Epistemic status: confident in the principle, embarrassed by the anecdote.
At a party in Berkeley last month, a friend chose “red” as her safeword. Someone asked whether she meant stop, or whether she meant that she assigned a high probability to wanting to stop. She said she meant stop. He asked her to taboo “stop.” She went home.
The next morning there was a shared document.
It proposed four levels of red, a confidence interval, and an appeals process. Two people had already left comments asking whether the scale was linear. My friend had left one comment: “stop.”
Remembering to use it is another problem. System 1 does not honor the contract that System 2 signed. You can add hand signals, but someone who’s having trouble speaking may also have trouble remembering the double tap.
One reviewer objected that “yellow” was underspecified. Yes. You stop and ask. The missing information is in the other person, who is right there.
I know a couple whose safeword is “pineapple,” and I know this because one of them ordered a pizza.
You still have to pay attention to your partner. If they’ve gone quiet, check in. “They didn’t say the word” is a poor account of how someone is doing, however easy it is to log.
The safeword was made for the scene, not the scene for the safeword.
The document is now nineteen pages. My friend is dating someone who has not read it. This has been raised as a concern.
This post is part of The Sensations, the introductory sequence on consent.