439 - We Have All Violated Consent - Listener Q&A with Kitty Stryker Pt 1
Welcome back, Kitty!
Kitty Stryker, who has been working on defining and creating a consent culture for over 13 years, has rejoined us today to help answer some listener questions. Kitty has defined and created consent culture through her writing, workshops, and website consentculture.com. She's the editor of "Ask: Building Consent Culture," author of "Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook," and is especially interested in bringing conversations about consent out of the bedroom into everyday life. In her copious free time, Kitty works as a street medic for direct actions, plays Dungeons and Dragons, volunteers at the local animal shelter, and cares for her two cats. She identifies as queer, asexual, sober, anarchist, and femme. She was last on Multiamory back in 2018.
The main discussion we have today during this episode lumps several listener questions together that all had a similar theme: tricky consent situations:
One recurring theme was retroactive realization that a situation was non-consensual. Many people asked about situations where someone realized after an encounter, sometimes days later or sometimes years later, that their consent had been violated by someone else. Maybe they had frozen up during the encounter and couldn’t say no, maybe the other person hadn’t even used any physical force or violence.
Another recurring theme was both parties being absolutely mortified once this came to light.
It seems like no one knows how to resolve or rectify these situations. Is it automatic no contact and expulsion of the perpetrator? For the person whose consent was violated, can it be healing to reach out to the other person? Or what about the reverse, when someone realizes after the fact they may have crossed a line?
Kitty helps us answer these questions today with her breadth and knowledge of consent culture. Find more about her on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Patreon.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are diving into an amazing conversation with Kitty Stryker about consent and difficult consent questions. We did not intend this, but there was so much amazing content in this that we decided to make this into a two-part episode so that we could get to as many of the listener questions as possible. We had some really great questions from our audience who submitted for this, as well as some great conversation with Kitty.
Kitty Stryker has been working on defining and creating a consent culture for over 13 years through her writing, workshops, and website consentculture.com. She's the editor of Ask: Building Consent Culture, the author of Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook, and is especially interested in bringing conversations about consent out of the bedroom and into everyday life. Kitty, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kitty: Yes, thank you so much for having me. It's been a while.
Jase: Yes.
Kitty: Nice to meet you.
Emily: It has indeed.
Dedeker: Yes we were just talking about ahead of time. Episode 135 was when we last had Kitty on the show to talk about and that was around the time that Ask was first coming out back in 2018, 2017 or so. It's really wonderful to have you back here.
Kitty: My first child.
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Jase: Yes. Love it. Also, for those of you listening at home, if you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, you can check out our book, Multiamory Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold. Alternatively, the first nine episodes of our podcast also cover some of those tools, so you can go check those out today.
Dedeker: I want to dive in just because it has been six or seven years in between the first baby coming out and the workbook baby coming out. I am fascinated to know from your perspective, how have you watched the public discourse on consent shift or change positively or negatively over the past few years?
Kitty: Oh boy. Well, unfortunately, one of the things I think I've noticed a lot is the desire for punitive action went from being a very niche conversation into a larger conversation, so a lot of conversations about cancel culture and call-out culture, which had been created by Black folks mostly on Twitter to talk about how to hold each other accountable within the community, got trickled out to everyone else, and we adopted it with not the best intentions I think. I feel like in a way it's important for us to talk about different strategies for dealing with consent violations and sometimes that does include things like withdrawing from somebody and isolating them from the community.
I also understand this pushing back against that, that we've seen, including from a lot of consent educators, which are like, "No, no, that's never appropriate." I fall somewhere in the middle. I think that sometimes that is the best option, but I also see it used too often, especially against marginalized people. It's mostly effectively used against trans women, Black men, disabled people, and I just got to be suspicious of that. That doesn't seem like using it properly to me. That's one thing I've noticed that I have mixed feelings about. I think it's good that we're having conversations about it, but I still think nuance is really not present in so many of those conversations.
Emily: Regarding that nuance. When we see people getting canceled for something that was said 10 years prior or things like that, that to me feels a little murky and like, wait a minute, should we really be getting upset at this person for the thing that they said back then, the place we were in history in the past, the person that person was back then, all of those things. What would you say for things like that that are occurring and the cancellations that are occurring because of stuff said in the past?
Kitty: I think for me, I care a lot about patterns of behavior. For me, a tweet here, or even 5 tweets 10 years ago, I don't see that as a pattern of behavior. Now, if those tweets are included in current behaviors, then I can see there being a reason to include them because now you're establishing an ongoing pattern of attitude, of potential to cause harm, of maybe being defensive when people brought this up then I can understand. So often it's not really about that, and it's not about people learning. It's about punishing them.
Dedeker: Yes.
Kitty: I am not a cop, and I don't wish to be a cop, so that's not really my department. However, that said, I've also been very frustrated with some people who speak very bluntly about cancel culture and how cancel culture is always bad. So often these people are people who are saying these things because someone close to them has had consequences for their behavior, and so it's like, "Well, you're a little bit biased, aren't you?"
I want to shout out Disrupting the Bystander by A.V. Flox who's a fantastic writer. That book in particular really goes into how to address situations where one of your friends is being called out, and how to support them while also holding them accountable, which I think is a really complicated thing to figure out. I don't think there's a lot of models for that.
Dedekar: Have you seen any changes in the opposite direction? Things that you feel positively about as you've been in this space for the past few years?
Kitty: I think the fact that I'm seeing more conversations about consent outside of sex is really positive and outside of physical touch. I think that those conversations are important, but I do think for a very long time, consent as a thing between sexual partners has been a huge focus with maybe a dip into romantic partnership and maybe a dip into parent-child relationships. Outside of that, it's not really thought about. I'm glad that we're starting to talk about that more as we talk about the writer's strike, for example.
I think talking about unions, talking about collective actions more generally, talking about accountability in other areas that aren't just around sexuality, is hugely important because that's where we learn all these lessons first. That's where the patterns start to get established. That's where I'm fixated at the moment.
Dedeker: I see. Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're pointing out the fact that when we first learn about consent, and not in the brain sense of learning about consent, the definition of consent,= but literally learning the social scripts around consent, that tends to happen in these non-sexual, non-physical touch context when we're younger. Is that what you're saying?
Kitty: I think they do. I think we don't call it consent. We're starting to, but when we talk about sharing, when we talk about, "Oh, well you've gotten to play with this for a while now it's time to let somebody else play with it." When we talk about, "You can't take your pants off in the grocery store." These are conversations about consent and negotiating not just your own consent, but the consent of other people.
It's just we don't often talk about that being consent, like, "Do you consent to this?" It's more of a what is and isn't appropriate. I wish we talked more about it as a consent thing and actually named it as that because I think that that then opens us up to understanding those things more when it comes to asexual or romantic context later on.
Jase: Yes. It makes me think of how just the word consent, I think is part of the obstacle there because we tend to think of consent in a legalistic way. I say we as in the average person because that's when it tends to get presented. It's either I'm consenting to some terms of an agreement, which is some sort of a contract type thing, or we talk about consent in terms of punitive action, or someone did this thing which violated consent and therefore they are a bad person and should be destroyed. That's the way consent is presented.
I know when we've talked about this in the past on this show, we've tried to get home this idea that consent is this empowering thing that makes our relationships with each other better and that wanting to be good at respecting other people's consent and communicating your own is this fun, cool thing that makes your relationships and your communication better and nicer, but I think that's not the connotation most people have with it. It's this, "Oh, consent is this. Okay, I've got to figure out exactly what the rules are. It seems like they keep changing every day, but as long as I do or don't follow these, I know if I'm a good or bad person."
Kitty: I think that's a huge problem. I would argue that's the stem of so many of the issues that we see. We see people wanting to learn the rules so they could figure out how to follow the rules technically but not in spirit, or trying to figure out the rules so they could figure out, did this person break them? There's not a lot of conversation about bending. Also, they're not really rules. They're guidelines at best, and everybody has different ones. I think there is a very real fear of being a bad person and being seen as a bad person and not being able to escape that.
Once you have been deemed a consent violator, that's it. You're ruined. I try really hard to combat that by saying everybody violates consent all the time. We have a society built on violating each other's consent. Bosses have demanded that I come into work on days that are not my day to work all the time with the risk of me losing my job. That is a violation of my consent and arguably coercion, but there it is. That's part of what being in a job is. There's a lot of conversations of like, "Well, if you stay at the job, are you consenting? Is that an overarching consent? Is that then okay for you to have this financial coercion?"
I don't know. I think it's really complicated. I don't think that there is a simple answer. I think that probably one of the reasons why my consent work is the more controversial and maybe less popular than some of the other consent writers is because I'm like, "I don't have answers for you and I'm not an expert." I think about this a lot. I'm a philosopher of consent, but a lot of the work that I do is about finding those nuances and saying, "Okay, how can we have a little bit more grace for ourselves and for each other while also holding each other accountable in a way that is tough love, that encourages us to grow so that we don't stagnate."
I think I say in the book something about how exciting to learn how to hurt each other less. That's really the attitude that I want to bring to this. When I say everyone has violated consent at some point, it's not to be like, "We all have original sin." It's more to say, "It's okay. Calm down a little bit." Yes, there are situations where it happened not in good faith. Honestly, we've probably all violated someone's consent in some way that wasn't entirely in good faith too. A lot of manipulation is that. I just want people to feel it's okay to be humble. I want to teach people, it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to mess up, and you should be trying constantly to do better tomorrow than you did today.
That's something we can all learn from. That doesn't mean that any of us need to be locked up. I also leave some space that sometimes that is the only thing you can do. I don't like it. I am a prison abolitionist, but right now, we don't have close enough communities to have that protective framework that we would need for that level of transformative or restorative justice. Until we have that, the best thing we can do is learn how to control our own behavior, and by doing that, modeling that for everybody else.
Emily: I love that. That's so wonderful, and just, I appreciate, I think on this show we talk a lot about there isn't just these black and white things out there. So much of it really does lie in the middle, and that that's what you're advocating for is huge and just refreshing because it's so often not what gets the Instagram likes and stuff. I really appreciate you saying that.
Kitty: It's a lot scarier because once you start to say, "Oh, yes." One of the stories that I tend to tell is, I remember there was a time at Burning Man, that's how the best stories start, I had taken acid and I had wandered off. My boyfriend at the time was napping in the tent. I went to go watch a movie or something at Bad Idea Theater. I came back and for whatever reason I just had in my head, I want to jerk this person off right now. He woke up and was like, "Oh God, am I like violating you because you're on a substance and I'm not?" Also like, "Wait, what's happening?" I just said something like, "Shh, cows don't talk." Which was not okay. It's like a response to this, very honest concern.
I'm grateful he and I were able to talk about it. That was a big learning moment for me because, yes, if the genders had been reversed, that would've absolutely societally been seen as unacceptable, and it was unacceptable. I'm glad that we were able to come at it with a sense of humor and good faith, but at the end of the day, that's a sexual violation. That was something that taught me, "Okay, if I'm going to be doing substances, I need to be a lot more careful about how I'm interacting with people, and I need to have some things in place so that that thing doesn't happen again."
It's one of those stories that's funny until you really think about it go, "Oh, actually, yes. Oh." I want to tell those stories because I want to say, "Look, I have been researching this stuff for a long time and these things still can happen to me. It's really important to stay humble." That is an area that I wish more sex educators in general were more aware of. I think that, not to go off on my usual anarchist rant, but in a capitalist society, we reward people for saying that they are experts, and those experts can never falter. They can never fail because as soon as you fail even a little bit, then you fall from grace and that's it. That's the end of your career.
Obviously, that creates a dynamic where it's not that those people aren't going to fail, but they're very invested in silencing people when they do. I don't want to live in that world. I'd much rather live in a world where we're all like, "Hey, we all up fuck up sometimes." That's a safer world to me.
Dedeker: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing that story because I think it's such a good example to show how if you write that situation, that story down on paper and try to feed it into the consent computer bot, or try to feed it into the court of public opinion, it's going to gum up the works. It's not going to be a clear answer of, well, this was the bad guy and this was the good guy, as it were, or this is the way this situation should have been rectified. You're totally right. There's capacity in all of us for these things.
It reminds me of, we just recorded an episode on "Toxic Behavior" and diving into what are the things that we tend to label as toxic behavior and what are the reasons people might turn towards that toxic behavior and have we done this toxic behavior? It falls on that same spectrum that-
Kitty: Yes. For sure.
Dedeker: -when you're inside yourself, whether you're a layperson or someone who's earning money as an expert, it gets so murky. It's so hard to see your own behavior, especially if there's a financial incentive, not just to silence anyone who might be criticizing you, but also to silence yourself, to justify to yourself why you did this behavior.
It's easy because you have all the information in your head of what was in your heart and brain or what substances you were on when it happened. Yes, I really appreciate you sharing those stories and being so vulnerable because I think it does help. It does help for people to know these things.
Kitty: I think it's helpful to say, "Look, I am very vulnerable about the ways in which I have messed up, and I'm still a consent educator. I'm still writing workbooks, and I'm constantly learning." I think it'd be really nice if we respected people more for acknowledging that their work's in progress. I think in the age of Instagram influencers and stuff, there is this sense of needing to have the right answer and not just a right answer, but you are the right answer so that people come to you and not to other people. It just really ruins critical thinking skills as far as I'm concerned. I really want people to decide what's right for them, not what I think is right for them. I don't know them.
Dedeker: It's true that we have often come to the conclusion if we are a little more decisive and punchy, we probably have many more Instagram likes ourselves, but could we live with ourselves?
Kitty: That's the question, is it ethical?
Jase: All right.
Emily: Exactly.
Kitty: It would be more successful, but is it ethical? I have that conversation with myself all the time.
Dedeker: Briefly before we dive into our listener questions today, tell us about the new workbook.
Kitty: I wrote a workbook called Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook. It's 28 prompts, the idea being, you could do it in a month. It would be a really intense month if you did that. It was an intense month for me writing it. The idea is to look at what have you learned about consent, what stories were you brought up with, what was your family like, your environment like, what's your culture like around consent, what were some positive things that you learned from that, what were some maybe negative things that you've learned or had to unlearn, what did that look like? Really starting that consent conversation in the first week with internalized navel-gazing.
Then we go from there to you and your close relationships, which can mean your lovers but can also mean your family, can mean your kids, can mean your best friend. People who you are in contact with on a more intimate basis, emotionally, directly, that's the second week. The third week expands a little bit more into the community and consented interactions within activism or tabletop RPGs or various institutions. Then I bring it all back to internal navel gazing again of like, "Let's look back at what you thought when you started this workbook. Has anything shaken loose for you? How are you feeling about this? What are some things you might try differently?"
I interviewed a bunch of different people. It has anecdotes that illustrate the questions that I'm posing. That was really important to me because as with the first book, I wanted to make sure that my voice, that of a white cis woman, was not the voice of consent. I wanted to say, "Look, there are people in here who their anecdotes are things I agree with, but it's important for you to see how different people interact with these things and interface with them so that you can better make your own decisions."
Jase: Awesome. That's great. Now it's time to dive into some conversation about common consent concerns and questions that listeners brought to us specifically for this episode. Before we do that, we want to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show and keep this content coming to everyone out there for free every week. That is to just take a moment, check out our sponsors. If any seem interesting to you, go visit them, use our promo codes. It does directly help support our show. If you're able, you can support us at multiamory.com/join. Let's get to some listener questions now, shall we?
Emily: Let's do it.
Jase: All right. Quick disclaimer here. The four of us on this show have spent a lot of time studying healthy relationship, communication, and consent, in the case of Kitty, but we are not perfect, we're not experts, and we're also not mind readers. Our advice and comments here is based solely on the limited information that we have about these situations, so take it with a grain of salt, of course.
Emily: Every situation out there, whether it's these ones that we're going to be talking about today or your own unique situation, it's your own. We encourage you to use your own judgment and seek professional help if needed. Ultimately, you're the only true expert in your own life and feelings and your decisions are your own.
Dedeker: We got a lot of really great questions. Sorry that we can't get to everybody's questions. A lot of these questions have been edited for clarity, but we do have access to the full questions in case we need any context. Last time we did a Q&A episode, we did say that if you had a clever sign-off name, we would bump you up in the queue. There were a lot of people who got the assignment and made a clever sign-off.
I've tried to prioritize your questions as much as I can. Some of your questions, even though the sign-off was great, were not necessarily a great fit for this episode. My apologies, but please, we love the sign-offs. Please keep them coming. I'm going to dive in with question number one. Question number one is actually about 20 different questions.
Kitty: That's usually the case.
Dedeker: Yes, because we got a lot of repeat questions. I'm calling this category consent dilemma questions or tricky consent situations. There were a couple of recurring themes. I identified two recurring themes in a lot of these questions. One recurring theme was someone having a retroactive realization after the fact that an interaction was non-consensual. A lot of people asked about these situations where someone has realized after an encounter, maybe days later, sometimes a year later, sometimes years later, that their consent had been violated by someone else.
Maybe it was they realized that they were in a state of freeze during the interaction. They couldn't say no, or maybe it was tricky because the other person hadn't used any physical force or violence or maybe overt manipulation in that way. That was one recurring theme.
Then the other recurring theme in these questions was both parties being absolutely mortified once this came to light. I don't mean just the person whose consent was violated, wakes up one day and realizes that happened and they're mortified by it, but also this happening on the "perpetrator side," someone realizing years later, "Oh my God, I think I did something non-consensual. I think I crossed a line here, and I'm horrified." It seems no one knows how to resolve or rectify these situations. Is it okay automatically have to go no contact and expel this person from my life or from my community the person who realizes that their consent was violated after the fact?
Is it good? Is it appropriate? Is it healing to reach out to the other person? What about the reverse? If you realized, "Oh my God, I think I maybe did something non-consensual. Should I reach out to them? Should I apologize? Should I let it go? I don't know." This is what I mean by it's 20 different questions on top of 20 different questions, but anywhere in that spaghetti you want to jump in, I think it's a good place to jump in.
Kitty: I think this is one of those areas that is really hard. Again, we live in a culture where we violate our own consent all the time. That was one of the things that I really cared about bringing up in the workbook was that we aren't really encouraged to think about what we want. We are encouraged to think about how we can please others, or how we can win in a situation. There's this competition that taints interactions. I think this happens a lot. I've thought about situations in my life. I was like, "Yes, I don't know that my consent was 100% there," but then also, there's been situations like that where I didn't feel violated afterwards."
I could recognize like, "Yes, my consent was questionable, or that was that was murky, but I feel fine." There are situations where I 100% know that my consent was not present, but I also don't feel traumatized by it. I think that that-- do you have trauma around it? Maybe first work on that. Before you start thinking about your responsibility to the community or to another person in talking to them about it that, number one, figure out what you need to help yourself feel safe right now. That's also true if you think that you may have done perpetration of some kind to somebody else. I think focus on like, "Okay, let me sit with this. Let me have the feelings that I'm going to have about it."
If you are correct, and you've crossed somebody's consent, the last thing they need is to make you feel better about it. Sort that out first and then you could go to that person and talk to them about it, but have that be something that you bring up in therapy. Maybe talk to other people about, "I feel bad about this, and I would like to figure out not how to feel better, but how to be a better person, how to take this and learn from it." I think from the perspective of someone whose consent has been violated, I think sitting with, "Wow, okay, I froze, I had a really hard time saying no in that moment."
Why is that? How can I use this information to learn some better tools to communicate with partners in the future so that I know that if a violation happens, it is in bad faith? I feel that's a really difficult part of this is, I think, so many situations I hear about, violations happen, but everybody is acting in good faith and doing the best they can. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes you step on somebody's foot even when you didn't mean to. That is a very different situation than somebody stamped on my foot repeatedly while I told them not to, or somebody stamped on my foot, it was clear they wanted to cause harm even if I didn't pull away.
I think that those feel very different. Sitting and being in your body and saying, "How do my guts feel? How does my skin feel when I think about this? Does this make me afraid? Do I feel anxious?" Learning how to sit in that, I think, and tell yourself that, "Yes, that happened and that sucks. You are out of that right now, and here are some ways that you can take care of yourself," I think that has to be the first step.
Emily: I wanted to bring up the patterns that you spoke about before, that if there is a pattern of the violation of consent, and you found going back in your mind and realizing, "Okay, that thing that happened to me was part of a pattern," I feel like sometimes that can lead to more, "Okay, perhaps I need to talk about this in therapy or perhaps I need to even go so far as to cut that person out of my life to a degree."
I'm thinking about, I was in a situation with my half-brother who's much older than I am. There was a pattern of strangeness that ended in, basically, him touching me in a really, really inappropriate way when he was very drunk. I don't really speak to him much anymore and haven't in years. I feel like that was the right decision for me, even though it was really challenging. Again, it was because I had realized there was a pattern of those things happening, and even if I did speak to him about it specifically and say, "This is not okay," I didn't know that that would necessarily change.
I think questioning instances like this in terms of how you're going to continue to interact with this person or not, I think those things have to be looked at, is it worth it to me to even go there and try to discuss with them? "Hey, you did this thing to me in the past. I'm now realizing it was really challenging for me, and maybe I want to fix that, or I want us to come to some understanding for future interactions." Maybe that's not even going to be a thing or a place you want to go to, and I think that's okay.
Kitty: Yes, absolutely. I think callouts are an area-- callouts and call-ins, I think are very similar to me in my understanding because they involve being invested in the other person's growth. There are people that you don't feel invested in, and that's fine. You can't be that for everybody. If someone has shown that they aren't interested in growing, or they're not invested in growing with you, yes, don't bother. I think that something that I've learned for myself is that sometimes, especially when I've gone through a breakup, my friends are very quick to see patterns where patterns may or may not actually be.
That is another thing to be wary of without actually invalidating your experiences. I think that can be very, very complicated. I had a bad breakup. I had an ex-boyfriend who told me I was murdering my cat because I put my cat to sleep when he was very, very sick. I broke up with him for this. No regrets. I was processing our breakup texts and stuff with my friends and my friends were like, "Oh, well, he's clearly a narcissist," because they saw behaviors that to them said narcissism. I was like, "Well." As somebody who focuses a lot on mental health stigma and especially personality disorders and how often they're misprescribed to people when you're not a professional, I'm very hesitant to say that.
I don't think that's true. I don't even identify his behavior as abusive. It may have been abusive to someone else. For me, I didn't see it as abusive. I saw it as him attempting to control me and failing. Maybe because I didn't feel broken up about it, I didn't feel abused by it, but I could see how my friends and their experiences, they saw patterns that for me weren't patterns. I identified very different patterns. I saw a pattern where this was a person who really struggled with death, whose mother had died when he was very young, and he didn't respond well when friends of mine had died, when my grandmother died. My cat dying was a last straw.
I can understand that without forgiving him. I don't need to forgive him. I'm not invested in him anymore. I'm not invested in his growth or his evolution. All that said, I was approached a week ago, I think, by a bunch of his exes who are like, "We need your help to understand some of the patterns of behavior that we're experiencing." I was like, "Here's a breakup journal that I wrote when I was going through it four years ago. Here, read that, and you might see things that you recognize in there. Understand that not all of the baggage there is yours to take on. Maybe you're invested in helping him understand how these things hurt other people, and maybe you're not, and either way is fine."
Yes, it was a really interesting turning point for me to be like, "I don't need him to be a monster. I am just not invested in him as long as he is not invested in learning these things." If he's not interested in being accountable, I'm not going to waste my time trying to hold him accountable. It's complicated though, right?
Dedeker: It is complicated, but I'm really glad that we ended up at this place because I think that that actually really connects to a piece of this spaghetti pile of many different questions, which it brings up that question of, do I need to make someone a monster in order for myself to feel healed? Do I need to find some reason or find a label? Do I need to make him a narcissist in order for me to feel like my hurt feelings are justified and therefore I can heal? Or, do I need to get super invested in this person's growth and their growing is directly attached to me healing? Like, "I can't heal unless I see them growing and changing."
I think that is tied to some of the questions that people asked about, "Oh my goodness, if I realize someone crossed a line, do I need to reach out to them? Is that the only way that I can heal?" or, if you're on the other side of it, "Is the only way I can heal this is if I try to make it right and try to get this other person to make me feel better?" I think it does obscure the fact that so much of our healing, fortunately or unfortunately, there's so much of our healing that needs to happen on our own. There is some healing that can happen in community, there is some healing that can happen relationally, between us and the other person, but largely so much of our healing is our own.
We can mistake making the other person a monster or getting super invested in how they change or whether or not they're going to do better of confusing that with, "Oh, that's what's going to be healing for me." This is not new. This is foundational to a lot of transformative justice theory of realizing that punitive action does not equal healing and restitution. I think it's interesting because I do think there's an undercurrent of that here.
Kitty: Yes. Well, as you're saying that it made me think a lot. I don't get along well with 12 steps. I'm in recovery, but I don't get along well with 12 steps in a lot of ways. I do think there's an interesting lesson in 12 steps where that making your apologies is the 8th step. You're getting towards the end of your steps. You've done a lot of work before you do that. I think that there is something really important about that. Now, I do have issues with the way that 12 steps encourages you to feel a lot of shame. I don't think that's healthy, but whatever. There's other sobriety things out there.
I do think it's really important to recognize, yes, you can do that work even when you've harmed other people. You will be in a better place to apologize when you can say, "I know what I did wrong. Here is what I should have done instead, and here's what I'm doing for the future." Honestly, the other person, whether they respond to your apology or not, they will have a little bit more of a sense of your investment when, A, you don't demand a response from them, when it's not about that. B, when you can show that you are showing a pattern of fixing these behaviors.
For myself, I was like, "I don't want to be doing hallucinogens with a sexual partner. I don't think that's a good idea for me. I think I need to be with somebody who is on the same vibe as me, who is my compatriot/handler, and we're doing that for each other. I think that is a better idea for me than a situation that creates a weird sexual dynamic that could get messy really fast. Also, I was on a substance, and if he had taken it in a direction I didn't want, that would have been even more complicated. I think that these things are really hard, and I think that you might try a type of restitution or you might try something and it doesn't work.
Someone might not forgive you. Someone might not care that they hurt you. The only person you can control is yourself. That is maybe the thing I tell myself in my sobriety/recovery for being an activist all the time, "The only person I have control over is myself." To really sit with that means I have to let go of expectations for other people's behavior. I can decide if I want to engage with them and the behaviors that they do, but I can't make them do anything. That is aggravating and also so freeing. Oh, my God. I sleep so much better now.
Jase: I just want to come back a little bit to the conversation about what you can learn from these kinds of realizations, and just to also rope in a little bit of my personal story with this that I had an experience back in 2018, or something like that, of having my consent violated and being very upset about it, but in this very, like, I froze kind of way. Even a fawning kind of way, of looking back, I'm like, "Fuck." I'm smiling a lot during this even though I was deeply uncomfortable and upset by this. Two things.
One, I wasn't very good at proactively dealing with the emotional traumatic part of all of that, and that also the few times that I did try to reach out to professionals about it, I found that they were not very helpful. I think there's a whole other, maybe, field of some complication here when it comes to gender and stuff like that complicated things further. In thinking about what you're talking about, these different things, I feel like I've gone through all of these phases. The first is, I want this person to be punished. I want this person to be kicked off of couch surfing. That's how this came to be. I want them to be punished by them, and they were completely non-responsive and did nothing about it.
I'm really mad about it, and I'm upset about it. Then also it led to, again, thinking about my behavior and how-- His reaction was to be mad at me for accusing him of this and that I'm the bad guy. Then thinking about it through and seeing as much as I hate it, being like, "Yes, I can also see this from his point of view," and that clicked into focus, "Oh, my God, what about all of these times where I've probably been to him in this situation, to varying degrees of pressuring rather than any physical or threat or direct, like you said, no and I'm saying yes," kind of thing. It's all that subtle other stuff that you've been talking about.
Kitty: The implication.
Jase: Yes, all of that, or the people-pleasing, or the power dynamic that you're not aware of. All those things. It led to, I would say, several years of having a very hard time coming to terms with all of that, of the baggage around consent from myself, realizing, "Oh, God. This is so much more pervasive than I thought it was." These invisible power dynamics that we're not aware of.
Also, at the same time, weirdly, having more sympathy for him and situations but then also being mad about it and upset about it, and upset that I was hurt, and that no one took me seriously, and no one cared about how I felt. Everyone instead was focused on these other things, and it was just, "Boy." Even thinking about it now, I'm still emotional about this roller coaster that I was on for several years after that. It's very validating to hear you talk about all of this, and I'm realizing now I should have gone to you and paid you for coaching because I think that would have been really helpful.
Kitty: You still can.
Jase: There you go. Maybe I still will.
Kitty: I think I've been a-- counselor isn't really the right word. I hate the idea that I'm a life coach because I really urg.
Dedeker: I feel you. I feel you. Dirty term. Really dirty term.
Kitty: It's just there are so many of them that are so predatory, and that's not my jam at all, but I've been that person for a lot of guys in particular who are just like, "I thought I knew about all of this, and I didn't know." There are so many triggers, and tripwires everywhere that I'm just trying to navigate. I've heard a guy be like, "Well, what am I supposed to do?" I have to admit, I've been asexual now for like four years. Doing consent culture broke me. It is hard work, and it is deeply difficult work. I feel like I'm better able to do it because I've abstained from relationships for a while in order to better hone my instincts and my understanding of being able to see red flags.
That's not practical for a lot of people. I can't honestly say if I'm asexual now because of the trauma or because I always was and I got traumatized because I was putting myself through it anyway, I don't know. My therapist says it doesn't matter, which is fine. I guess that's fine, but I do think that there's also this sense that we have to be always healing. This is something that you have to get better from, and sometimes you're just going to be wounded. That's just going to be there until it doesn't need to be anymore. I don't think you can force that kind of stuff, either.
You can give it the best space to grow, but you also have to let it have that space to either it's going to blossom, or it's not. I think that that is really interesting because that speaks a lot, for example, to the whole walk-it-off attitude that we have when you get injured, or like, "Oh, you feel sick? Well, go into work anyway. Push through it." I think we are like that with our emotions just as much as we're like that about physical stuff, like, "Oh, you feel tired, don't go to sleep. Take lots of caffeine." We're constantly pushing through our discomfort.
This is the kind of thing that I want to talk about when it comes to violating our own consent, where we-- A lot of the reason why I drank was because I felt uncomfortable, and it never occurred to me, I could just leave. If I don't want to be at this party, I could just leave. Now that I do that, I don't need the alcohol. It was that simple for me. It's not to say that it's that simple for everybody. I think that I am in a very luxurious position of being raised as a queer person by extremely accepting parents who were second-wave feminists who then became third-wave feminists through raising me, who took me to march outside of abortion clinics when I was five.
I had the best possible container to think about this stuff in a lot of different ways. I also want to acknowledge that because I have had all of that, I don't expect everybody to have all of that, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who find it really difficult, because it's difficult for me even with this ideal container.
Jase: This has been fantastic so far, and we can't wait to continue this conversation with you next week, Kitty, to get to more of these questions from our listeners because I think this is a topic that people just really crave these answers. It's something we're taught as so important and yet we're not taught a lot of good tools for how to actually apply this in a healthy way in our lives. It's like we talked about at the top, people are all looking for these black and white rules or how to decide if someone's a good or bad person.
Clearly, we've seen already just with one question out of the several that we got. I guess that was several questions combined into one, but there's so much here and I'm really excited for us to continue that. Kitty, before we wrap up for today, could you tell us where can listeners find your book, all the content that you make as well as your new workbooks, all of that?
Kitty: Yes. I'm pretty easy to find. I'm Kitty Stryker on most social media. Instagram I think @Kitty_Stryker, because Instagram kicked me off for showing my nipples years back, and I am no longer on Twitter. Twitter banned me for impersonating Libs on TikTok.
Dedeker: Oh boy.
Kitty: I'm on Bluesky, I'm on Post, I'm on Medium, I'm on Facebook. There's an officially Kitty Stryker Facebook page to follow the various podcasts I'm on, books that I've written. I also have a website, kittystryker.com, that desperately needs to be updated, but I'll get to it one day. You could find a lot of my projects and stuff there. Then if you're looking for my books, there by Thornapple Press and you can find them on Amazon. You can find them on Thriftbooks. I don't mind.
They're also available at Firestorm Cooperative, which is a bookstore that I'm going to be doing a book club/community workshop thing. We're basically going to go over one question per week from Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook and do it as a group. That should be really exciting. I don't know how that's going to work, but you can come find out with me. It'll be Sundays from September 10th, I think, until October 1st. I want to say that's at 11:00 AM Pacific, and it's free. You can find out more information about that on Facebook. You can also find it on Firestorm's website.
I have a new workbook that should be coming out in April that's going to be called, Say More: Consent Conversations for Teens. It was originally going to just be a really quick little reworking of ask yourself but with more teenage-focused scenarios. I realized I had to rip the whole book apart and start fresh because the way that I talk about this stuff with teens is a little bit different from the way that I talk about it with adults. Also, it's very similar in some ways. I formatted that one where teens actually proposed the questions.
Dedeker: Oh, nice. Wow.
Kitty: I answer questions that teens gave and then I give some questions back to them. I talk about complicated stuff like, is it non-consensual if they said yes but they didn't mean it? Simple, easy questions like that. While it is focused towards teens, I think it'll probably be very applicable to adults as well. It has all different resources specifically for teens in there. It should be coming out in April. I just finished the first draft.
Jase: Awesome.
Kitty: Exciting.
Dedeker: Wow.
Emily: Amazing. Congratulations.
Dedeker: Wonderful. Congratulations.
Kitty: Thank you.
Dedeker: Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. It's been fantastic.
Kitty: Thank you so much for having me.