Informed Consent
What an oxymoron is ‘informed consent’!
Have you ever read the RX bottles of medicine’s labels? They have printed information in minuscule letters, that tell you about all the things that can happen if you take the pills. Death is usually one of them. Have you ever thought about how you may get in a plane crash, when you fly? Or worse, if you are driving how badly you can get injured, or killed, and how often it happens? I remember the film they showed us in driving school of an accident; it still haunts me. How many people do you know who have been in driving accidents? I bet you know a lot of people if you haven’t been in one yourself. Where is the informed consent about driving? You may die in a car accident (if you read the statistics).
Vaccines - how we fear them now - or some of us do. When I was young, in my high school, we had a sewer overflow and the whole school had be inoculated against Typhus. No if, no’s or buts allows, you got vaccinated. My mother was adamant about vaccinations. We were supposed to fly to the Middle East and you had to get yellow fever vaccination. We got it even if we ended up in Turkey instead.
Now we are in a new era of anti vaccination. Probably the only thing that modern medicine got right, and that has prolonged people’s lives, are vaccinations. Thank Louis Pasteur. He supposedly invented it, but it was really the Ottomans who did, because they knew giving people a bit of the disease could save lives and make you more beautiful. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu discovered the Ottomans were inoculating their people agains small pox and she had her son ‘vaccinated’. She later introduced the practice to England. Yes there is a small chance you might die. But take that chance against a great chance of suffering from the virus (and dying) or infecting others (and killing them). But we live in a selfish era.
The age of consent.
That is a touchy subject. In Canada, the age of consent used to be 14, now it is 18. That doesn’t mean non consensual sex still happens amongst people who are below the age of consent. “The person below the minimum age is regarded as the victim and his or her sex partner is regarded as the offender, unless both are underage." I was thinking about that the other day when I told a guy to back off from my windows because he was smoking. He told me I was ‘mentally ill’ and he had the right to smoke where he wanted to. NO. I looked it up, it is 9 meters away from open windows and doors. But ignorance is no excuse in the law. A guy like that probably thinks he can f__k anyone, and smoke anywhere…
Consensual sex.
“In consensual sex the sexual arousal and possible induction of orgasm are normally the welcomed outcomes and it is tacitly assumed that a willingness to undertake and experience the activity is an important factor allowing arousal and orgasm to occur.” In Canada "consent means…the voluntary agreement of the complainant to engage in sexual activity" More here
Consensual sex / actions in BDSM.
People who practice Bondage & Discipline / Domination & Submission are interesting. I won’t go into every aspect of this world, except to say there is an assumption that the BDSM kinky crowd is honest and above board.
I don’t think so. I wonder if someone who is under the influence of powerful endorphins ( and other self produced drugs) can make a rational informed consent? It is like asking a decision of a drunk or someone who is taking drugs. Top space and bottom space are the terms used to describe the experience that a Dom or a sub feels when they are doing BDSM.
The laws come down on people who claim consent in BDSM;
Doe v.Rector and Visitors of George Mason University (2016) In this case, an unidentified woman accused a man of assault. The male, referred to as John Doe, claimed that the victim didn’t use their agreed upon safe word. In a bold conclusion, the court ruled that there is no constitutional right to engage in BDSM in the United States.
More here on the laws and consent in BDSM
More about the sub-space and top-space.
A more in depth discussion of consent in BDSM
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the following chart which purports to describe the sub and Dom spaces and a text on addiction and corporal punishment;
