The word "consent" finds its roots in the Latin 'consentire,' meaning "to feel together" or "to sense together." This etymology is why we define consent as a shared feeling, one that comes from voluntary agreement (made without coercion) between those with decision-making capacity, knowledge, understanding, and autonomy.

Consent is a shared feeling created together through a process of constant, collaborative discovery. It's not a thing that you obtain once and never have to consider again.

Reducing consent to a simplistic logical construct or a mere checklist of rules can actually increase the risk of consent violation, because we may not pay as much attention in the moment to the emotions and bodily sensations that humans really use to determine whether something is consensual or not. Each person's experience is deeply personal, so developing full-body awareness, emotional intelligence, and communication skills is essential to a practice of consent.

Accepting the emotional underpinnings of consent also means we have to get comfortable with the "grey" areas of consent. It's normal for people to be unclear about how they're feeling, to say "maybe" or "I'm not sure," and to need time to sort through their sensations, feelings, and thoughts. To create a shared feeling between people, we often need to slow down, move carefully, and leave the lines of communication open, before, during, and after an activity. We have to respect that everyone gets to evaluate their experiences in their own time, and that our experiences of events can be different from each other without anyone necessarily being wrong. And we must recognize that logical arguments can't invalidate peoples' lived realities.

Consent exists in every aspect of daily life, “from the bedroom, to the boardroom” as we at the Consent Academy like to say.

In any given day, consent is affirmed and violated multiple times. People do it to us and we do it to other people. Creating the conditions for consent is a skill that gets better the more you practice. We need to practice consent in regular, day-to-day situations so we’re prepared for more intense ones, like those involving kink. If we violate consent in intense situations, we could cause serious, lasting harm. Practicing consent everyday lowers the risk of consent violations happening, and it also prepares you for what to do when things go wrong. We can never fully remove the risk of a consent violation, so we must practice responsibility and take accountability for our actions if they result in negative impacts.

Consent Vocabulary:

• Consent Affirmation: an experience where consent is upheld. When someone assents to a request (by saying 'yes' or agreeing) and/or respects a boundary.​
  
  
• Consent Incident: an event or occurrence, involving consent, where something has gone wrong. There is no initial assumption of guilt or fault, just as there is no initial assumption of victim or perpetrator. It is an event that happened which needs consideration, review, and outside support. A useful term to use as a third party observer or when the people involved are still processing the event.
  
  
• Consent Violation: an experience where someone believes their consent was broken, a set boundary was crossed, or harm was caused during the consent incident. Only the person who experienced harm within the event gets to decide if their consent was violated.

We'll keep defining consent as it relates to kink as we move through this course. To learn more about consent as a shared feeling and how to practice it in all aspects of daily life, we recommend taking our Foundations of Consent course - which you can access for free with the discount code at the end of this course!

What is your working definition of consent? Let us know in the comments!