Safe, Sane, and Consensual

"You know kids, I wish every mother and father in this theater would go home tonight and make a speech to their teenagers and say kids, be free, no guilt, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody."

- "My Conviction", in Hair

It's okay for people to do pretty much anything to each other, as long as they are all into it, know what they are getting into, and the risk of permanent harm isn't unreasonably high. Right?

But how do we really know what's going on? A mutual game, or abuse? Sometimes it can be hard to see the difference between the two.

The difference between actual abuse and BDSM/similar activities (sexual and otherwise) is often described in the terms of BDSM being SSC -- Safe, Sane, And Consensual:


 * Safe means that the risks are known and minimized: That people know what they are getting into and handle it responsibly.
 * Sane means that the individuals involved have self-control and will not betray their partners' trust.
 * Consensual means that everyone involved agree without coercion, and also has a sufficiently high intellectual capacity so they understand the risks and consequences of their actions. (Legally speaking, everyone who have reached a certain age are expected to have reached such capacity (outside of those with cognitive disabilities).) Those who are drugged down with high doses of alcohol or similar may not be able to give meaningful consent because of the effects of those substances on inhibitions and mental faculties.

This pattern can also be used to describe, for example, the difference between a honest boxing match and simply beating someone up. There are many variations of the pattern: Consenting Adults, Informed Consent, Risk Awareness Consensual Kink, and so on. But while nuances may differ and may be important in specific contexts, the basic concept is the same: Everyone involved does not merely give lip-service consent, they know what they are getting into and are capable of deciding for themselves what they want and don't want. For more on the fine nuances of the difference between these phrases, see the Useful Notes entry on Consent.

This trope is about discussing and defining the limits of proper behavior, or simply waving a Consent Flag. People simply doing BDSM in a SSC way is not this trope: It is either Casual Kink or Brains and Bondage, while people doing BDSM in an anti-SSC way falls under Bondage Is Bad unless this trope comes into play in some form; for example, the victim or another character pointing out that it's not the proper way to do BDSM.

One notable subversion of this trope is pretending that abuse or exploitation is BDSM (and thus implied to be SSC). One notable aversion/way of darkly playing it for laughs is to highlight the need for Safe and Sane by sarcastically pretending that consent is all that's needed -- and use an example where someone naively or stupidly agrees to something that they obviously can't handle.

See also Safe Word and Abuse Mistake. Compare Ethical Slut. Contrast Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny and Bondage Is Bad.

Comic Books

 * Indirect in City of Dreams: Much is done without formal consent, but dreamers can always wake up. Subverted in two different ways towards the end.

Film

 * In Preaching to The Perverted, with the mistress explaining BDSM to the newcomers.
 * In Exit to Eden, with the mistress explaining BDSM to the newcomers.
 * Discussed in The SM Judge, as Magda is trying to explain the difference between spousal abuse and what her husband has been doing with her.
 * The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is implied to be this for most, genuinely weird, Transylvanians. Contrast this with Frank-N-Furter's "Experiments" with easily manipulated humans

Literature

 * The 4:th and 8:th commandment of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
 * In Slave World, this trope is sometimes played straight, but usually overtly Defied with a lot of Lampshade Hanging that the plot is not SSC and thus not BDSM even thought it makes great BDSM Fetish Fuel.
 * In Slave Jade, the female lead is a sexually submissive woman who starts dating a "dominant" psycho who kidnaps her and executes a miserable attempt at inducing Stockholm Syndrome. Before they actually met, he seemed to have a very good understanding of consent and safety - what she didn't know is that the bulk of his mails to her were reasonable ideas that he never thought in his own head, but merely copy/pasted from various sites.
 * In the Kushiel's Legacy universe, things can get plenty kinky, but there are rules in place and violating them isn't just illegal, it's heresy.

Live Action TV

 * The episode of CSI that introduced Lady Heather also featured her schooling both Gil and Catherine on the difference between BDSM and abuse, with heavy emphasis on Safe Sane and Consensual, although she didn't use that phrase.
 * In Jack of All Trades, the episode located on De Sade's island has much of the BDSM exaggerated for comedy, so it's easy to forget that all the guests (except the protagonists, who are there under false pretenses) came there by their own free will. (Sanity may be questioned, since the austrian guy's wife ends up taking "acting like a dog" a bit far when she savages him. Again, comedy.)
 * In Torchwood season 4, Captain Jack Harkness finally gets a sex scene. He hooks up with a random bartender. Despite being in a foul mood and smashed drunk and the world is ending, he still absolutely insists on using condoms, and he doesn't get dominant until his partner tells him he can be in charge.

Newspaper Comics

 * In one Dilbert strip (28 August 2010), the Pointy Haired Boss is trying to make people believe that slave labor is ok by pretending that "slave" really refers to the BDSM kind of slavery rather then economical exploitation of poor people.
 * Aversion played for laughs in one strip in the comics magazine Larsson, with a therapist encouraging a couple to play with live hand-grenades in bed as part of their sex-life... as long as they both consented to it.

Theater

 * A core philosophy in Hair - see page quote

Real Life

 * In the German Internet Cannibal case, the defense argued that the victim/"victim" had consented to being eaten. The court ruled that no one who is willing to consent to being cannibalized is mentally fit to give consent in the first place. In other words, not Safe enough to be considered Sane.
 * This is the core philosophy of Mistress Matisse's and Dan Savage's sex columns for The Seattle Stranger. Savage has specifically said in articles that the only things he considers completely unacceptable are rape, pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia and coprophilia. He also tends to caution against cheating except in very extreme cases (for example, an abusive partner), though he is an advocate for consensual non-monogamy.
 * In theory completely averted in the law of the UK, in which no consent can ever be legally given for anything that goes so far as to leave a mark or bruise, and charges can be made by the police regardless of the consent levels of the participants. However, this law is rarely used against heterosexual sadomasochists (or heterosexual vanilla sex that also leave marks). Homosexuals, on the other hand...
 * In the UK it was the House of Lords case of R. v. Brown. This was followed in Ontario by its Court of Appeal in R. v. Welch. In the latter case the court stated that S&M is "inherently degrading and dehumanizing" and does not allow someone to consent to harm as they would in an activity with "a generally approved social purpose" such as a contact sport like hockey.
 * Just to demonstrate the unfairness in R v Brown, a UK case - R v Wilson - involving a heterosexual couple showed that there were some circumstances when consent could be a defence for assault in the case of S&M. The man was convicted for assault when he branded his initials on his wife's buttocks on her request, although he was later cleared at the court of appeal - apparently, as the branding was meant to be a personal adornment "like a tattoo", her consent was seen as good enough to have his conviction quashed. You have to wonder whether they would have come to that conclusion if the participants were gay.
 * The same is true in Massachusetts, and there have been prosecutions of consensual BDSM couples who don't choose their doctors or cover their bruises carefully enough.