The audacity of desire

Agency, Responsibility, Consent, and Belonging

my eldest child, having no trouble accessing her desire

Noncoercion must be a bedrock principle of any world where everyone belongs: we cannot—nor should we want to—force anyone to do anything they don’t consent to. I love the idea of extending this principle to nonhuman beings as well: the indigenous concept of “honorable harvest” as related by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

And yet. I’ve come to believe that we’re setting too low a bar. Consent should be the floor, not the ceiling. It defines the container within which interactions and relationships should take place; it is not itself the goal. I want to raise our collective sights: I want to start from willingness, but I want to reach for desire. This to me is the difference between acceptance (inclusion) and belonging. I don’t want to be tolerated, or accepted; I want to be chosen, to be wanted.

Today I want to talk about agency and responsibility. About consent and desire. I will share two frameworks/concepts that have influenced my thinking on these topics, then offer one of my own… before closing with an invitation to practice.

TL;DR: We are socially conditioned into systems that depend on coercion; we have few models of meaningful consent. But I fear too often the umbrella term “consent” conflates tolerance (grudging capitulation in the absence of meaningful choice) and willingness (acceptance from a place of caring about others). And that we never get to the harder, deeper, and more enticing work of asking ourselves what we truly desire. Building belonging is about designing from desire: it is about issuing an invitation for others to do the same. This world-building work starts in our own bodies and in our intimate relationships: we can start practicing a different way of being…. right now.

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The Wheel of Consent

I first learned about this concept a few months ago from the somatic sexologist my wife and I are seeing, and recently deepened my inquiry via an ISTA workshop exploring eroticism, embodiment, and sexuality. But while my engagement with the tool has been primarily in the realm of the erotic, the fractal implications for every other dimension of life (parenting! work! friendships!) hit me immediately and are profound. Introduced by Dr. Betty Martin—herself a somatic sexologist—and now the subject of her outstanding new book, the wheel defines four quadrants corresponding to four different essential skills… and is revolutionary when you really take it all in.

There’s a lot going on here, and I won’t try to unpack it all; I encourage you to check out Martin’s site and get the book. Honestly, it’s blowing my mind. I share it here to illuminate the points I want to explore today.

First, it defines the domain of action: our goal, at all times, is for everyone to remain safely inside the circle of consent. And: it clarifies that everyone involved in the dynamic has an important role to play to ensure that is possible. The piece that really clicked for me: even if you are acting from a commitment to full consent, if your partner doesn’t have the capacity to feel/express their boundaries or desires… you can find yourself pushed out of consent.

In heterosexual relationships under patriarchy, this pattern is most visible in the “take/allow” dynamic: if a man asks a woman “may I” and she says “yes” but actually overrode an unacknowledged/unstated boundary… then she has pushed them both outside the circle of consent (he falls unwillingly into perpetrator; she unwillingly into victim; this podcast episode describes this dynamic brilliantly). Each of us has work to do. And: creating the conditions for meaningful consent is a collective responsibility; we are all responsible for dismantling patriarchy (and all systems of oppression).

Second, it makes a distinction between two types of “giving” that feels transformational. The first kind of “giving” is what we often think of: I am giving to you, for your benefit. She calls this “serving.” But there is another kind of giving, where I am doing the action to you… but for my benefit. She calls this “taking.” It’s easiest to understand in the context of sex: I might be touching your breasts for your pleasure… or for mine. If we aren’t able to distinguish between those two motivations, or to be even sufficiently self-aware and collectively aware of “for whose benefit are we doing this”… it muddies the waters of consent.

Third, it clearly names the different skills and capacities we need — individually and collectively — if we aspire to live a life without coercion. There are the four skills named explicitly in the quadrants: Serve/Accept, Take/Allow… but very quickly we realize that in order to practice those skills we need to cultivate others. Each contains at least three different dimensions. To Accept (to receive) requires that we first know what we desire; then that we make a request to another to meet that desire… and only then can we practice the fine art of receiving. To Allow (to surrender) requires that we first know our own boundaries; second that we trust and care about our partner enough to stretch to meet their desires from a place of willingness… only then can we practice the fine art of surrender. And of course: in all cases it requires that we trust that our partners have sufficient capacity to fully occupy their quadrant.

The Three Circles of Relationship

The Wheel of Consent invites us to identify and communicate our desires and boundaries within a broader context of willingness. In the context of a relationship, it asks us to assert agency: to assume responsibility for ourselves. This podcast recently introduced me to a second framework, that I find really helpful in dialogue with Martin: Brad Reedy’s “Three Circles” tool (as related by his daughter Emma).

He invites us to distinguish between three different circles: my circle, the other’s circle, and our relationship circle. And offers specific guidance for our responsibilities in each circle, in a way that maps neatly (at least for me!) to navigating the wheel of consent. Each person has four responsibilities:

1. My Circle: Know my truth (desires, preferences, needs)

2. My Circle: Know my boundaries (don’t let others in my circle!)

3. Other’s Circle: Respect their truth, stay out of the circle!

4. Relationship Circle: Share your truth! (desires, boundaries, requests, longings…)

The Wheel of Consent as a tool takes place in the relationship circle… but depends upon the other two circles being healthy in order to function. We quickly realize how far we are from possessing the necessary skills… individually and collectively.

It was a humbling exercise for me personally to read the article: I pride myself on doing lots of work in my circle, and in supporting my partners in doing work in their circles, and showing up fully in our relationship circle. But as it turns out…

Another common violation of the relationship circle is when we take over the whole thing… Assuming that the other person cannot take care of their circle, or setting boundaries so we must do it for them. Assuming that another person will say yes to our request and then harbor resentment so we refrain from asking them in the first place. These are examples of what it looks like when we take up the whole relationship circle.

Um… I do all of those things. Turns out in my earnest commitment to shouldering my fair share of the relationship… I’m not leaving enough room for my partners to step into their responsibility.

Taking responsibility: from consent to desire

In a world characterized by domination systems (patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, etc.) that depend on coercion, it makes sense to orient toward noncoercion and consent as aspirational values. Yet: I think noncoercion and consent is too low of a bar. For two reasons. First, noncoercion describes what is not happening… and that’s essential. But it tells us nothing about what is happening inside the circle: it’s an empty vision. Second, consent is by definition responsive or reactive: you consent to something or someone. It allows us to limit our imagination to what we are willing to do, and to avoid responsibility for asking the harder question: what do we want to do? It abdicates our power.

We often tell ourselves that it’s sequential: that removing coercion will create the space for imagination (if only they will stop perpetrating, I can stop being a victim). While that would be nice, I don’t think we can wait for that. We give up too much power by waiting for oppressive systems (or people) to stop oppressing us. I’m reminded here of Ruha Benjamin’s gorgeous invitation:

Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.

I talk often in this newsletter about the vital importance of imagination. But I actually think what we’re talking about here is different. The task is less about imagining something outside of ourselves, and more about tuning in deeply to what we already know but have never allowed ourselves to feel, or express. It’s not about imagining; it’s about knowing. It’s about desire. I love Esther Perel’s articulation here:

Desire is to own the wanting. Desire is the expression of the sovereign self. Desire points to free will. You can force people to do, you can never force them to desire. It is the ultimate expression of our free identity, if you want.

Yes! This is what I’m talking about. Desire as freedom, as self-sovereignty… to desire is to be free: it is the affirmative expression of noncoercion. It is the companion to consent. Betty Martin talks about this as the move from “willing to” to “wanting to”; from “ok” to “hell yes!” I’m not talking here only or even primarily about sex: it’s about attuning to our desires, to our wants, to our needs… in all parts of our lives. And expressing them. This is what it means to live an integrated life. Echoing Perel, Martin explains:

The crux of integrity is owning our desires.

Michele Lisenbury Christensen had a gorgeous podcast episode on “unmet needs” (taking the concept of “needs” from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication) where she distinguished between needs, desires, and wants. She explains:

Our desires point to our needs; they are heartfelt rather than ego-driven. Ego-driven desires are wants. Wants by definition are insatiable, whereas desires once fulfilled in service of the underlying need dissipate.

This is the inner circle I want to create inside the wheel of consent. It’s a new wheel, one organized around desire, where the relevant question is not “am I willing?” but instead “do I deeply desire?” This is one of my desires: that we refuse to orient toward consent as a goal, and instead require consent and noncoercion as the necessary foundation upon which we build toward desire.

Withdrawing “consent” from the intolerable

Having added this inner circle, I now want to make visible what’s happening outside the wheel of consent, since regrettably under our systems of oppression this is where we spend much of our time. I love Miki Kashtan’s work on acting from willingness and capacity, and want to bring in one of her graphics here to illustrate this point:

the dotted circle represents an individual’s zone of willingness

Like the Wheel of Consent, this graphic starts from a place many of us can only long for: where the outcome is defined by our willingness, and the goal to find a place where everyone involved is in mutual consent. This is the definition of consent that Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton offer, in their classic text The Ethical Slut:

Active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned.

But of course that isn’t our experience of living in the world. We live in a nonconsensual culture whose core structures depend on coercion. All of our institutions function this way: do what your boss tells you or get fired; obey your teacher or get kicked out of class; listen to your parents or get punished; pay your taxes or go to jail. We are conditioned into tolerating coercion as a feature of life; small wonder that we have such difficulty understanding meaningful consent.

So I want to define the terrain we currently operate from. Specifically, I’d like to add two additional concentric circles outside Miki’s zone of willingness (or Martin’s wheel of consent): one for toleration, and one for what is intolerable. My sense is that a different action/orientation is required, depending on what circle we find ourselves in. Hopefully this can make it more clear how we can navigate from where we are (in coercion and non-consent) toward where we long to be (living from desire). With apologies for my woeful graphic design skills:

The proper realm of life (and the domain of Miki’s graphic and the wheel of consent) is the inner two circles: everything within mutual consent. Unfortunately, I suspect most people live lives—at least much of the day—outside that place. I think there’s something powerful about naming that we do not consent to being there; it’s a key piece of how we restore agency and reclaim our rightful power and responsibility.

There is something particularly insidious about insisting that a nonconsensual interaction is consensual: this is gaslighting, and it’s ubiquitous. For a choice to be meaningful, for it to be fully consensual, we must have another option realistically available to us… and we must have confidence that acting on that choice will not leave us vulnerable to violence. Without that meaningful choice, we are conscripted into systems of harm—including self-harm—against our will. This is what I was trying to get at in my recent post exploring the concept of moral injury: nonconsensual complicity in systems of oppression, with no meaningful way out.

I think of this dynamic in the real estate market, where people are often trapped in intolerable situations. Take for example the recent fire in a Bronx apartment complex, a result of gross neglect by the landlord in the face of dozens of complaints by tenants. Can we say those tenants consented to live under intolerable conditions? The law would say yes: they signed leases, they paid rent. But most of us would say no: their absence of accessible alternatives meant that their “choice” cannot meaningfully be called a choice; otherwise surely they would not have chosen to live under objectively uninhabitable conditions.

We may still perform the action, but there is an important sense of agency in naming to ourselves—and the world—that we do not consent. We may still sign the lease, but we can name our truth: that we are doing so under coercive conditions, and that we are doing our best to escape, or to survive… but to be clear that we are doing so under conditions that are fundamentally inhumane and contrary to life.

The audacity of desire

One of my most deeply held convictions is that we need to bring more boldness into the world. As Dan Pink put it in a recent interview with Brené Brown:

We need to be more bold, and create environments where people feel comfortable being bold.

We need people to bring all their fullness, all their gifts, all their desires. Both as an end—that is one definition of a world where everyone belongs—but also, crucially, as a means to that end. The act of orienting toward desire in a world that teaches us to deny it is itself revolutionary. In her classic the Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde reminds us:

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

For me personally, I think the most radical act has been giving myself permission to feel what I feel, to want what I want, and to believe that I have a right to want those things. And to trust the possibility that maybe others will want those things too. That perhaps the thing I fear most—the crushing vulnerability of taking those first tentative steps toward my desires—will actually bring the thing I long for most: a sense of community and belonging among others who feel similarly. I’m understanding in a deeper way the paradox of Marianne Williamson’s line:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

What do I desire? To live as fully into my authentic truth as I can. To live as an embodied invitation to others to live into their fullest truths. To have others see my authentic expression not as a threat, but as an invitation. To build belonging together; to co-create from a place of deep desire. I’m reminded of a gorgeous line from Ceasar McDowell, at a retreat in Boston before the pandemic on what belonging means to him:

I want to be with people… who can be with my longings.

This is the promise, if we can survive the inevitable backlash. Lorde again:

When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense… Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness… Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.

An invitation to practice

This post is intended as an invitation to recognize the agency we already have, and to step into the power that is ours to claim. We have an opportunity to practice in every waking moment. I love adrienne maree brown’s reminder and mantra:

You’re always practicing something. So you’re either practicing upholding the world as it is, or you’re practicing shifting into the world as you want it to be... What each of us practices at the scale of our individual lives is what is then possible for us at a large scale. I’m a microcosm of all the possible liberation, justice, pleasure and honesty in the universe, and I act accordingly.

Yes: what would you like to practice today? I’ve really been appreciating the vulnerable sharing-out-loud journey Sebene Selassie has been leading in her newsletter; this feels like exactly the energy I’m seeking:

I want my own deepest desires and needs (and the preservation of my life force) to be the ultimate barometer for what activities, conversations and experiences I choose moving forward. None of that is easy for me. I'm so used to orienting outward that feeling, let alone prioritizing, my own desires and needs takes practice. And with practice, I'm getting better at it. (emphasis in original)

One concrete offering here is the practice that birthed the Wheel of Consent: the “3-minute game.” Highly recommend: with an intimate partner, a friend, a family member. It need not be sexual; it’s an opportunity to attune to your desires, and to practice the skills of the four quadrants.

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As always, I’d love feedback on what resonates, what doesn’t, and how you’re making sense of agency, responsibility, consent, and desire. While I always welcome email responses, I also encourage folks to comment publicly so others can also join the conversation And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing.