So you’re RACK? Congratulations, but what do those letters mean to you?

Way back when BDSM hadn’t yet become a Fifty Shades enterprise, people cared a whole lot about acronyms. There was SSC and PRICK. There was RACK and CCCC, but if you put all those acronyms in a bucket and swirled them around, you still wouldn’t get enough consent for an ethical scene.

Every word in those acronyms is useless without some theorising. Let’s take SSC. “Safe” could mean sticking to a little light spanking, or it could mean remembering to wear gloves while sewing your brat’s mouth shut with barbed wire. “Sane” could mean a bit of light rope, or it could mean doing anything @AncillaL would do, except with a bottle of antiseptic on the bedside table. SSC is nothing more than a Rorschach test, so it’s only useful if you interpret it intelligently.

I’m looking at you, S-type. If your top claims to be SSC, look deeper. Interpret the inkblot, because it could mean a host of different things, and RACK is no different.

Among lazy folk, all RACK means is, “I’mma use this panga on you, and I totally know that’s risky. See? RACK!” If you think that’s just an approach I made up to sound interesting, I see it every time I write about consent acronyms. I’m a RACK person, so I require quite a lot more out of it than they do.

Risk awareness is the only route to informed consent. If all parties understand the precise risks they’re exposed to (and yes, you’re supposed to enumerate them even if it requires you to read a textbook) then all parties are in the position to consent. I’ve added a little something to my risk awareness model, though. Awareness is useless until you’re doing everything possible to ameliorate that risk. I like to think that’s the spirit in which RACK was created, or it wouldn’t be meaningful at all.

PRICK is the sort of ink blot that conservatives love. It contains the words “personal responsibility” which basically means if things go badly, it’s your own damned fault and not your top’s. Maybe PRICK’s inventor meant it that way, but I doubt it.

Rorschach tests have been proven useless in diagnosing any mental illness other than schizophrenia, and in the wrong hands, consent models are just as ineffectual.

Only yesterday, a reader told me that consent was a matter of degrees. He said sometimes it’s offered as an enthusiastic “yes” but most of the time, bottoms provide it reluctantly. I hope you can interpret that ink blot. It’s the sort consent violators use to get what they want, to hell with the consequences. (If you haven’t read much about dishonest justifications, I highly recommend the book Addictive Thinking by Dr Twerski.)

You can justify anything with four letters and nefarious intentions, so if you’re considering a new top, don’t ask them if they’re SSC. Ask them what SSC means. The answer might throw up enough red flags to mobilise an army.

I’m open-minded about kink. I feel just fine about high-risk activities as long as everyone involved knows what they’re getting into and both are doing everything possible to mitigate that risk. RACK doesn’t tell you do do either of those things, though. So you’re RACK? Congratulations, but what do those letters mean to you?