Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Consent

It’s come to my attention that there’s confusion around what consent means in partner dancing, and the world at large. Lets start with what it’s not.

Consent is not walking on eggshells. It’s not being paranoid about causing harm. It’s not asking for permission before every single action. Engaging in consent doesn't mean you obsess about it, nor does it mean you talk about consent all the time. (I do, but I'm weird.)

Consent is about respect.

Consent culture means respecting the boundaries, physical and emotional, of the people around you.

Key fact: Boundaries can change. They change because of a huge number of factors. My boundaries for a significant other are different from my boundaries with a close friend. Both are different from my boundaries with a stranger. My boundaries at work are different from my boundaries talking with friends, or on the dance floor.

But wait, there’s more! Boundaries are person specific. I can not make assumptions about one person’s boundaries based on other people’s boundaries. Every person has boundaries which are different from every other person.

(Side note: Making assumptions about someone’s boundaries based on race or ethnicity is called racism. When they’re based on sex or gender it’s called sexism. And when you make assumptions about a person’s boundaries based on their perceived income it’s called classism. Think about it.)

Now, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. We know most of this already. I will greet a close friends with a hug, but not coworker or stranger. And a few of my closest friends are not comfortable with hugging. So I don't hug them, even if I'm hugging everyone else. 

Lets bring it back to dancing.

At a dance it’s safe to assume everyone there wants to dance.  But remember how I said making assumptions based on perceived gender is sexist? I'm not going to assume someone leads or follows based on their gender. But consent means so much more than this.

Consent means being aware of the people around you and treating them with respect. If someone is at a dance event, but engaged in a conversation, be respectful and don't interrupt them.

Consent means changing how you interact with people based on your relationship with them. If a friend of mine is talking to another friend, I might butt in and ask for a dance. Remember how boundaries change based on context?

Consent means you make assumptions ONLY when presented with enough evidence. If someone tells you two or three times that they prefer to follow, it’s safe to assume they'll want to follow in the future. 

Consent means that boundaries change depending on who you're interacting with. Simply because one person dances in a specific way with one partner, it does not mean that I can dance in the same way with that person. 

Consent is not a specific set of instructions, not a series of if/then statements, nor is it just saying the proper words. Consent a way of treating people with respect. 

The Subtle Reasons Why Consent Is Important

(A friend of mine who dances blues and lindy hop send this to me after we talked about consent in partner dance. With her permission I have edited out any personal details. These are her words, I have highlighted key passages.)

I've been diagnosed with PTSD, an anxiety disorder. Some evenings I feel very on edge, and dancing with strangers makes me very uncomfortable. I don't think I really need a reason to say "no" to a dance, but some nights I say "no" to almost every dance, except for dances with people with whom I feel comfortable and safe and anxiety-free, which is kind of a big deal for me. It would be nice if there was a culture in our dance community that allowed me to do that without discussing my mental illness, and it is part of the reason I advocate for it rather strongly.

Anyway, tonight was one night when I was very on edge. I had to leave the dance floor a few times just to gain some space and calm myself down, and when I did come back, I said no to most dances with people I didn't know. I was also sitting next to a table, and asked a friend to sit on the other side of me, with another empty chair slightly in front of us -- effectively barricading myself. My body language was similarly protective. A guy came up to ask me to dance anyway. In fact, he had to maneuver around the table to do so. I don't particularly blame him for this, because lindy hoppers are notoriously bad at reading body language, even when I made it as obvious as I possibly could. I politely declined. He persisted, saying something along the lines of, "Are you sure? Is it because you're tired? Maybe just one song?"

So I said no again, again politely. At this point I was feeling a little uncomfortable. One "no" should really be enough. He then continued standing there, an arm's length away from me and very much invading my space, as he looked around the dance floor. I kept waiting for him to leave. He didn't. I can only assume he was hoping I would feel guilty and dance with him anyway, or maybe he was just totally oblivious to my personal space. By this point, I was feeling downright unsafe, which is a feeling I'd been trying to avoid all evening, and found myself physically pushing my chair back to create more distance away from him. Eventually he left.

Shortly after, I had to leave and find myself a dark and safe corner. I had been feeling on edge and anxious all evening, and this incident was enough to push me "over the edge" into panic attack mode. Again, I don't blame him for this, as most of the factors leading to that are internal, but his behavior certainly didn't help. It might be a very minor and unintentional thing, and any other night I would have probably given in and danced with him, or maybe just felt slightly annoyed, but tonight it had a very big, very tangible impact on me. Like I said before, this is part of the reason I feel it is so important to create a culture of consent in our community. Even in dancing, "no means no."

Flow Charts Makes Everything Better

Ever stop and wonder when you should throw an aerial? This flowchart from Gaby Cook should tell you everything you need to know.

Modeling Consent

Curious what all this consent-culture-yada-yada talk looks like in real life? Check out this post on Disrupting Dinner Parties. The author writes about going to a "hippy-dippy, counterculture" dance event in northern Washington. There are privacy reasons for not mentioning the specific event, but lets just say there was lots of partner dancing, "skinny-dipping", "classes/skillshares", and "discussions about things like consent and gender". If you can't figure it out, ask a blues dancer for help.

So why is this so amazing? The author of the post, Rebecca, meets someone, sexual tension starts to grow and then this happens:

“Rebecca, I’d like to kiss you”

I was taken off-guard. No one had ever verbally asked me to kiss them before unless I was physically keeping my face away from theirs so that they couldn’t. “Oh wow” I thought… “He is actually asking for consent!” And for something as “small” as a kiss. And that phrasing, “I’d like to kiss you”. I felt desired, but not pressured. It didn’t spoil the mood like the awkward, weirdness of, “Can I kiss you?” It gave me a chance to think about it: I did have some reservations. I was afraid that kissing him might lead him to believe we were going to have sex. But damn, I did want to kiss him, so I replied with a small, breathless “ok” and leaned in.

This is exactly what "consent is sexy" means. Verbal communication, when done correctly, adds to a sexual encounter. The next day the guy made a point to seek out Rebecca and check it. She was shocked that he would take the time to make sure everything was okay.

I was completely blown away by this experience. It was the first time I had ever seen consent practices so explicitly modeled. I want to pass it on. I want to take all aspects of this interaction out of the counter-culture setting and bring them to the mainstream. 

BAM. Consent culture. Do it.

Source.

Obligation and Honesty

The great lindy hop blog Swungover just posted a primer on etiquette and floorcraft. Most of it is basic stuff we've learned over the years. (Don't be smelly, be careful on crowded dance floors.) There's a section on rejecting dances I want to call out, because it's brilliant.

"If you do not wish to dance with a person who asks you, then you should reject that dance, and no further explanation is necessary. (Unless you desire to elaborate, of course.)"

Swungover adds that many dancers add "I’m sitting this one out" after saying no. This is a problem because:

"First off, they will probably ask again, later, and so you are simply prolonging the problem rather than solving it. Secondly, your personal safety — whether physical or mental — is much more important than social graces. The rejected partner may ask why, in which case you have the opportunity to give them honest feedback on their behavior. “Well, to be honest, in the past…” (Depending on the behavior, you may want to give them feedback on it regardless of whether they ask for it or not.)"

There are two important ideas here. First, your mental and physical well being is far more important than being nice. You have no obligation to be polite when someone is making you feel unsafe.

Second, being honest gives you a chance to improve the situation. "To be honest, last time we danced my shoulder was really sore afterwards. Can we do a gentler dance this time?"

Being able to give (and receive) this kind of feedback is very important to improving the overall safety of a dance scene. I'll cover it in detail in a future post. For now, here's one of my favorite dance videos:

Why Beginning Dancers Need to Learn Both Roles

Years ago I taught the drop-in East Coast class for a college swing dance club. I started every class with a two sentence introduction to leading and following, then asked the class to split into leads and follows. I would add something short like, "Traditionally, men lead and women follow, but you can pick whichever role you feel like."

I thought I was being so progressive. 

About once a month a woman would decide to lead. Even less frequently a man would choose to follow. Without meaning to I was reinforcing traditional gender roles in partner dancing. Three things were going on here.

First, my wording was terrible. I set up the expectation that we would follow traditional gender roles, while giving lip service to freedom of choice. It takes more that a simple statement to upset the status quo. Actual action is needed and that was obviously missing from my classroom.

Second, I was asking my students to make an uninformed decision. An instructor can easily explain the differences between leading and following. However, it takes actually dancing both roles to understand the physical and psychological difference between the two. It's impossible for someone with no partner dance experience to make a make an informed decision about which role they prefer.

Third, I was setting up a situation in which you had to cross a metaphorical picket line to dance a nontraditional role. For a man to follow he has to be comfortable with being the only guy in the follow's section of the class. That's a situation which will last for the entire class. You had to be brave enough to stand out and be obviously different if you wanted to dance a nontraditional role in my swing class. That's hard to do.

Teaching the whole class to lead and follow neatly solves all three problems.

1) Traditional gender roles in partner dance simply aren't mentioned. There are no assumptions regarding who will dance which roles.

2) Everyone has a basic understanding of both roles, so they can make an educated decision every time they step onto the dance floor.

3) Finally, everyone in the class is simultaneously learning both roles so there is no pressure to conform to a specific gender role. Everyone is free to dance the role they want to.

Curious how to run this style of class? Ambidancetrous has a wonderful how-to guide.

Five Questions to Start a Dance (or, Assuming Things Makes an "Ass" Out of "U" and "Me")

In a wonderful blog post, Ambidancetrous suggests that all dances begin with the question "Would you like to lead or follow?" This is a great place to start, and as Ambidancetrous says, the revolution will be polite.

However, this specific question is not always the best one to ask. Dancers are not all the same and there's a range of questions you can start a dance with. These five should cover the most common situations.

First of all, if you don't know how to lead, or how to follow, don't offer to do so. It's not honest to offer to dance a role you don't know. Worse, trying to dance a role you've never danced before can be painful for your partner.

Sometimes, the question to ask is, "I'm learning to lead, may I lead you?" or "I'm learning to follow, will you lead me?" (Even better, follow that up with a request for feedback.)

On the other hand, sometimes you really want to dance as a lead, or as a follow. I know some people who are amazing and unique in how they lead or follow. I often want to dance with them in a specific role. Or, I'm at a point during the night when I really want to lead. (Or follow, especially if it's 4am and I've been dancing for six hours straight. My brain gets tired.)

Sometimes, the question to ask is, "May I lead you?" or "Will you lead me?"

Finally, we usually dance with people we've never met. We know nothing about them, except for their physical attributes. If I assume they lead or follow based on those physical attributes, I'm making a sexist assumption. We simply can't tell just by looking if a person prefers to lead or follow. That's when the question is "Would you like to lead or follow?"

My point is simple: Don't make assumptions. 

The most common way for a male-who-leads to start a dance is to ask "Would you like to dance?". Then he immediately raises his left hand and curves his right arm out, the closed blues position. Or, he puts out his hands in a "cup" and waits for his follow to put their in the follow's position. Regardless of the specifics, both of these maneuvers assume that the male bodied person will be leading and the female bodied person will be following.

That assumption makes no sense to me. Yes, we currently dance in a world where the vast number of women follow and the vast number of men lead. That's changing. Leading and following are roles within a dance, not gender roles you're required to follow. Why do we look at someone's body and assume we know anything about how they dance?

Don't make assumptions. Specify the dance roles you're interested in dancing with that partner before the dance starts. It's as easy as clapping on the 2 and 4.

Consent Culture In Everyday Terms

This one is a little older, but it's still worth talking about. Lindy Hopper Problems isn't a feminist blog, nor is it serious cultural commentary. It's a bunch of gif jokes about swing dancing. That makes their post on consent culture that much more important.

Mind you, "consent" is never used in the post. Instead we have:

I only say yes to a dance if I have a really good reason. My good reasons include: “I really want to dance with the person asking me.”

I could turn down every single request to dance, and you still don’t get to judge me for it. I don’t attend events for the benefit of other people. I go because I want to. I sit down because I want to. I dance because I want to.

Or, to rephrase using consent culture terms, asking for a dance is asking for consent. You always have the right (and the privilege) to say no to a dance. That decision should be respected and it should not be judged.

Read the full post here.

"I see consent as ultimately a great force for bringing people together."

(This was originally posted on Facebook by Stephen Burrows. It's reprinted here with permission, emphasis added.)

It's always strange to me to hear people say that discussions of consent culture in dance feel alienating – that consent is somehow going to make us all terrified of crossing boundaries – that the issue is, by its nature, divisive.

This is strange to me because I see consent as ultimately a great force for bringing people together, for unifying them, for making everyone feel more comfortable and sure in themselves and their relationships.

The discomfort that people associate with consent culture is not actually related to consent culture. It's primarily related to the transition.

Right now, we're in a place where some people have started shining lights in the dark corners of the dance world where nobody wanted to look before. And it's making some other people extremely uncomfortable. With good reason! There's some bad stuff that goes on there.

But that's *not* a problem with consent culture. That's a problem with our *current* culture. It's just one that's been tucked out of sight.

There are three ways we can go. On the one hand, we can turn off the lights and stop looking. We can say that there's been enough discussion – that everyone gets it now – that it's just feels too bad to keep looking.

On the other hand, we can keep the lights on and keep shining them in the corners and just spin our wheels doing nothing to fix what we see.

Or on the other hand, we can move forward towards creating a consent culture. We can actively work towards a place where we have enough trust and understanding in each other to ask and tell each other what our boundaries are.

I absolutely agree that we can't just keep talking about this. But I think the solution, rather than stopping discussion, is starting action. If a consent culture is something you'd like to see, start using consent in your own life and your own dancing. Seeing what a consent culture would look like will probably do more to convince people than any number of discussions.

(Also, it feels so damn good to know that your partner wants to be in close embrace!)

Consent culture?

So, what is consent culture? I like this post from The Pervocracy:

"It is a culture with an abhorrence of forcing anyone into anything, a respect for the absolute necessity of bodily autonomy, a culture that believes that a person is always the best judge of their own wants and needs."

A lot of current talk about consent focuses on sex, but it's so much more than that. The Pervocracy continues:

"A consent culture is one in which mutual consent is part of social life as well.  Don't want to talk to someone? You don't have to.  Don't want a hug? That's okay, no hug then.  Don't want to try the fish? That's fine."

Pretty straight forward. But it's harder than it sounds. In the dance community we're been told for decades that men lead and woman follow. But if we embrace this culture then we need to ask for consent before leading or following someone. Consent applies to more fundamental aspects of partner dancing as well. It's the difference between forcing a turn and inviting a turn.

The Pervocracy post talks about bring consent out of the bedroom:

"In many ways, forcing people to do things is part of our culture in general.  Cut that shit out of your life.  If someone doesn't want to go to a party, try a new food, get up and dance, make small talk at the lunch table--that's their right."

And finally, this is the best argument I know of for bringing consent culture to the partner dance scene:

"A "yes" brings the joy of knowing someone is really hot for you, really wants you.  It means that they're going to not just go along with but be into the stuff that comes next.  That's not "prerequisite checked off," that's "awesome, this is going to be so much better now."" 

This applies to dancing as well. When someone says they really want to dance with you, everything is going to be so much better.

 

Introduction

Welcome,

In the past six months the number of people talking about dance culture has skyrocketed. There are have been many wonderful conversations about partner dancing and how we can ensure our community is as open and as welcoming as it can be. These conversations have taken place in private, on Tumblr and, most predominantly, on Facebook.

Facebook is a great tool for communicating with your friends. It's not such a great tool for sharing your ideas with a wider audience. Yes, lots of good things are being said on Facebook, but who wants to go dig through fifty or more comments to find them?

My goal with this blog is to extract the most important ideas from these comments, messages and Tumblr posts. I will make it easy to skip the pages of dialogue and help you skip straight to the conclusion. I will occasionally throw in my own ideas as well and I want to bring in guest authors as well.

That's that, lets get to it!