A few days ago, I saw a personal ad that someone I know put up online. It ended with something that really rubbed me the wrong way. After listing what they were looking for, they had a list of things that they’re not into, including “humans that can’t communicate.” That gave me pause. And the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more it feels like a shitty and judgmental attitude.

I think it’s entirely reasonable for someone to want to be involved with people they can communicate with. I think a good part of having and maintaining healthy relationships is learning to communicate with people in your life, and, occasionally, deciding whether or not relationships are worth the work based off of how well you can communicate with people. But that’s not a way to put that sentiment well. And talking about it in those terms is actively harmful.

Just because someone can’t communicate well with you doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. If you’re reading someone that way, you’re probably being uncharitable. Instead, what is happening is that communication styles or habits or cultures aren’t aligning. Successful communication or interaction requires capacities to send and receive (to affect and be affected) to line up. It requires a shared culture and language and basis for interpretation. There really aren’t people who just can’t communicate. There are people who don’t (and maybe can’t) communicate like you.  Sometimes a breakdown in communication is the fault of one person. But there’s no necessary fault of anyone. Sometimes people just don’t align. And that’s okay.

Why am I bringing this up? I think we have a really narrow idea of what communication looks like in the kink scene, and that’s part of the reason it’s so culturally homogeneous so much of the time. Part of making kink more inclusive is understanding that people’s habits of communication are both individual and culturally contingent. Not everyone was raised by parents who had parenting styles influenced by Benjamin Spock. Not everyone is comfortable talking about their emotions directly, especially in groups. Not everyone handles setting and respecting boundaries the same way, and a lot can get lost in translation.

Recently, I’ve noticed how much I personally code-switch in talking about personal relationships. I was raised by two psychologists that are relatively progressive. I know how to use a lot of the communication strategies that are popular in the kink and non-monogamy scenes. It isn’t language that works with the rest of my family. Especially my latinx family. My parents might have learned how to do something disciplinarily, but doesn’t change the fact that a lot of this stuff is Anglo as fuck, and doesn’t work with everyone. If I forced my family to talk in the frames I use, I’d be reproducing some shitty colonial power dynamics. I feel like a lot of the racism in the kink scene (although definitely not all of it) can be tied to a “sex-positivity” version of homonationalism, where people who don’t fit  the pansexual kink scene’s normative whiteness and class coordinates are often criticized for being reactionary because they don’t adhere to a properly “sex positive” and “progressive” mode of communication. Consent culture generates its own forms of normativity..

Why is the pansexual sex scene demographically so straight, white, cis, and middle class? I think a lot of it is that to be involved, you have to acculturate to a set of norms that are associated with that demographic. You have to learn to talk like those people. That’s how you show competence. That’s how you show you’re safe. That’s how you show you’re worth engaging. If you read the work of Margot Weiss, you might feel icky about this exact demonstration of mastery, and how it’s deeply linked to a post-Fordist, neoliberal political order that’s both commodity oriented and implicated in the reification and eroticization of gendered, classed, and racialized inequalities. You might hear a bigoted and problematic sneer behind a lot of the available education that’s something along the lines of  “you don’t know how to communicate if you don’t talk like me.”

I’ve come to realize that “non-violent communication” and other progressive communication strategies can have their own kind of violence, especially when they come coupled with an assertion that they are superior to other kinds of communication  or are tied to set of “purity politics.” A lot of the touchie-feelie language we use, language and techniques I use, can have downsides. “Compersion” is maybe an annoying coinage, but it’s a useful concept. When we talk about it, however, we have to keep in mind that a lot of the time credit for coining the term goes to Kerista, a commune and utopian society that’s been the subject of significant criticism, a large part of it around the coercive implementation of an established, “ethical” set of communication techniques. The biggest problem with the organization, according to Lawrence Hamelin, was a purity politics. Communicate in a way that didn’t follow the standards of the community? It was questioned whether you could communicate at all in a way that wasn’t toxic and whether you belonged. Concerns around this sort of dynamic is a major parts of what has come out about the ways in which EP was abusive. I’ve only linked a small subset of what’s been written. But there, adherence to “nonviolent communication techniques” was used as a bludgeon. Situations don’t have to be abusive for purity politics around language to interaction to become an issue. Compersion becomes a nasty idea when it’s expected or taken as the mark of a good person. The same is true for talking i highly specific, ritualized ways. Communication suffers when it just becomes about signaling one’s in-group status.  

I know a ton of people that have been pretty harmed by being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, that they can’t communicate. That’s dispiriting. Especially when it comes couple with being told that you aren’t fit for a relationship or or interacting with other people.  That’s an awfully grim thing to hear someone who is a involved in education saying, even in their private life. Being raised by psychologists, I understand that disciplinary training in that kind of thing doesn’t necessarily make you a good person or good communicator. But part of me at least hopes that some of the people I see making those kinds of statements  would know to avoid them. Especially people who work in mental health, are educators, or organize things in the kink scene.

So what’s the alternative?

When I teach, I feel like I spend a lot of time facilitating communication. I’ve taken away a few things from my experience. You have to start with people where they are. When you model communication techniques or styles, your job shouldn’t be that the people involved in the class communicate like you or use the same structure, but rather your goal should to model something that works for you and explain why it works for you. You might not (and probably) don’t have all the answers. However, you can encourage people to find something that works for them and give them some tools to start thinking about what that might be.

But the biggest takeaway for me, after seeing lots of conversations break down:  first and foremost, don’t tell someone they can’t communicate. Don’t tell it your students. Don’t tell it to your partners. Don’t tell it to anyone. If you’re putting out there that you’re looking for someone, instead say that you’re looking for someone that can communicate in a way that works with you. Or that can intentionally communicate about how they communicate and state their needs.

Feel uncomfortable talking about certain things directly? That’s okay. Find a way to let someone in on the ways you are comfortable talking about them. Don’t know what that is? Reflect on it. Find someone who is familiar with you and your situation that you feel you can trust and talk it out (therapists can be useful here). Have trouble having those conversations? Figure out how to have them in ways that are comfortable to you. They might like different depending how you, yourself, communicate. Learn how to establish ground rules and identify what you need. But, most of all, if you choose to disengage with someone because you have trouble communicating with them, don’t pin it to them being ignorant of inferior. Maybe you’re just not compatible. And that’s okay.