There is a document in my Notes app right now entitled “Porn + things to do.” It is exactly what it sounds like.
Sometimes at night lately, after Matt and I have watched an old Cary Grant movie or caught up on Stephen Colbert or laughed our asses off at a Zoom improv show, they’ve been assigning me the following task: pick 3-5 porn scenes for us to watch together, and make a list of 3-5 sex/kink activities I’d be open to doing afterward.
This borrows from the concept of a “palette of permission,” coined by kink educator Sinclair Sexsmith, which has been enormously influential to how I think about consent. There are always whiny people on the internet complaining that “consent culture” is annoying because you have to explicitly, verbally ask permission for each individual sexual activity you try to do nowadays. But I just don’t think that’s most people’s experience, or expectation, of consent. There are ways to be clear without being painfully explicit, there are ways to check in without stopping altogether, there are ways to pre-plan what you want to do together without it feeling like a checklist on a clipboard at a board meeting. Having a palette of permission is one such way.
There are some things that come up on my lists a lot – oral, dildos, impact play – because I’m almost always up for them. And there are also things that change from day to day, odder things I crave only at particular times, like financial domination, scratching, or pressure-wave clitoral stimulators. It’s nice to be able to reflect, each evening, on what my body is telling me it wants. Matt doesn’t have to do all the things on the list, but the list is a palette of shades they can choose from when they’re painting a picture for us both to enjoy.