feel like Žižek has never been to a play party. His argument that people should be able to handle themselves and the idea of consenticorns as ‘policing’ is literally an argument I have only heard from straight, white, cis-men who only see supports as curtialing their freedom and assume that everyone feels as safe and as assured as they do. The research overwhelmingly indicates that this is not the case and that there are a multitude of reasons why someone might feel uncomfortable speaking up.”

Weighing in on Žižek’s critique of the consent guardian concept, Prof Ratele says, “Slavoj Žižek is a contrarian and performer, among other things. He is interesting to read and listen to, but we should not give all he says too much attention.

“Of course, he has a point when he says neoliberal capitalism commodifies our intimate life. At the same time, it is also the case that the rapist can be somebody with whom you are intimate. This predicament is all too common in South Africa that even first-year philosophy students understand. So when [Žižek] says, beware the commodification of intimacy, I say beware the violence of intimacy. I do not want a sexual bouncer when I am having fun, of course not. But until violence is exceptional, we might need not consenticorns per se but consent compacts may be necessary.”

Prof Ratele whose research has a big focus in the promotion of gender equality, finding new, progressive masculinities and nourishing healthy family structures says an idea like consenticorns could extend beyond the nightclub scene and used in every-day society.

“I have been thinking about not consenticorns as such but something along those lines. In a study we are undertaking on masculinities at universities we would like to train what we call sexual violence preventionists. We are still in the thinking stage, so there is nothing to report. But the work we see these preventionists doing is to prevent sexual violence, along with other forms of university male student violence, before it happens. Training people and doing campaigns around consent is part of that work,” says Prof Ratele.

In fact, Rabkin explains that “despite all the messaging people are still sometimes afraid to speak up. They will say they didn’t want to make a big scene or there is a fear that if they do speak up it will cause a confrontation. As women I feel like these are fears that exist in the back of heads.”

Because people have different and personal ideas of what classifies as appropriate touching, the thread of consent can unravel very quickly.

On the nuances of consent, Prof Ratele says, “Utterly vital though it is, in many situations consent can be quite tricky. We should exclude situations where non-consent has been expressed, whether in the form of ‘no’ or nonverbally. That out of the way, an example. You can give consent but yet not want to have sex. Why? Because the motive is to please your partner. Or you can want to have sex, but not certain acts, like anal sex. But for whatever reason you give consent because it is easier to say ‘yes’ than to say ‘stop’.

“Perhaps one of the most troubling moments for many of us is when we give consent even when we don’t want to because we want to be liked. That, I am afraid, is the complexity of humans and their psychological life that makes it a difficult rule to fit to every situation all the time. Humans can and do often enough give their consent even though they may not want sex.”

Rabkin adds that, “A lot of people, and I will say especially in America, think that freedom means no rules whatsoever and I think that people don’t understand that there is something even more freeing about being in a space that has structure. I think this is a hard concept for ‘don’t-tell-me-what-to-do’ Americans who fail to realise that embracing structure can mean freedom too.”

And indeed, the story of House of Yes, she says, is a story of resilience, adaptability and “figuring out how we can keep providing people with a space to self-express… Safer spaces and consent is not really just about getting grabbed, it is also about teaching people how to negotiate social situations and how to speak up for themselves, how to say ‘no’ and how to accept ‘no’.

“Perhaps the silver lining with Covid is that it will allow society to ‘reset’ and it will allow people to navigate social interactions in a fresh way and re-negotiating how we share space with each other. It will remain to be seen but I am optimistic that in the post pandemic world, clubs will change from the ‘meat market’ that they were before,” Rabkin says. DM/ ML

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