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Safe, Sane, and Consensual
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www.seekdiscipline.com
Safe, Sane and Consensual (SSC) is one of several phrases used by a large section of the BDSM and sexual bondage communities, who regard SSC as a watchword for safety to describe themselves and their philosophies.
The principles are that BDSM activities should be:
- Safe: attempts should be made to identify and prevent risks to health
- Sane: activities should be undertaken in a sane and sensible cast of mind
- Consensual: all activities should involve the full informed consent of all parties involved
Other people in the BDSM community do not consider SSC to be an accurate term for these relationships / activities. The term Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK) has been gaining popularity as a substitute description.
For those who dissent, issues generally arise from the subjective nature of each term in SSC and the problems this creates both within and outside the community when using the term as a yardstick to evaluate activities. Another objection to SSC is that it is redundant. For example, that genuine consent (freely given informed consent) is an equivalent principle, since without sanity one cannot be genuinely informed, and that safety is an illusion in the real world. Instead of only doing safe activities, we consent to do activities with an acceptable level of risk. In that view, information about risk is central, not safety, and so informed consent is sufficient.
Within ownership and M/s, SSC is often rejected because of its association with "Safety Police" attitudes which are usually antithetical to ownership relationships. SSC also fails to address the issue of Consensual Nonconsent.
Most people attribute the term SSC to David Stein, based on his essay "Safe Sane Consensual: The Evolution of a Shibboleth" in which he describes the coining of the term by a GMSMA (Gay Male S/M Activists) committee of which he was a member in 1984. It is important to note that all the key concepts of SSC appeared before this. Tony DeBlase in DungeonMaster magazine popularized the term “Safe and Sane” SM and various American SM organizations including the Society of Janus, TES, and Samois elaborated on this in their own definitions of SM in the early 1980s. The term SSC did not achieve widespread notice until its use in some of the literature for the SM-leather contingent of the 1987 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights, which GMSMA helped organize. In 1988, representatives from most of the major U.S. and Canadian SM organizations met at a conference in Dallas. Following two days of increasingly vitriolic debate, they formed an organization called Safe Sane Consensual Adults, which two years later merged with the National Leather Association (NLA). The NLA, in turn, popularized the term SSC in all its publications and its Living in Leather convention and helped it win almost universal acceptance by the early 1990s as the key concept that differentiated SM activities from abuse and criminality.
See Also
External links
- Essays by David Stein
- SSC vs RACK by Justin Medlin
(This article incorporates text from the Safe, sane, and consensual article in Wipipedia.)
Archivist note: link for “Safety Police” goes to a broken page.
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www.slaveregister.com
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Expected entry missing from this site
Entry not referenced on this site
External links
- Essays by Mikail Togneri
- Absolute_Dynamic on Yahoo Groups (formerly AbsoluteBDSM)
Archivist note: yahoo groups is no longer available and was not found in archive.org
long text
www.ownership-possession.com
Safe, Sane and Consensual (SSC) is one of several phrases used by a large section of the BDSM and sexual bondage communities, who regard SSC as a watchword for safety to describe themselves and their philosophies.
The principles are that BDSM activities should be:
- Safe: attempts should be made to identify and prevent risks to health
- Sane: activities should be undertaken in a sane and sensible cast of mind
- Consensual: all activities should involve the full informed consent of all parties involved
Other people in the BDSM community do not consider SSC to be an accurate term for these relationships / activities. The term Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK) has been gaining popularity as a substitute description.
For those who dissent, issues generally arise from the subjective nature of each term in SSC and the problems this creates both within and outside the community when using the term as a yardstick to evaluate activities. Another objection to SSC is that it is redundant. For example, that genuine consent (freely given informed consent) is an equivalent principle, since without sanity, one cannot be genuinely informed, and that safety is an illusion in the real world. Instead of only doing safe activities, we consent to do activities with an acceptable level of risk. In that view, information about risk is central, not safety, and so informed consent is sufficient.
Within ownership and M/s/, SSC is often rejected because of its association with "Safety Police” attitudes, which are usually antithetical to ownership relationships. SSC also fails to address the issue of Consensual Nonconsent.
Most people attribute the term SSC to David Stein, based on his essay "Safe Sane Consensual: The Evolution of a Shibboleth" in which he describes the coining of the term by a GMSMA (Gay Male S/M Activists) committee of which he was a member in 1984. It is important to note that all the key concepts of SSC appeared before this. Tony DeBlase in DungeonMaster magazine popularized the term “Safe and Sane” SM and various American SM organizations including the Society of Janus, TES, and Samois elaborated on this in their own definitions of SM in the early 1980s. The term SSC did not achieve widespread notice until its use in some of the literature for the SM-leather contingent of the 1987 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights, which GMSMA helped organize. In 1988, representatives from most of the major U.S. and Canadian SM organizations met at a conference in Dallas. Following two days of increasingly vitriolic debate, they formed an organization called Safe Sane Consensual Adults, which two years later merged with the National Leather Association (NLA). The NLA, in turn, popularized the term SSC in all its publications and its Living in Leather convention and helped it win almost universal acceptance by the early 1990s as the key concept that differentiated SM activities from abuse and criminality.
See also
External links
- Essays by David Stein
- SSC vs RACK by Justin Medlin
(This article incorporates text from the Safe, sane, and consensual article in Wipipedia.)
Archivist note:
- Risk-aware consensual kink and RACK vs SSC in wipipedia
- SSC and RACK in BDSMwiki
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Archivist note: yahoo groups is no longer available and was not found in archive.org
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