Dateline August 25, 2016
I was frankly appalled to learn yesterday of the multiple serious injuries resulting from solar branding play at Fusion 2016. Normally I stay out of anything that has a fragrance of scene politics but I can't be silent about this.
Full disclosure: I have not been personally involved (thank the Lord) so all My info is second hand from the fet threads. But here's what I'm pretty sure of:
-One of the leaders of the Primal Arts group did solar branding.
-Primal Arts does ordeal/ ritual stuff that is not My kink, but a prior serious partner was much taken with their flesh hook suspensions and so I once watched "the ritual" for about 4 hours at a WinterFire. I found it troubling, not the activity per se, but the language being used. It felt very... Ambiguous. Un-responsible. It felt to Me like language one would find in a cult. It was indirect, circular, non-specific. Subject + verb + direct object seemed absent. It gave Me the creeps. I saw one really crazy-happy lady up there danging from the fleshhooks and I watched one woman who clearly wanted to chicken out go through with it (with the support/ pressure of her peers) and walk around behaving traumatized the rest of the event.
- This PA leader guy decided he wanted to add to his existing body mod skills and learn solar branding. So he self-taught by researching online; didn't take even one class. Didn't call up any of his body mod buddies who would know. Apparently didn't even practice on himself. Then at Fusion he posted an invitation to people who might want to be recipients of his new skills. But he didn't tell them he had no experience, had *literally* never done it before. And the recipients, presumably knowing of his leader reputation in the Primal Arts community, didn't ask the seemingly unnecesary question. One of them requested the brand go entirely around a limb; even though he has apparently taught tattoo classes in which he explained why that is a giant no-no, he did it anyway.
- His solar branding gathering was not an official event of Fusion.
- I remember seeing his posting at Fusion and thought, "Wait, you can kill ants with a magnifying glass. This is a terrible idea." But there's quite a bit of stuff I think is unsafe at these events. I play SSC, many people play RACK/ RASH. At some point, that's an individual choice, I have had to come to terms with the idea some people make terrible choices and I cannot police the world at these events. I thought no more about it.
- The guy did massive, unspeakable, almost unfathomable damage. Tens of thousands of dollars of medical bills. Hospital stays. Surgeries. One person nearly lost a limb.
Here's what strikes Me about the situation:
1. Absolute hubris. Period. This is a person who has lost the awareness of the risks they undertake and the ability to perform a realistic risk analysis. He was drinking his own self-empowerment kool-aid. That's the only explanation I can find for circumscribing a limb when he has taught others not to.
2. Massive consent violations. In highly hazardous play, for which there apparently isn't even a community accepted standard of performance, and esp. when you are a visible community leader with a reputation that disposes people to defer to your judgment... You damned straight better tell each and every person just what a newbie you are at this ultra hazardous activity. Their consent hinged on the belief of his competence; had he disclosed his total inexperience with solar branding they might not have gone through with it. The definition of battery is an unconsented touching. The recipients' consent hinged on an active misrepresentation of his competence which compromised their consent. In My mind, that is (criminal) battery... if both the act was present AND EITHER criminal intent or extreme recklessness was present (details vary by state law). And OBTW, negligence may very well be here too, although likely the recipients were at least somewhat contributorily negligent as well. Courts don't like to do things that create a "moral hazard" (i.e., encourage other victims to make similar mistakes), so they probably would want to make it clear (with a finding of contributory negligence) that at the end of the day, if you agree to let someone burn you, it's up to you to make damned sure you have chosen well.
That's the low hanging fruit.
3. Negligence gets *really* interesting in kink consent violation situations. The standard is always what a reasonable person would foresee and what they would do. What we do in the alt lifestyle community is almost by definition NOT what reasonable people do. I have been lit on fire and loved it. Do reasonable people ever allow themselves to be lit on fire? Maybe not. So to make the standard work, you have almost have to tailor it down to a *similarly situated* reasonable person... In other words, a reasonable kinkster. But who is that? I think I'm a reasonable kinkster because I play SSC, but not everyone does, lots of people play RACK/RASH. How far down that train of logic a court would go is fascinating to ponder. I wonder if there is a line of cases concerning tattoos or cosmetic surgery gone wrong that provides precedent.
4. The community has a very hard time spotting/ policing bad apples, and hardest time of all may be when the apple has a widely spread reputation as a presenter/ leader and is getting dangerous. It takes a long time for facts to catch up with and corrode a reputation; huge damage can be done in the process. The bigger they are, the harder they can fall. We need to find ways to keep ahead of this behavioral curve.
5. The really egregious cases with the leaders (that I know of) involve hubris. It is a documented element of all forms of risk management that when we do something dangerous for a while and nothing bad happens, our perception of the danger drops off. That leads to complacency, with predictable results. So perhaps we should be most skeptical of the most "expert", most well known edge players. They are most likely to feel invincible, most likely to lean on their reputation, and probably pretty likely to keep wanting to add new, edgier skills. And at minimum, selecting your Top based in part on their level of humility and willingness to meaningfully discuss prior fuckups might be a fine way to vet them. It would seem to flag the dangerous ones when little else does.
6. Even if the event were not legally liable, it will be held responsible in the court of public opinion one way or another. People will eventually conclude that where there is smoke there must be fire, and then they will vote with their feet. The nuance that the solar branding was one guy's terrible idea rather than a Fusion sponsored event gets lost in the noise. But it still raises exactly the issues that DO should consider when it agrees to allow an Ion to occur.
7. Camp feels to Me like a tremendously permissive and accepting environment, anything goes. Looking for a Mermaid on a Unicorn? Sure, no problem, right this way. I have actually had that conversation while floating naked in a pool. I love that about camp; it is very freeing for Me as a responsible and vigilant person. But I'm one of the shrinking number of grownups -- in My forties (gasp!!)!! The money is not being made on those of us who came up through Black Rose, those of us who were taught safe sane and consensual is the bedrock. I'm a Safety Domme and I spot danger fast, and steer clear. Too often I am right: inflated giant unicorn head mounted on golf cart obstructs view, results in injury -- to the safety guy, no less -- yes, I saw that coming. But other people... Young, inexperienced, a bit discombobulated by the big event? Those people are in considerably more peril, and if they are female or new to bottoming or worse, both? It's more a matter of when than if.
8. It may be that this large scale (1,000 people) permissive environment just cannot coexist with the full range of Primal Arts folks, who are engaging in ultra-hazardous activities for deeply personal reasons that make them willing to accept the risk of life changing personal injury. The Primal folks are not playing SSC. They aren't playing RACK/RASH. They are in an important sense NOT "playing" at all. DO and Primal Arts used to look to Me like two flavors of basically the same thing but I now see them as operating in parallel universes, on nearly opposite assumptions about responsibility. The DO play instinct is to top the next person, keep pushing the edge because it's FUN to be increasingly outlandish; that flavor of group energy might just be too toxic for Primal activities like permanent body mod. On their side, the Primal Arts model seems to be agnostic about the Top's responsibility, as a core concept. In that model, everything seems driven by what ordeal the (bottom) person chooses for themselves. There seems to be a deference to the bottom's wishes that SSC would not countenance. As an SSC player, if a bottom wants Me to hurt them in the wrong way or a way in which I don't feel competent, I will refuse. My observation is that PA people say "it's your ordeal path" and do what it asked. Sadly, in this case the ordeal they got was not at all what the person signed up for.
9. I feel bad for DO. What happened was the act of a single person who is a leader of Primal Arts which has had a symbotic relationship with DO. Primal provides a very specific subset of offerings and they seem to keep mostly to themselves. Subcontractors are forever causing headaches for their prime, and that is to some extent the case here. DO chooses its presenters but I'm betting DO has been letting Primal pick its own leaders for the ordeal track, with minimal oversight. This is two separate events happening at the same time in the same location; one is not a subset of the other. If anyone was going to spot this bad apple, it was more likely a Primal person than a DO organizer. At the end of the day, though, whatever goes wrong at a joint event lands heavily on DO's reputation.
10. Dungeon Monitors are not enough. I see dangerous stuff happening all over camp, but what I see in the dungeon is generally quite well considered. We may need more DM type people all over camp, maybe some walkie talkie stations, so that when something unwise/ ill advised is happening, timely communication is easy. There needs to be more emphasis on collective responsibility, a more See Something/ Say Something imperative coupled with the pervasive and fully functioning hardware to allow better communications.
11. We need after-action reporting from DO. Enough things have gone wrong that we need to be connecting dots, looking for patterns, identifying risk factors. These situations follow a pattern and they devolve rapidly into histrionics on fet. I don't see a collective learning curve happening. What we need is to really understand these events in terms of repeatable patterns, so that the patterns can be interrupted. In serious safety cultures, incident reports are common, lessons learned are formulated, and they are widely distributed. Surely someone with a background in social sciences could identify the critical factors to consider. The cases I know of involved male top leaders and female bottom not-leaders without a great deal of scene experience; maybe we should start there.
12. At the end of the day though, if you put a thousand people together long enough, often enough, let them have sharp pointy things and alcohol and freedom, well, at some point some shit is going to happen. Truly random fails will occur. Poor judgment will happen even in normally responsible people. It has happened to Me. There will be some percentage of bad actors because any random sample of humanity will have at least a few. Whether these events attract *extra* bad actors because of their inherent lawlessness and the absence of transparency is an interesting but hard to answer question.
These bone head screwups aren't things that "should not happen", they are things that absolutely will happen in some form, given the circumstances. So the event organizers have to be ready for it. If that means a $10 surcharge for consent monitoring and process improvements, so be it. By my reading of the DO marketing materials, total DO attendance averages 1000 people per event, maybe 900 are paying. 900 x 4 events/ yr = 3600 registrations x $10 = $36,000. That should be enough to hire a consultant to make recommendations to fix the safety processes and provide at least one paid consent mediator/ counselor/ resource per event the first year. Second year, it should be 2. This isn't a job for an attendee volunteer; this requires professional grade skills.
13. We need to do a better job of explaining to attendees that they are really the only ones in charge of their safety. In an event of 1,000 people there is effectively no one in charge, no recourse in most scenes. The constant crop of newbies (again, I think disproportionately female bottoms) needs to receive the message that only they can protect themselves, and if they have any doubts they need to end the scene. This is deeply un-sexy and not the vibe DO wants chilling the fun, I get it. But DO won't survive if this doesn't get fixed.
I would suggest that in addition to the legalese liability waiver, there should be a plain language, witty, distilled version, that has an educational function. I would be happy to take a whack at a first draft. And there need to be some giant signs around camp (dining hall ideal since we have plenty of time to look at in there) that outlines a set of no-brainer questions people should ask before a scene. It might start with "Dude, how many times have you done this before?". Maybe a big Smokey The Bear posting saying "Only You".
At the end of the day, this is a problem of scale. At the scale of a local dungeon, maybe risk management by communal reputation works much of the time. But not at national scale of 1,000 strangers in various states of euphoria. That's a bunch of strangers literally playing with fire together. The hands off approach was never going to work. I just hope DO can figure it out fast enough.
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