There is a difference between calculated and consensual surrendering to sexual violence, and freezing up because you've still never really got the hang of the idea that you're allowed to tell someone you don't want them to touch you like that or indeed at all.

The difference was neatly illustrated at a party I attended yesterday. Diagram One, consensual surrender, is what I was doing on a sofa at six this morning. It's what I have a standing invitation to do at some later date with a knife and some rope, and which I am looking forwards to. Diagram Two, frozen inability to say "no", is what occurred while my ex-boyfriend put his hand down my pants and had a good rummage and I, as I had when I had dated him, simply played possum, stiff and awkward, and couldn't get my head to function sufficiently to accept that I am, as a thinking individual and an adult and a woman with agency etc., allowed to say "no".

The problem I have with saying this here, where I am just a mask talking about submission and haematophilia and masochism, is that I worry people think that my inability to say "no" in a circumstance like this one last night is the same thing as me willingly and in full sanity handing over the control of my physical circumstances to another person for a limited period of time. It isn't. It isn't the same thing.

I give up control to someone else: I am active in this equation. I give. That's a verb. I hand over power, but that power is with me to begin with, and returns to me at the end. At no point do either I or the person I've handed it to ever feel like my right to make decisions or to say, "stop this now" has ceased to exist. I am aware of my own ability to self-determine because I allow someone else to borrow that power.

In the other scenario, in the other chain of events, control is taken away from me. I am not the actor. I am the acted upon. I am not a person who has made a decision to temporarily give away what is mine, my agency is removed. I have no power, or feel that I have none, and so my brain just collapses in on itself and won't step in to save me.

Even here, mask on, anonymous as fuck, I can't say I want to trot out the same boring bullshit about why my Stompyboots Bitch Shield fails me when people get close enough to shove their hand in my pants. I don't want that to be equated with the things I do, and the things I want to do, in order to make a mess in my pants, as 'twere. Shakesville: The Thorny Issue Of Sexual Consent explicitly says that BDSM becomes a problem in terms of consent because of the element of roleplay etc, etc., and says that if you don't set a safeword you're pretty much paving your own road to eventual assault.

To which I say bullshit. It's not the safeword that's the key, it's the ability to be enough of a human being that you can work out when someone is not enjoying themselves, and to make the right judgement. That doesn't take a genius. It just takes a functioning set of whichever perceptive senses you use, and a little compassion. The ability to remember that the person you've tied up is still also a person, and that the power they've handed you is theirs, not yours.

It's an old cliche that the sub is in control of the scene, but it's a cliche because it's true. And if they're not ... it's not a "scene" anymore.