Intimate Interactions

Today’s introduction is long because we touch on some pretty advanced stuff. Thanks for bearing with me. Normalizing behaviours is key to getting rid of shame and stigma, the key to promoting intimacy on our own terms. Shame isolates people, and rarely is anyone made more compassionate for others by being shunned or disconnected from society. When we make distinctions between amazing intense, hot sex and - content warning - nausea inducing, head-spinning traumatic rape - sometimes very similar physical acts might be involved but in very different social containers. This is one of many reasons why an evidence-based, adversarial approach to justice has historically failed survivors. So is the primary difference just consent between those two acts? If consent is the jump from rape to sexual intercourse and connection is the jump from intercourse to meaningful sex, the same is true for BDSM. Consent is the jump from abuse to BDSM, and connection is the jump from casual hitting to… an indescribable intimacy. Meani