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Consent 101 - FRIES, Limits, Negotiations

Written by: Mira - Original thread

Heya, sweeties, let’s talk about Doing Kink Safely, because we wanna make sure people only get hurt in the fun ways! This is a little endeavour from some of us to share our experience with the folks in the community that might be new to kink, to make sure everyone knows at least the fundamentals of safer, healthy, and responsible play. I’ll be linking the other threads here too, please check those out as well!

My topic (unsurprisingly) is Consent 101. We’ll be discussing what consent is, how to give it, how to negotiate a scene, and how to set your limits. This will be the basic crash course to make sure everyone can play safely and consensually - if time permits, I’ll write up a 301 later on how to play with consent as safely as possible, but for now, the basics!

On that note, two tangents before we begin, one for the newer folks, and one for the veterans.

Firstly, if you’re new to kink and BDSM, while I’m not your mother, I would *really* caution against diving headfirst into CNC and/or rape play until you’ve gotten some wider kink experience under your belt, regardless of whether you’d be subbing or domming. I’m sure there are people who did CNC scenes before they even had vanilla sex who turned out fine, and that’s great, but for most folks I’d suggest trying some ‘standard’ D/s scenes first, to get comfortable with scene negotiations, limits, and aftercare. This stuff can *really* get you and/or your partner hurt if it goes wrong, so please, be safe!

Second, if you’re a veteran, you might bristle a bit at a few points I present here as immutable laws of kink. I am aware that they are not. I play with them a lot. Yes, you *can* do intox play. Yes, you *can* play without a safeword. As long as everyone involved knows what they’re doing and has decided it fits in their risk profile, it’s fine. However, for newer folks, I think it is wise to give them hard and fast rules to hold on to while they grow more comfortable with themselves and play. Consider it simplified high school physics versus the *real* deal you get during your PhD., if that makes sense. So. Like. Don’t run me out of town for taking a hard stand on issues that *are* more nuanced under the hood, okay? <3

Now, then, with that out of the way, let’s start with the simplest question: what, exactly, *is* consent?

At its most basic, consent is agreeing to a certain thing. It doesn’t even have to be a kink thing - I can, for example, consent to let my partner do up my hair, or to do a quick grocery run for my friend down the street. It’s just often discussed much more explicitly in kink, because the consequences when consent is *absent* can be much more damaging, running the gamut from broken trust, to triggered traumas, to outright sexual assault. Consent is very, *very* important - in life, but *especially* in kink.

Some of you are probably already yelling at me that I’m oversimplifying consent, and you’re *right*, but I did want to make sure we all shared the same baseline at first! See, consent needs to be *more* than just agreeing to something. If I agree to something when I’m drunk, does that still count as consent? If I say yes, then change my mind, am I still consenting? If I agree to handcuffs and you instead, without checking, put me in ropes because you forgot your cuffs at home, is that okay?

I hope everyone answered ‘no, no, and no’ to those questions, because that should be intuitive, but it might not be super clear *why* doing any of those things would be wrong. Thankfully, Planned Parenthood has developed a very good model¹ for thinking about consent: FRIES!

¹If you do sex work - well, you probably don’t need to be reading this thread - but if you are, the IDC has iterated on the FRIES model with the CRISP model, for specific use in intimacy/sex work contexts. Not my area of expertise, but at a glance, it does seem solid - might be worth checking out!

https://www.idcprofessionals.com/blog/defining-consent-from-fries-to-crisp

FRIES stands for Freely Given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific. Each of these are necessary but not sufficient constituent parts of consent: if *any one* of them is missing, consent is being violated. All five elements need to be present for us to be able to speak of consent.

Freely Given is straightforward - you have to give your consent without being pressured. If you’re being coerced, tricked, or manipulated into it, it’s not consent. Similarly, if you’re drunk, high, or otherwise not in a state of mind where you can reasonably make decisions, you can’t consent.

Reversible is just that - you can *always* change your mind. Even if you’ve done it a hundred times before. Even if you’re in the middle of doing it right now. None of that matters - when you decide to revoke your consent, it is *revoked*.

Informed means that you can only consent to things you know about. If someone lies to you about what you’re consenting to, whether through outright falsehoods or by omission, you are not consenting. You can’t consent if you aren’t given an accurate picture of what saying ‘yes’ actually entails.

Enthusiastic is an underappreciated part of consent, and relates back to Freely Given, in a way: nobody should make you do things that you do not ACTIVELY WANT to do. You shouldn’t have to do things just because you or your partner feel they are expected of you.

Specific is what it sounds like - you consent to the *specific thing asked of you*, and not *anything else*. If you consent to me tying you down and spanking you, that does not mean I get to use a whip on you. If I consent to get naked and make out with you, that does not mean I consent to have sex with you. If you want to do something new, ask!

Awesome, now that we know about saying ‘yes,’ let’s learn about saying ‘no’ - time for limits!

Keep an eye out for @estrogenandspite.bsky.social’s threads, since she will cover them in more depth later, but they are *extremely* important for discussing consent. Besides, repetition never hurts, so you’ll get the basics here!

Limits are, simply put, the opposite of consent. Rather than saying ‘yes’ to something, you are bringing up things that you are pre-emptively saying ‘no’ to. Generally speaking, they come in two flavours: hard limits and soft limits.

Hard limits are your dead stops. They should not come up in the scene. People should not even try to bring them up in the scene. If they *do* come up, that is almost certainly grounds for a safeword. Unless you have discussed it beforehand (and I do not recommend you do this when just starting out), people should *not* be trying to push your hard limits, let alone *break* them. You know best what would be a hard limit for you, but if you aren’t sure, you can think of things that would trigger traumas, activities outside of your risk profile (that is, things you think are too unsafe to do - I refuse to choke anyone in way other than placing a hand over their mouth and squeezing their nose shut, for example, and I will not do knifeplay or bloodplay until I’ve taken a first aid course), or activities that you are just *deeply* uncomfortable with or just plain do not want to engage in.

Soft limits are more flexible boundaries. They might be things you’re not sure if you *like*, but you know you don’t *categorically reject*, things that make you uncomfortable but you want to do anyway, or just plain ol’ sometimes foods. Soft limits can be things you only want to engage in under specific circumstances, or something you only want to see in your scenes occasionally, or in a light form. For example, I *generally* do not want to have people imply I am a bad friend or romantic partner when I am being degraded by them, but there are some *specific* scenarios in which I’m okay with it. Even then, I’d rather it not be the focus of the scene - just something occasionally sprinkled in to drive the hurt home extra hard. Generally, I’ll let them know before the scene if it’s something I’m in the mood for. As always, communication is key!

I would encourage erring on the side of caution - if you’re not sure if something is a hard or a soft limit, run with it as a hard limit until you’ve had time to figure it out. Better to be safe and not need it, than to not be safe and need it. That said, if you *do* figure out something you’d set as a limit isn’t one (anymore), or that what you thought was a hard limit is a soft one, please do communicate about that before trying to introduce it to the scene. Negotiations are living, breathing things, and it’s good to be renegotiating plenty! I do it all the time.

Limits can vary from person to person and dynamic to dynamic - it’s very reasonable to have more stringent limits with people you don’t know well than with people you have trusted and played with for years, for example, but no limit is ever bad to set!

That said, it is important to note that limits are about *you*. Things that are done *to you*, things people want you *to do* to them, or things that *you* might be exposed to. What other people do in the privacy of their own scene is not generally something you can set limits on, excepting where it would affect you. It would, for example, be reasonable to ask one a play partner you have sex with to use protection and get tested if they sleep with other people, since that could directly affect your health. Demanding they do not get peed on by other people because you think it’s icky, less so. That said, asking them to not bring it up to you if they do, to not show you photos or videos of it, or to ask you to pee on them *are* all very reasonable limits, since that involves *you*.

Of course, the above paragraph is a little flexible if you’re in an established relationship or dynamic with someone. You might be in a D/s dynamic, and that dynamic might involve the dominant being the only one allowed to do something to the submissive. This would then be a negotiated part of the dynamic, and would be a limit you would set for anyone else playing with you.

Additionally, you might not want very intimate or specific acts to be repeated wholesale on others, because that would make you feel like the bond between you and your play partner would be less special. This can be okay, as long as you relate it back to a limit for *you*, not *others*.

For example, I have given one of my submissives a very specific hypnotic trigger. I then asked her if it would be okay if I used that same trigger on another submissive. She objected, saying that if I gave it to someone else, she would no longer want it. Note that she did not try to impose any limits on what *I* did with other people, but rather said she would revoke her consent to have that trigger, were I to use it with others. I was free to use it elsewhere - I would simply not be able to use it with her anymore. This, I think, was a very reasonable request, given the context and depth of our dynamic. This is a murky field, and the line between a limit for yourself and a limit that imposes on the dynamic of others can be a bit blurry at times, but this is why communication is important. Talk it out with your partner, especially if they’re important to you!

So, now that we know what consent is and what limits are, let’s talk about establishing them - negotiations!

Sometimes, things happen organically. Especially in this corner of bluesky, chatting to someone on the skyline might take a turn for the kinky, if you’re both enjoying the vibe. At that point, it might be good to drop a quick line in DMs to do a temperature check - just a quick “hey, are you cool with what’s going on in the replies right now, let me know if I need to back off” never hurts! It’s always good to check, in my opinion - better too much than too little. At this point, it can also be good to ask if there’s anything you *shouldn’t* bring up, especially anything related to what your main discussion is centered on or heading towards.

However, if you’re planning a scene in advance, or want to talk about establishing a longer-term dynamic, it’s *extremely* important to actually sit down with everyone involved and negotiate! Negotiations are the core of safer play in basically *any* scenario. It’s just what it sounds like: you and your partner(s) have a talk, whether in person, on call, or in DMs, about what you do and do *not* want to see in the scene.

First and foremost, you’ll want to talk expectations. Everything else flows from here. What is the plan? Is this just a single scene? Are you looking to start a dynamic? Are you just going to be vibing it out, occasionally sparring on the skyline, and seeing where that takes you? All of those are fine options, but it’s important everyone is on the same wavelength. If you’re expecting a committed dynamic, and your partner thinks you’re just having occasional no-strings-attached fun, that’s a recipe for hurt feelings!

Next up, discussing your safewords! Safewords are words that you say to indicate that something has gone wrong, a limit has been crossed, or you need to just stop and talk about something. Safewords suspend the scene, or end it entirely. As the name implies, they’re a safety measure, and a very important one! I do *not* recommend playing without one unless you and your partner are *very* experienced, know what you’re doing, and are dialed into each other *extremely* well!

If you want to, you can just pick a word like ‘pineapple’ or something that serves as a hard stop to the scene, but for beginners (and everyone, really), I highly, highly, *HIGHLY* recommend the stoplight system. (Just as a side note, if you do decide to pick a single safeword, make sure it’s not something you’d possibly end up saying in the scene itself!)

The stoplight system is very simple. It works with the colours of actual stoplights; red, yellow, and green. Each of these carry different meanings. I’ll give you the definitions I work with below, but please, *make sure to actually discuss the meanings you assign to each colour with your partner*! If you and them think red means something different, that is going to cause *problems*! Make sure you agree on the definitions of the colours before you play!

Red is a hard stop. It ends the scene. All of it. All of the dominance, submission, sadism, masochism, *everything* stops, and you move directly into aftercare (stay tuned for a thread on aftercare by none other than the ever-wonderful @sanguine-sophie.bsky.social!). This is what you call when a hard limit is crossed, something’s gone wrong, or you just want the scene to *stop*.

Yellow can have multiple common meanings; I have seen and used many of them. For this reason, it is perhaps the most important colour to discuss: almost everyone will agree that a red means the scene is over, but yellow is much more likely to mean different things to different people. Double-check this one!

One of the most common meanings, and the one I recommend, is “Pause the scene; we need to talk”. It temporarily stops what’s going on so you can say what you need to, talk out what needs to be talked, and go back to it. Maybe a rope slipped, and is constricting your limb. Maybe you hit on a soft limit you didn’t know you had, and want to make clear you don’t want it pushed further this session. Maybe you just need a bathroom break. Whatever it is, this definition of yellow gives you the space to bring it up. Because it’s so flexible, it also encompasses the other definitions I’m about to mention - I’m mostly just bringing them up so you’re aware of them, but I would strongly suggest using this one, unless you are certain one of the others is a better fit for your scene.

Speaking of, another option is “‘Til here but no further”: you are fine with things as they currently are, but do not want them to get more intense. This is effectively a warning signal that your limits are being approached.

Finally, a version of yellow I’ve encountered is “slow down”. Nothing has gone wrong, no boundary has been breached, but if the current intensity of the scene is kept up, that *will* happen. Tamper down the energy; take the sting out of some of the insults. Maybe lay off the flogger for a bit. Generally, this is a hint to your partner to step off the gas a bit.

Last but certainly not least, we have green. Green is, in my opinion, pretty underrated - it means “this is good, steady as she goes, keep it up”. It’s a signal to your partner that you’re consenting to what is currently happening, and you want it to continue. In most cases, you are happy and comfortable with what is happening - though not necessarily *all* cases, since play can deliberately explore misery and discomfort. But, bottom line, green means go.

Being tiered like this gives the stoplight system two advantages: firstly, that you can differentiate between needing to slow down/pause the scene, and end it entirely, allowing you to catch a break or talk something out without having to entirely stop. This also makes it easier to assert your soft limits, since you won’t feel like you’re ending the fun for everyone over something that you think you might be able to grin and bear - you just call a yellow, talk it out, and go right back to it.

I cannot stress enough that calling colours is *good*. Do not hesitate to do it. Do no hesitate to ask for them. It makes *everyone* safer. It is *invaluable* information. If your partner seems unsure, ask them for their colour, and tell them where you’re at! Even a green is good, because it lets your partner know they are on the right track, and you’re having a great time - positive feedback is as important as its negative counterpart!

One thing that’s important to note is - take into consideration what to do if you *can’t* talk! Whether that’s from having your mouth full of cock, being gagged, or just from going nonverbal from how intense the scene is, have a backup plan! Generally, I recommend tapping out - ideally on your partner’s body, so they can feel it, but if that’s not feasible, on something loud that makes noise. Fast, rapid, persistent taps are good, to make sure they know it’s not just random squirming or in-scene struggling.

Should you expect to be in a situation where you can’t talk *or* tap out - say, you’ll be sucking your Mistress’ strap while your hands are tied behind your back - I recommend holding a clicker in your hand that you can use if you need to.

Of course, make sure to discuss what tapping/clickering out means! It could be a yellow, or a red, or whatever you agree on, but make sure it’s clear for everyone involved!

Once that’s hashed out, time to discuss limits! We’ve already discussed what those are, so I won’t repeat myself here, but something important to keep in mind is that a limit can be *anything*. It doesn’t just have to be about *actions*; it can also be about pet names or insults you do not want to be called, for example. I always like to check what kind of terms people are okay with me using for them.

I highly, highly, *highly* recommend writing down the limits of yourself and your partners somewhere. Since I play a lot online, I tend to pin posts with limits in our DMs, and I keep a notes file separate from that on my phone. I *really* want to sit down and make a proper spreadsheet one of these days, for ease of overview, but whatever works, works. Just make sure you can refer back to them later, so you’re less likely to forget them in-scene.

Other important points to discuss are aftercare needs! What do you want your partner to do for you once the scene is over? What should be prioritized - emotional support? Physical wellbeing? What would you need in terms of emotional support?

Sylvia and Sophie will cover these points in more detail in their respective threads, but I thought it important to mention - also negotiate what happens *after* a red, or when the scene just comes to an end, planned or naturally by mutual agreement! You don't want to have to wing aftercare!

Finally - and easy to forget - I also strongly suggest discussing what you *do* want to see in the scene! This can be as specific as planning it down to every plot beat, or as general as just mentioning you’d like to be degraded more this time. This ties back to the expectations point from earlier, but it bears repeating separately. Closed mouths don’t get filled - *ask* for what you want, and check with your partner! We’re all here to have fun (or at least, be miserable in safe and interesting ways), so make sure you bring up the things that *make it fun for you*! Don’t *just* discuss what you *don’t* want - what you *do* want is just as important!

Well, I think that about covers the absolute barebones basics of consent, limits, and negotiations. I hope this has been helpful, and if you have any thoughts, feedback, or additions, I’d love to hear them! Thank you so much for reading, and have fun and be safe out there.