Cultivating a consent culture

I was reading Psychology Today’s recent article, The Power of No, this morning, and it got me thinking about a question that haunts alternative sexuality communities, or should. The question is this: in a world where we accept the feminist precept that rape culture exists – which needless to say, I do – how do

Childhood, consent, and learning to be human

In anticipation of my talk on embodied consent in September, I’m going to writing a lot about consent in this space. I’m away until August 10, so for the next two entires, you’ll be getting reruns. Here’s an oldy but goody that practically went viral when I first posted it. What imprints do we receive

Fostering consent culture – making touch safe for kids and adults

My friend and colleague Christine Kraemer wrote over at the Patheos website recently about how desperately kids need touch – not just for emotional development, but literally for biological development – and how that touch is being systematically taken away in many school environments and elsewhere. More and more, non-parent adults are not allowed to

Cultivating a consent culture

I was reading Psychology Today’s recent article, The Power of No, this morning, and it got me thinking about a question that haunts alternative sexuality communities, or should. The question is this: in a world where we accept the feminist precept that rape culture exists – which needless to say, I do – how do

Childhood, consent, and learning to be human

What imprints do we receive as children?  When you were five, or six, or seven, what messages really stuck and taught you how people ought to treat each other, how you deserved to be treated, and what options you had for interaction with others? I know for my part, I was teased a lot as

The Classic Sequence: First Touch at the Head

As promised, I’m beginning my series on the Classic Sequence of moves in a Rubenfeld Synergy session.  The first move is a gentle touch at the head, and in this post I’ll describe the quality of that touch, the reasons we do it, and what we’re attempting to determine from it. A word on the

Respect: honoring where you end and I begin

Part of a series on the GROUND of RSM – a foundational acronym introduced by Joe Weldon and Noël Wight at the 17th Rubenfeld Synergy Training. The second piece of our GROUND, after Gentleness, is Respect, which probably sounds pretty basic.  Again, though, these concepts are foundational: both literally and figuratively, they are the ground