Kink.com has introduced a set of standardized documents intended to clarify consent during porn shoots. The BDSM website has been on a mission in recent years to improve consent negotiations on its own sets, and it’s now sharing these consent checklists publicly in the hope that other companies and producers will use them to protect themselves and their performers.
The sites’ new landing page specifies, “The documents we’ve published are not dictums, nor legal documents, but starting points for you to customize, adjust, and use to safely create adult content.”
With no regulatory body in place to police on-set practices, the adult industry has experienced a number of high-profile consent violations in recent years, starting with James Deen’s infamous outing as an alleged serial consent violator about four years ago, and continuing through last year’s allegations by Raven Alexis while on a Black Payback set.
Kink.com’s CEO, Alison Boden, told Jezebel, “In many cases, producers aren’t purposely pushing performers’ boundaries, they simply don’t have adequate resources, or they haven’t thought about the issues…We can’t do anything about people who are willfully violating someone’s consent, or who simply don’t care. But most people want to do the right thing and we want to do what we can to help.”
So, the Kink.com team got to work turning their own consent protocols into an easily reproducible, customizable series of documents for general use across the industry.
The basic checklist details a variety of sexual acts, whether a performer will be performing or receiving them, the level of intensity permissible, fluid exchange protocols, and safewords. Its BDSM-specific checklists are broken down into “dominant” and “submissive” checklists, which cover specific kink practices, physical sensitivity, marks on skin, and more. And the “Performer Rights and Responsibilities” document addresses issues around consent, and reporting practices for violations.
We’d love to see these documents – and others like them – used on adult sets as a way to keep performers safe. We believe that a safe, consensual porn scene is always better than one where consent is unclear. What do you think?
