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"SSC" vs. "RACK"
By Rick Umbaugh
Some history:

Safe, Sane and Consensual ("SSC") is a construction coined by slave david stein, a gay man in NYC and an edge player if there ever was one. He did it to explain to the vanilla world the difference between what we do and abuse. Anyone who uses it for any other reason is using it incorrectly. slave david would agree with whomever said that rules are what people consent to.

I'm going to line out what SSC means:

"Safe" means that all the equipment is checked out to make sure it is functioning properly and all the participants are, if not experienced, at least educated in what they are going to do. This is rather the same thing as making sure that a skydiver knows how to skydive and has a functioning parachute. Any other use of this term is a misuse of this term.

"Sane" means that the participants in the scene understand the difference between fantasy and reality. The definitions of this change over the years. Back when started, using a singletail on a woman was considered rather beyond the pale, but eating shit was considered gross but okay. Neither of these things would have flunked the sane test, but the last story in the first edition of The Leatherman's Handbook has a story about a doctor who takes a mans testicles out of his scrotum, places them in his mouth, then sews them back in. (Okay guys, you can begin reading agian.) This did not and never will pass the sane test, but it's just about the only thing I can think of.

"Consensual" means that everyone in the scene has a reasonable idea of what is
going to happen and has consented to it. I would expand this to the idea that a person has consented to participate in the scene and trusts the Dom(me) to not go beyond the pale. This consent can take many forms, from moment to moment consent, where the sub is allowed, without penelty, to stop the scene to subs giving up their right to withdraw their consent except by leaving the scene.

My objections to Risk Aware Consensual Kink ("RACK") is that there are two concepts that don't work outside the scene itself. "Risk" is a dangerous term to use in the vanilla community as there are people out there who think that we should remove all the risk possible from life, so the idea that one would voluntarily accept risk is alien to them. By using the word "Safe" we are cutting through their neurosis. Lastly, "Kink" is a term that is a red flag for some, who think that "normal", i.e., vanilla, is the only measuring stick to sexual play.



Other items by Rick Umbaugh:
Articles: The Nature of Dominance
Articles: The Art of S/m
Articles: CHAINS
Stories: The Girl on the Beach

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