Important note: the following text is written mostly from my own perspective (I'm a heterosexual man). This made it much more natural and easy for me to write it and avoids cumbersome duplications. But all the arguments are in fact totally symmetric and can be made in the same way for women and - I guess, even if I lack a bit the experience to be sure - also for homosexual relationships.
The „Yes means yes“ (also called „affirmative consent“) approach is a code of conduct for sexual encounters. It demands that „both parties agree to sexual conduct, either through clear, verbal communication or nonverbal cues or gestures“.
Let’s put it into a virtual (imagined) lab and try it out. In a gedanken experiment it is often a good idea to use rather extreme examples. They tend to show the properties and weaknesses of the idea under investigation more clearly.
So let’s assume you have sex with your girlfriend and she gives you a slap in the face. This is one of the strongest (and probably also most problematic) gestures in sexual play. But it can be, used by the right person on the right person, in exactly the right moment after a sequence of very particular events, undoubtedly also be very hot. This is why some people actually do it and enjoy it.
Now can the „Yes means yes“ framework (Ymy) help to tame the dangers of this kind of play?
What if your girlfriend would ask you before sex: „can I sometimes slap you in the face?“. You would most probably say no. Nobody wants to give permission to be slapped in general.
Now Ymy also allows to get consent immediately before escalations during sexual play. So she could ask you immediately before slapping you: „can I slap you in the face right now?“. OK, now you would indeed have a choice, you could say „no“ if you think you won’t like it. But this would also totally ruin the fun. The power of the face slap comes to a large extent from the moment of surprise. Announcing it neutralizes its power. Using Ymy in this sense would be like watching a movie which has special subtitles which announce anything surprising happening in the movie a few seconds in advance. This is no fun anymore!
Therefore, at least in this case, Ymy either cannot be applied or it ruins the experience.
Unfortunately for Ymy (but fortunately for our curiosity) the problems with Ymy go much deeper.
A sexual encounter between two people is not about „I want this“ and „I like that“. Such a focus on oneself is more characteristic of wanking. What good sex should be - I believe - is more something like „an adventure beyond our wildest dreams is happening to us“. In this post I want to explore this view in detail.
How could we make this work? I believe the best solution is to use the long forgotten art of compassion combined with a small (!) portion of pain tolerance.
How does compassion work? It simply means that both players should be highly attentive to their partner in the sense that they can actually feel the partners pleasure (but also the pain!) all the time. This attention should be maintained at all times to allow the creation of a shared „continuous/gapless emotional/sexual story“ which determines how the shared experience unfolds in time. Then it is not one player anymore who decides what happens next („I want a blowjob now!“) but things happen according to the shared past. It then does not matter anymore what a single player wants but what both of them want together.
If we use the word „unfold“ we immediately smell a loss of control. Is this not dangerous then (in the sense that it can lead to events which are traumatic for one of the players)? And how well can it work? If we are attentive, we construct a model of our partner in our brain. This model - of course - cannot be perfect. This means that this kind of sexual experience cannot be completely risk free. Is this a serious problem?
Let me explain it with a story from my childhood. I sometimes used to go with my bike and my friends to a nearby forest to play, ride the bikes „motocross“ style etc.. When I came home, my mother usually had to spend quite some time patching me up: there were bruised knees, bee stings, a sun burn, stinging nettle rashes, scratches from plant thorns. But she never complained. She knew: this is how kids are supposed to look after a cool day in the forest. And she also knew that this small elements of pain serve a very important purpose: they are warning signals which remind you that you are slowly entering dangerous territories. They are required to make sure the kids don’t do things which could really harm them.
Therefore small doses of pain are required as a guide. To suppress this pain is a dangerous thing to do!
Let’s look at a practical example:
Maybe you and your girlfriend are into BDSM (e.g. you are the dominant part, she is submissive). Now you might say „I make all the decisions, she also likes this. Why should I be so attentive to her? What’s the benefit?“. First of all it could protect you from yourself: if you do something you actually don’t really enjoy to do (you might do it for instance only to impress her) you would harvest her sadness. And maybe also her feeling of boredom and loss of lust. Yes, this means that it is not only her anymore who can feel pain (i.e. the red butt) but also you: these feedbacks will hurt your heart and your ego. But it can also protect you from harming yourself!
But much more importantly: if you are not attentive, you are like a blind elephant in the porcelain shop. Do you really think it would help much if the shop owner told you before where in the shop the most fragile pieces are? And would it reassure you if she would tell you that she would inform you immediately in case you do major damage (your „safe“-word)? No! Of course you would still be just a blind elephant in the porcelain shop and this is always an outright dangerous thing.
Therefore you are well advised to open your damn eyes. Even if this means that you can experience things you don’t enjoy.
And if you are attentive, the experience will change profoundly (to the better). Even if it would still look from the outside as if you were making all the decisions alone, her subtle feedback will guide you to a shared bliss.
The title of this blog post is admittedly a bit clickbaity, but I don‘t feel too guilty about it (and now is the moment to explain why): Of course, Ymy is not dangerous if you wank alone at home. But it’s a method which is promising to make autistic wanking together „safe“ (when it actually can‘t!). Such a method is in the same way dangerous like a swimming aid which promises to keep non swimmers afloat but will actually often let them drown.
But, I’m sorry, we are still not at the bottom of the rabbit hole. It gets even worse (actually considerably worse).
Just imagine your girlfriend asks you during sex if she „can do proktopotl with you“. Of course you’d say no („what the hell is this? Could it mean ‚to castrate‘ in Vulcan language?“). But most likely she would not even ask you because she knows that you don’t know. Or that you maybe know what it means technically but not how it will feel. And this deprives you of your right to decide what will happen to you.
More general, you can only agree on activities you both understand (technically and emotionally). And now you can finally use the set theory you had to learn in primary school: we can conclude now that the set of possible shared experiences is - for the Ymy method - the intersection of the things both partners know. Of course you could have different partners who all have a different set of things they know. Each of them would allow you to experience an additional small part of the things you know.
But even if you spin the „Tinder wheel“ for years you’d be ultimately limited to the set of things you knew at the beginning of your journey. This is the theoretical maximum. Ok, you might say, not too bad. But think again: this means that in an Ymy world you cannot grow beyond of what you know now. And how much did you know at the beginning of your journey into sexuality? Of course only very little. So this means that you simply cannot grow past this very little! And this is extremely disappointing!
I have not explained yet how the compassion method could solve the face slap conundrum. Why would you allow your girlfriend to slap you anytime and without warning during sexual play (maybe even without having ever mentioned this before)?
What if you know that she is all in too? That, if something goes wrong, your pain will be her pain too. Maybe in this case you could be sure that she will plan such a bold step very carefully (in her own interest!). That she will notice (and suffer from) your early pain in case she starts to touch your borders.
But you would also know that she will be - as she can feel and enjoy your lust too - ultimately driven by her desire to tap into a hidden (and until now inaccessible) inventory of your lust (you maybe don’t even know about yet).
This means that the compassion method offers a fundamentally new possibility: jumps in the experience space! Your partner can take you to unknown places you have never experienced before. And she/he is highly incentivized to make it pleasurable and to minimize the risks (for both!).
Now let’s look with the same math teacher eyes from before at the compassion method too: in this case the set of possible shared experiences is the union of the things both partners can imagine. This is a much much larger set compared to the Ymy set! And you can unlock it with only a single partner! And the things you can imagine can be easily expanded by reading (and the like). Therefore the space is almost unlimited. The sky is the limit now.
I assume not many people know the term „yes means yes“. But I guess many of us intuitively use similar consent patterns already for many years. I want to try to estimate their prevalence in the last part of this post.
For me, one of the major symptoms of a high prevalence of Ymy-type methods is the obsession with the female body in our culture (like Emily Ratajkowski becoming super famous just by shaking her titties for a few seconds in a music video).
But, to explain it with a „nerd“ metaphor, the body is only an interface to the soul. It is not what really matters in sexual play. It’s - in this metaphor - only a „peripheral“ (like a joystick or a mouse). So most modern couples would - if transported into the metaphor world - look like this:
Two people, sitting in front of each other on a desk. Each of them in front of an unplugged laptop with dark screen. Both touching the mouse, staring at it and obviously deeply fascinated from it. They look as if they are both imagining some kind of game they could play with this incredible mouse in their minds.
But they are obviously not really playing the game together! They are - sort of - only wanking together!
Of course the game would have to run on the CPU of the laptop (corresponding to the brains). But not even this is really important. What really matters is the game, the software! The game software of course makes the difference between a cool gaming experience and a dull one.
And we all know: the best games are often many decades old (think of SimCity - since 1989 - or the MS flight simulator - since 1977).
Now you might ask yourself: have I only been wanking until now? I never had real sex? Should this make me feel sad now?
No, on the contrary! Think about it: if there exists a „game console“ whose joystick alone is already so unbelievably exciting to touch, isn’t it a valid assumption that actually playing the game must be an experience beyond your wildest dreams?
Probably: the game we are talking about here is many millions of years old!
Maybe you want to give it a try. It's never too late. And it's even distributed for free.
There is, if you are interested in this topic, a second blog post about it.
Animated GIF „Sexuality“ by GUM
Image: DALL-E (this AI sure has its moments of creative genius!)
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