Power Dynamics & Consent

Power is everywhere, and it’s not the enemy

Most people picture power as a boss or a cop. In the rooms I spend time in, it’s quieter than that, and there’s usually more than one kind at once:

• Role. Teacher and student. Instructor and client. Performer and audience. Host and guest. Organizer and member. Top and bottom inside a scene.
• Experience. The person who has tied for ten years and the person on their second class. The one who knows what “normal” looks like and the one guessing.
• Status and popularity. Who everyone likes. Who gets invited. Whose word gets believed first if there’s ever a disagreement.
• Money. Who is paying, who is being paid, who can’t afford to lose the booking or the refund.
• Age, size and strength. Physical facts that change what a “no” could cost in a body.
• Social capital and access. Who can get whom uninvited from the next event, the group chat, the community. Sometimes without ever saying a word.

None of this is bad. A teacher needs authority to teach. A top needs room to lead. A host needs to be able to run the room. Power is how a lot of good things get done. The problem is never that you have it. The problem is carrying it like you don’t.

A concrete test: list the ways the other person needs something from you right now. A good review, a spot in next month’s intensive, your approval in front of the group, a ride home. Every item on that list is a reason their no costs more than yours.

Why a no costs more from below

The Consent Model’s third question is whether a no would have cost the same as the yes. Across a power gap, it almost never does. A student who says no to an adjustment may worry they’ll be seen as difficult. A newer member who says no to a popular person may worry about being quietly left out. A bottom who says no mid-scene may worry about ruining it for someone they admire.

So the person with less power does what people have always done in rooms that feel risky. They go along. They go quiet. They freeze. They say a polite yes to get through it. Every one of those is a reasonable read of a situation where no felt expensive. None of them is a yes.

This is not a flaw in the person with less power. Going along is often the correct, protective read of a room. The four seats section says it plainly: soft refusal is the standard form of refusal. If someone didn’t say no to you, the question isn’t why they didn’t. It’s whether you made it possible.

None of this means a yes from someone with less power is fake. People give real yeses across power gaps every day. It means the yes only carries weight when you’ve done the work to make the no possible.

Sometimes not asking is the violation

This is the lesson I most want people to carry out of this library, and power is where it bites hardest. A lot of harm doesn’t come from someone ignoring a no. It comes from someone who never asked, so there was never a moment where a no could be said. Across a power gap, skipping the question isn’t neutral. It hands the whole job of interrupting to the person the section above just showed can least afford it.

From the more powerful side it rarely feels like a decision. It feels like “they came to my class, so hands-on is understood,” or “they would have said something.” Would they, to the teacher, the host, the person everyone likes? Go back to the list of what they need from you. That list is why they didn’t.

Here’s what makes this hard to hear: you can be kind, skilled, well-meaning, and still be the person who caused harm, because you treated a silence as permission. Intent doesn’t undo that. What you do next is accountability, and Asking Out Loud goes deeper into how to build the habit so it stops being something you have to remember.

More power, more of the duty to ask

Everyone in a room is responsible for their own honesty. But the job of making the question happen is not split evenly. The person with more power carries more of it, for three reasons. They can afford the awkwardness. They usually set the pace. And the other person may be waiting for permission to speak at all.

That duty has three parts:

• Ask. Before touch, before something new, before raising intensity, before taking a photo, before moving from class to coffee to something else. Out loud, even when you’re pretty sure.
• Ask so that no is a cheap answer. “Want to try the new tie tonight, or stay with the one you know? Both are good” gives two good options. “You’re okay with this, right?” gives one right answer and one that makes you both uncomfortable.
• Ask again when things change. A new position, more people watching, a drink. A yes covers what it covered, not everything after it. The full list of change points is on Asking Out Loud.

None of this means the person with less power has no voice. It means you stop waiting for them to use it before you do your part.

How to make no cheap

Saying “no pressure” doesn’t lower the cost of a no. What you build around the question does. A few things that actually work:

• Build exits before you need them. An instructor who says at the start of class, “If you’d like hands-on adjustments, put a card at the front of your mat. No card, I only cue you with words, and even with a card I’ll ask each time,” has made no the default and yes the thing that takes an action. For scenes, agree on stop signals before anything starts.
• Check in without a hook. “How’s this?” with room for a real answer. Not “This feels amazing, doesn’t it?”
• Don’t react to a no. No sigh, no wounded look, no “okay, but just so you know…” The way you take the first no teaches everyone watching what the second one will cost. Receiving a No covers this in full.
• Ask outside the moment. Talk about limits over text the day before, or over tea after class, not halfway through a tie with an audience. Questions asked in the heat of it are the most expensive to answer honestly.
• Let a third party hold some of it. A dungeon monitor, a co-teacher, a friend, a host someone can talk to without the person in charge in the room. A no that can go around you is cheaper than one that has to go through you.
• Take no without asking why. A reason is theirs to give. Asking for one turns a no into a debate they have to win.

Encourage the No goes further on building rooms where no is the easy answer.

Touch in teaching: adjust, spot, demo

Teaching is where power and touch meet most often, and where not asking gets called good instruction. Three kinds of teaching touch, three different asks.

• Adjusting is touch to change how someone moves: a hand on the hip to square a frame, pressure deeper into a stretch. It is optional, so it needs a yes each time, and words or showing it on your own body are always an equal choice. “I’d like to move your hip about an inch. Hands, or should I just tell you?”
• Spotting is touch to keep someone from getting hurt: a hand under the back on an inversion, near the head on a fall. Ask before the drill starts, never mid-fall. “In this one I spot at your hips and lower back. If you’d rather not be touched there, you can do the version on the floor or sit this one out.” If they say no to the spot, the choice is a spotted version, a safer version, or sitting it out. Spotting them anyway is not one of the options, and neither is letting them do the risky version with no spot.
• Demos get asked in private, before class, not in front of the room. “Would you be okay being my demo body for the hip drill? Totally fine to say no, I’ll ask someone else.” Asking with the whole class watching turns the class into the pressure. And a yes to one drill is not a yes to whatever you decide to show next.

A real emergency is different: if someone is about to land on their head, you catch them. Afterward, tell them what you did and why, and let them have their reaction to it. “It was a safety thing” is true for a catch. It is not true for an adjustment you didn’t ask about.

And if a teacher touched you without asking, including to “fix” something, staying still was not agreeing. If you weren’t asked is written for you.

Asking yourself, under someone else’s gravity

Power doesn’t only change what you can say out loud. It changes what you can hear inside. When a teacher you admire suggests a deeper stretch, or a scene has a lot of momentum, it’s easy to borrow their confidence and mistake it for your own.

A small practice that helps: before you answer someone with more power than you, ask yourself the three questions as if they had left the room. Do I want this? Am I glad I want it? Could I say no just as easily? If the answer changes when you imagine them gone, that’s worth knowing.

Another: notice who you’re trying to please. “I want to show them I can handle it” is a real feeling, and it isn’t the same as wanting the thing. Listening to Your Own No and Agency, Discernment & Embodied Validation both go further here.

And if you didn’t manage it in the moment, that’s not a verdict on you. Hearing yourself clearly under pressure is a skill, and the pressure was not your doing.

Dual relationships

A dual relationship is when two people hold more than one role with each other at once. Your instructor is also your date. Your event host is also your landlord. The person running the community is also your ex. Your client is also your friend’s partner.

These happen all the time in small scenes, and they aren’t automatically wrong. What they do is stack power. A no in one role can leak into the others. A student might say yes to a date because saying no feels like it could change how they’re treated in class, even if the teacher would never do that. The teacher can’t know from inside.

If you’re the one holding more of it:

• Name the overlap out loud. “I teach you on Tuesdays. Saying no to this changes nothing about Tuesdays, and here’s another teacher you can go to if it ever feels like it does.”
• Don’t start something new while the other person needs something from you. Wait until the course ends, the booking is paid, the audition is over.
• Some combinations are better not started at all, like an ongoing private client you’re also dating. That’s not a rule from above. It’s an honest look at how expensive no becomes.

When power moves mid-scene

Power isn’t fixed. It moves inside a single evening. The bottom in a scene may be the more experienced person in the room and the host of the party. The top may be new and nervous. A student may become the one who knows more about their own injury than the teacher does.

Two examples of what that looks like. A top ties someone who is well-known and much more experienced, and when the bottom says “go harder,” the top goes further than they wanted to, because refusing someone famous felt impossible. That’s the top’s own no getting lost, and it isn’t the top’s fault that it did. The person with the status owed a real question back: “Harder is what I want. Is it what you want?” Or a new instructor assists a senior teacher who also books their classes, and the senior teacher uses them as the demo body without asking. The class sees two teachers. The assistant sees their next month of work.

The rule doesn’t change when roles flip: whoever holds more power in that moment carries more of the duty to ask. Roles in a scene are chosen. The underlying power (experience, status, who the room will believe) doesn’t switch off because someone agreed to be tied up.

Power, the three questions and the four seats

The Consent Model gives three questions. Power touches each one differently.

• Do you want to? Power can make you want things that are really about approval. That’s still a real want. It’s worth knowing what it’s made of.
• Are you glad you feel that way? Only you get to answer this. A teacher saying “you’ll thank me later” about your body is answering it for you, and power makes that sentence land harder.
• Could you have said no, just as easily? This is the one power bends most. It’s also the one the person with more power can actually change.

Power also tilts the four seats. The person with more of it is most likely to sit in “you override someone” without noticing, and in “someone abandons themselves to you,” because a yes from below is the easiest kind to accept without looking. The person with less is most likely to sit in “someone overrides you” and “you abandon yourself,” and neither of those is their fault.

And like every tool here, this one can be turned into a weapon. “You have more power, so you can’t ever complain about me” and “I checked in, so you can’t say anything went wrong” are both misuses. So is the popular teacher saying “I’m the one who’s vulnerable here, anyone could accuse me” to make a student’s complaint feel cruel. Talking about power is for making room, not for winning.

If harm already happened

If you were on the side with less power and something happened that you didn’t want, it was not your job to have stopped it. Not speaking up, going along, freezing, saying yes to get through it: none of that made it your fault.

What you do next is yours to choose, including doing nothing for now. If you want to tell someone, Reporting walks through what your options can look like, and Report an incident is how to reach Arsclepius directly if it involved someone or something here. Reporting is an option, never an obligation.

If someone tells you it happened to them, start with When Someone Tells You. And if you’re realizing you were the one who didn’t ask, go to Repair & Accountability and let the person you hurt shape what comes next. The restorative justice page covers what that can look like when a community is involved.