The Thresholds of Consent

Why consent promises something it cannot deliver…

Illusions with good intentions have always scared me more than the uncomfortable truth. That’s why we need to talk about consent.

“Please take me there!”

“But what or where is that there? And what happens when I take you there?”

Limited vs. affirmative consent

Consent is often treated as the ethical ground for sexuality and relationships. It’s meant to secure mutual understanding and safety. Consent is vital for our safety, and we must strive to feel safe enough to say “no”. I’m forever grateful for all the feminists and other rebels who’ve fought for our autonomy, strive to abolish oppression and exploitative practices that compromise our integrity. Yet, I agree with psychotherapist Avgi Saketopoulo, who states that “consent promises something it cannot deliver”, it is always limited. We cannot fully know what we are consenting to, since we cannot fully know in advance what an encounter with something or someone will do to us.

We might think we know our intentions when we ask for what we want, but our unconscious might know better. Desire is not transparent to itself, or ourselves. We might be pulled towards something that we can’t comprehend, something beyond our grasp, things we are so unwilling to acknowledge, it remains opaque to us. It exists outside language, shaped by unconscious processes and tied to past experiences we haven’t metabolized, or that we might actively disavow, we don’t want to know them. This is also what creates our erotic life.

Interacting with other people always involves an element of risk or surprise, even when we have agreed upon certain “acts”. The other person also has their own agenda, a will and desire, fueled by their unconsciousness, perhaps only partly known. This doesn’t have to be a problem, but please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to romanticize risk, but I want to take seriously that our unconscious might want something other than our ego - and then, how do we deal with this?

The body is not a stable archive of predictable responses.

Let’s have coffee together, go to a movie, and so on. You might find that the coffee tastes differently than you anticipated, or that the film scares you in ways you didn’t know you could be scared. Something in you, something you didn’t know existed, has now made its entrance in you. Who could have foreseen this? Neither you nor your friend, yet it is undeniably unsettling. How would you want your friend to respond? Would you blame them for opening up a space in you that you didn’t want, even though you agreed to see the film? Who, then, is responsible for this unexpected expansion of the self?

This is not to suggest blaming victims of assault. We often know what is morally or ethically right and wrong. But where do we place the experiences we consented to, but who changed us in unforeseen ways? Experiences that brought us into contact with parts of ourselves we didn’t even know we carried?

This doesn’t sit comfortably with liberal ethics, where the self-knowing subject is always capable of clear agreements and knowing what we want. An ethical model that assumes the preservation of the self is always the highest good when it comes to sex and relationships, is also complicated. Our unconscious might pull us towards something beyond our grasp in order to give us an erotic splendid overwhelm, beyond pre-agreements. Our ugly parts might also be our splendid parts.

Consent is a necessity, but it is insufficient. I think consent is a threshold concept. It marks an agreement, but we ask it to be more, a total ethical assurance against trauma. This, I don’t believe is possible. I will however stress the strive to feel safe enough to say stop or no. Otherwise, what might feel like a delicious risk of splendid overwhelm, might just feel like violation of your boundaries. Consent is an ongoing practice of attunement, it can only ever be partial, situated and revisable. So, what does an ethical relationship look like when we accept that consent can never be more than limited?

Repressive repetition or repair through despair?

In the book “Sexuality beyond consent”, psychotherapist Avgi Saketopoulo calls our culture traumatophilic (trauma+love). We are risk aversive, scanning for triggers and treating trauma as something to be overcome or healed. But what does an untraumatized and healed state feel like? And, drawing on intersectionality, who has the privilege to be in such a state? If healing doesn’t exist, if it isn’t possible to unlearn what you have learned, how do we navigate this?

Saketopoulou is more interested in what people actually do with their trauma than in striving for healing. So, how do we live with our wounds, can we make use of them in more creative ways? Perhaps by metabolizing them through a kind of curated repetition, in which we inhabit a position of control. This might be understood as a corrective emotional experience, or, in this case, a corrective erotic experience: a re-encounter with earlier patterns of desire and relationality in a more conscious, bounded and self-directed way. But the question remains, does this repetition remain repressive, or can it become a form of repair through despair?

Saketopoulo touches a very important, but for many, provocative nerve. The limits of consent can be understood not only as a critique of ethical overreach, but as an attunement to the body’s capacity to register more than the subject can anticipate or integrate.

To make illusions shatter even more, Leo Bersani, especially in his book “Is the Rectum a Grave?” challenges the idea that sexuality is, or should be, organized around coherence, selfhood and mutual recognition. Bersani proposes that desire thrives because of the potential self-shattering, the undoing of the self. We are drawn to the edges, our longing to surrender to the unknown.

Babygirl

I recently watched the movie “Babygirl”. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, it’s about a high‑powered CEO woman, who from the outside seems to have it all, the looks, the husband and career, but whose sense of self is disrupted by a new, handsome, young, irreverent intern. He begins to challenge her authority in unsettling ways when he tells her: ”I think you like being told what to do”. It’s both an accusation and a recognition. The words land before she can refuse them. It fractures her authority, she looks shocked, filled with both grief and desire at once.

I imagine it hits her hard in her previous story, a memory, or mirror of past violations. It startles her not only because it crosses a line, but because it touches something already there, a longing that hasn’t yet been fulfilled, not even acknowledged. It’s desire beyond right or wrong, healthy or traumatizing - not in spite of safety, but because of the risk.

As the boundary between control and surrender blurs, she is forced to confront parts of herself that destabilize her carefully maintained identity. The destabilization is not only him, but the recognition itself, a recognition of herself - a part of her she doesn’t want to exist, but now cannot forget. Perhaps exhilarating an old wound into a new trill, that is now alive in ways she had long disavowed.

Desire cannot be fully domesticated into ethical language

Going beyond our comfort zone, to risk something emerging that we couldn’t already know, even painful, but potentially transformative, might lie in the nature of desire. The question then becomes; how do we navigate this without either collapsing into naive risk-taking, where anything transformative is worth it, or rigid contracts where nothing beyond explicit consent is permissible?

The edge isn’t a fixed boundary, it’s dynamic. Sometimes we need to cross it to know where it is. May we cultivate sensitivity to our own and others thresholds as they shift. Can we create a relational context where rupture can be acknowledged, not denied. If we expect it, can we also handle it better, rather than put it under “the rug”? Can we pause before we conclude from our encounter, that this other person is as sadistic fuck, when they too were just going along? Can we accept that some experiences will only become meaningful in retrospect, both the good and the bad, because it’s beyond that binary dichotomy?

Psychoanalysis has always stressed that we need to hold the tension of the opposites; make room for ambivalence and complexity. Consent remains vital but structurally limited, it cannot offer certainty. The fantasy of pre-negotiating every outcome risks creating a culture overly averse to trauma, or traumatophilic, as Saketopoulou coins it. We carry great responsibility under conditions of uncertainty, yet we might forfeit the chance to form new neural pathways that enhance our erotic plasticity if we assume that surprise and risk are always inherently bad.