Saturday, October 18, 2014

Asking The Right Questions

A Story

A hypnotist stands at the front of the class.
"Raise your hand if you've never been hypnotized," he says.
A woman in a corset and combat boots is the only person to raise her hand. She is sitting with her submissive at the back of the room.
"Wonderful," says the hypnotist. "Would you like to be hypnotized?"
"Uh. Sure." She goes to the front of the room and has a terrible experience that she didn't want in the first place. She's uncomfortable the entire time, and goes back to her sub afterwards unhappy and embarrassed.


What happened? He got consent. He asked if she wanted to be hypnotized, and she said yes. What went wrong?
No. It's not working.


Unfortunately, he asked the wrong question. He asked, "Would you like to be hypnotized?" As it so happens, this woman did want to be hypnotized. The questions he did not ask, however, were...

  • Would you like to be hypnotized by me?
  • Would you like to be hypnotized now?
    and
  • Would you like to be hypnotized in front of all these people?
The answers for all three of those questions were no. The wrong question combined with the social pressure of a classroom of people and a hypnotist asking you to be hypnotized led to a failure of consent.

How do we improve our consent language?

Ask the right questions and ask them the right way. Here are some ways to do that.


  • Use neutral language
    Ask "can you tell me about what just happened?" when checking in. Or, "how would you feel about me hypnotizing you today?"Do not ask leading questions like "is this something that happened in your past life?" 
  • Be specific
    Ask all of the questions, even if the answer to one implies the answer to another. "So, you are interested in doing rope. I see that you're wearing a nice dress and doing rope on your torso or legs would require you to take off your dress. How do you feel about taking that off here? Would you like to do that, or just do rope on your wrists, or we can find something else to do?"
  • Ask questions with more than one option of equal weight
    Give more than one option. "Would you like to be hypnotized, or shall I see if I can find another volunteer." 
  • Hesitant "yes" means, "not today. Ask again next time."
    If you ask a question and someone says they need to think about it, or seems hesitant with their "yes," ask again another time and pick a different thing to do. Play with enthusiastic yes consent only. It is possible that the person just needed a minute to think about their response, but hesitance can be a lot of other things, too. Take it off the table and try again next time.
  • Don't require a "no" to decline.
    "No" can be hard, especially for people of a gender conditioned by society to be polite and obliging. Ask questions that don't require a "no" to decline. For example, "let me know if you want to play" works really well. All it requires for a decline is "thanks," and then silence, whereas a yes is still "ooh, sure! That sounds like fun!"
You are a star.


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