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As a result, notwithstanding my considerable feminist writing and activism, I live in fear of my "feminist card" being revoked because of my BDSM identity.

Yet, simultaneously, my practice of BDSM has greatly informed my feminist understanding. Rape and consent are both very important feminist issues, and much of the BDSM community obsessively examines sexual consent. The dominant BDSM community "mantra" is "SSC: Safe, Sane, and Consensual." Some people debate whether another "mantra" would be better, but I have never heard of someone removing the "consensual" part. Indeed, the ways many BDSMers think of sexual consent overlap dramatically with the ways that many feminists think of it.

Safewords are a famous and high-profile example of careful BDSM communication tactics. They are specific code words that any participant can use to stop the sexual action at any time. Safewords are important in a context where one partner might want to scream "No!" or "Please don't!" or "Mercy!" with no intention of actually stopping the action.

Safewords serve another, stealthier, but equally important function: they bring home the idea that consent is a continuously changing process. Consent is part of the ongoing sexual negotiation that takes place between two people. Here, BDSM consent ideas overlap heavily with feminist consent ideas. For example, one article by high-profile feminist Jaclyn Friedman pushes back against dominant conceptions of consent by stating that "consent is not a lightswitch." As Friedman writes:

Sexual consent isn't like a lightswitch, which can be either "on," or "off." It's not like there's this one thing called "sex" you can consent to anyhow. "Sex" is an evolving series of actions and interactions. You have to have the enthusiastic consent of your partner for all of them. And even if you have your partner's consent for a particular activity, you have to be prepared for it to change.

Safewords are, effectively, a constant reminder that "you have to be prepared for [consent] to change."

BDSMers and feminists tend to teach explicit, straightforward verbal sexual communication -- in contrast to the seduction community, which typically teaches non-verbal or playfully tacit sexual communication. For example, the seduction community has an extensive array of discussions about how to initiate flirtatious touching, which PUAs refer to as "kino." The seduction community also places a strong emphasis on developing skill at reading a social situation without asking exactly what is going on; if a PUA is good at understanding implicit social signals, he is described as "calibrated."

For BDSMers and feminists, the sexual consent territory continues to overlap after safewords. Huge factions, if not majorities, within both groups have concluded that the best way to encourage consent is not merely to encourage people to understand that they can withdraw consent at any point -- but to encourage open communication and self-knowledge about sex.

Among feminists, an example of this approach is Jaclyn Friedman's brand-new book What You Really, Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety. Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory notes in an interview with Friedman that:

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