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.