Between Trust and Transgression: Rethinking Consent in BDSM

What new research reveals about the ethics, law, and psychology of Consensual Non-Consent.

A new peer-reviewed paper in Sexuality & Culture by Dr Ofer Parchev of Haifa University, titled Between Normalization and Transgression: The Complexity of Consensual Non-Consent in BDSM, takes one of the most taboo subjects in sexual ethics, Consensual Non-Consent (CNC), and asks a question that could reshape how we think about consent itself.

CNC describes erotic or relational scenarios in which one partner, the submissive or bottom, gives permission to suspend their own consent during an agreed scene or dynamic. It includes everything from short-term rape play to long-term total power exchange relationships. Within BDSM culture, CNC is both deeply desired and deeply fraught. It sits at the edge of what our legal, moral, and psychological systems can recognise as legitimate.

How BDSM became normalised and what it left behind

Over the past three decades, BDSM has moved from the margins to mainstream acceptance. No longer automatically pathologised or criminalised, it is now recognised as a legitimate form of adult sexuality. This shift has been built on one crucial foundation: consent. Frameworks such as Safe, Sane and Consensual (SSC) and Risk-Aware Consensual Kink (RACK) have helped distinguish BDSM from abuse by emphasising negotiation, safewords, and aftercare.

Parchev’s study argues that this model of active consent has also created an exclusion. Practices that centre on passivity or surrender, such as CNC, fall outside the recognised boundaries of ethical play. In his view, consent has become a mechanism of control, a structure that protects BDSM from stigma but also sanitises it.

The paradox of willing surrender

In CNC, the submissive partner’s fulfillment lies in surrendering their will. This creates an ethical paradox. Safewords and aftercare are designed to maintain the bottom’s control, yet in CNC dynamics, the very point is to give that control up. What happens when a person wants to relinquish the right to withdraw consent?

Parchev argues that mainstream consent frameworks are ill-equipped to hold this paradox. They require the bottom to remain an active agent, constantly evaluating risk and safety. But for those who find meaning, healing, or transcendence in the act of surrender, this requirement invalidates their agency by refusing to recognise passivity as a chosen state.

When law meets desire

To show how institutions respond to CNC, Parchev examines two legal cases: R v J.A. (Canada 2011) and State v Van (United States 2004). In both, courts rejected the idea that someone can consent in advance to acts performed while unconscious or restrained. The rulings upheld ongoing, continuous consent as the only legitimate form and in doing so erased the subjectivity of participants who had willingly entered CNC arrangements.

The legal logic, Parchev notes, reflects a deeper cultural assumption: that autonomy must always mean activity and that passivity equals victimhood. The submissive’s choice to suspend control is therefore recast as pathology, while the dominant’s fulfillment of that choice is treated as exploitation. The result is a legal landscape where CNC cannot exist except as either abuse or crime.

Beyond consent toward trust

Rather than advocating for the abolition of consent frameworks, Parchev calls for an ethical expansion. He proposes replacing consent as the sole marker of legitimacy with trust as a relational foundation. In BDSM, trust already operates as the invisible contract between partners, the belief that the dominant will care for the submissive even while controlling or hurting them.

Trust, unlike consent, recognises that vulnerability is sometimes chosen and that safety can coexist with risk. It also shifts responsibility. While consent frameworks often centre the bottom’s verbal control, a trust-based model places accountability on the dominant to remain attentive, responsive, and ethical even when the submissive cannot speak.

This approach does not erase the risk of harm. It insists that trust, intimacy, and care must form the ethical baseline for any practice that crosses into CNC territory.

Why this matters for clinicians and educators

For therapists, sex educators, and legal scholars, Parchev’s paper offers a major challenge. If consent is not the ultimate safeguard, what replaces it? His work invites professionals to engage with the psychological depth of surrender without collapsing it into pathology. It also calls for more nuanced conversations about power, agency, and desire, especially when working with clients who find healing or erotic charge in relinquishing control.

A trust-based framework could help clinicians recognise the relational ethics at play in CNC rather than defaulting to risk avoidance. It also provides a starting point for legal reform, encouraging systems to distinguish between exploitation and mutually constructed surrender.

The next frontier of consent research

Parchev concludes by urging researchers to build an empirical field that explores CNC ethically and phenomenologically rather than through stigma or crime. He suggests that future studies focus on how trust is built, maintained, and tested in these dynamics, and how practitioners can support participants in negotiating vulnerability without harm.

The takeaway

The study does not argue that CNC should be unregulated or risk-free. It argues that our existing frameworks are too narrow to capture the full complexity of human erotic life. If BDSM has taught society anything, it is that consent can hold both danger and devotion. Parchev’s work pushes us to look further, to a future where the ethics of intimacy are measured not only by permission but by trust.

At the Progressive Therapeutic Collective, we share this research not as an endorsement but as an invitation to reflection. We do not necessarily agree with all of Parchev’s conclusions, but we believe that engaging with complex, discomforting ideas helps our field grow. These conversations matter because they challenge us to think critically about ethics, care, and the many ways power and intimacy intersect in human life.

Reference:
Parchev, O. (2025). Between Normalization and Transgression: The Complexity of Consensual Non-Consent in BDSM. Sexuality & Culture.