Consent withdrawal

The part of consent that actually does the work. An agreement you cannot get out of is not an agreement, and the test of any arrangement is what happens the first time somebody wants to stop.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

What it means

Withdrawing consent means taking back an agreement you previously gave. It happens at three scales. Mid-scene, using a safe word, which stops everything at once. Between scenes, deciding that something you have done before is no longer on the table. And at the level of the whole arrangement, ending it.

All three work the same way. You say so, and it is over. There is no procedure to follow, no notice period, and no requirement to persuade anybody that your reasons are good enough.

In practice

The mechanism is easy. What makes it fail is social cost, which is why I would rather write about that than about the words. A person who is by disposition keen to please, who has spent an evening being told they are doing well, will take considerably more than they want rather than be the one who spoiled things. The safe word was available the whole time. It was just expensive.

So a top has to make it cheap, out loud, before anything starts, in plain words. If you stop this, we stop, and there is no version of that where I am disappointed or where it gets mentioned later. Then it has to be true the one time it is tested, because that occasion sets the price for every occasion afterwards.

For withdrawing from an ongoing arrangement, my advice is to keep it short and not negotiate it in the moment. A sentence is enough. You are allowed to think about it for a week and then say the same sentence again. If you are worried about the reaction, tell somebody else first and arrange to be somewhere else afterwards.

The common misreading

The belief that stopping mid-scene is a failure. It is not, and I would go further: someone who has never used amber with me has not yet given me any evidence that they will. It is a normal piece of running feedback rather than an emergency.

The other error, and the serious one, is believing an agreement binds you. It does not. A contract has no legal force. Rules are not obligations. A partner who says you consented and cannot now change your mind is describing control, and behaviour of that kind can amount to controlling or coercive behaviour under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, an offence in England and Wales.