There was a time when I would have come into something with this title with my hackles up. I’d be prepared to bite back: no, my being young, my being new do *not* mean that I don’t know what I’m doing. I should get to do edge play if that’s what I want. I can evaluate risks just fine. And if that’s you, the first thing I want to say is: you’re right. I agree. This writing isn’t going to tell you you can’t. This isn’t even a writing geared toward the inexperienced, anyway. This is a writing geared toward everyone
because we all should reevaluate our risk profiles.
no matter where in our journeys we are; no matter how long we’ve been with and intend to be with the same partners. The things we are willing to sacrifice for what kink gives us–which is what I use to define risk profile, but your own definition probably works here too–just don’t stay the same. This all needs to be looked at and talked about, frequently.
It isn’t a one-time assessment; it’s a process–because being a human being is a process. We learn. We become more aware of ourselves and our bodies. We interrogate our desires, needs, and priorities in life. And those desires, needs, and priorities change. Constantly. Dynamically. Often in surprising ways.
As I recently started to think about an upcoming Risk Profile Workshop I was teaching and topics people here on Fet said they wanted to hear about, I put out a status asking how people’s risk profiles have changed over time. I have had some great conversations since. This writing is an attempt to sum up those responses—something which this answer, by @MadQueerBitch, does quite nicely (and much more briefly than myself, lol):
Much more detail.
More body parts that are fragile.
More time constraints.
More emotional availability.
More hard skills.
Far more soft skills.
More “No, none for me, thanks”
More self-protection.
More ease in stating boundaries.
More self-strength in my “vetting”.
Here are the things I saw come up over and over again.
Our risk profiles change in how we evaluate and discuss what fits into them.
People spoke of their risks becoming less about “this is what I like and this is what is a limit” and more about skills. Do tops have the proper training? Have bottoms taken classes or done enough research to identify warning signs? Have tops and bottoms talked together about elements of risk mitigation? More access to classes, experts, and resources is a big part of this. So is figuring out we can’t really take anything for granted—be that knowledge, willingness, or capability. Itai said, “I left behind Guess Culture for Ask Culture,” which I thought was a particularly wonderful phrase.
Our risk profiles change in response to changing bodies, desires, abilities, and needs.
What our bodies can and can’t handle is in flux all the time for so many reasons: age, ability, hormones, what prescriptions we are on, the amount of sleep we are able to get. What is safe for our bodies one year may not be the next. Play that didn’t used to cause scarring may one day start to. New disability happens. Injuries. Changing needs for changing careers and family structures. Wear and tear on our bodies simply from kink itself. It’s worth noting that changing bodies, as @Friskybunny pointed out to me, can subtract risks and make us able to do more, as well as less—bodies that have a risk of becoming pregnant that causes more caution at one point in life, for example, one day will not.
Minds change too, both in their health and in what interests us. I’ll speak to my own experience here: there was a time when appearance or intelligence-based degradation were things I was wholly unwilling to touch. Now they’re among my favorites. I can’t say what changed—was it comfort with my partner? A new fetish I picked up reading someone’s writing? More confidence in myself? I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe it was just time: learning our reactions and experimenting makes a difference, and it makes our awareness of our needs and abilities more nuanced. As the very smart and experienced-with-this-sort-of-thing @_Pavlov_ says:
I’m WAY more emotionally healthy than I was years ago, and can do MUCH cooler and higher-skill-needed emotional kinds of play now. That being said, I’m much less willing to risk fucking around with play that can easily result in unintended feelings of attachment.
Our risk profiles change in response to experiencing and knowing more in kink.
Sometimes learning and experiencing more means that we have to rule out play we once loved in order to keep our ability to do the things we most prioritize safe. This can come with learning about a risk we didn’t previously know could happen (may I direct you to the Risk Evaluation Database?), gaining understanding of the skills required to execute a certain sort of play properly and realizing the people we know who actually have those skills are more limited than we thought, and the things we observe in our communities. To that end, @off2infinity added an interesting point about how his time in the scene has changed *who* fits into his risk profile:
I feel safer with newbies and people who don’t have a leadership position within the community, whereas before, I leaned towards more experienced tops. It’s difficult to speak out against someone who is perceived as an authority figure or leader.
But knowing and experiencing more can also lead to doing more. Being exposed to new and different kinks (and ways of making our current kinks happen) can open up opportunities. This might mean that we can make things happen with less risk and no sacrifice to the amazingness of play–increasing both tops’ and bottoms’ comfort, frequency they’re willing to engage in certain things, and so forth. @MadQueerBitch’s growing kink experiences have led to figuring out that “the results/feelings desired can be duplicated in lower risk actions, most of the time.”
Hand-in-hand with this is the fact that…
Our risk profiles change in response to experiencing and knowing more of ourselves.
When I talk about my approach to risk management, I occasionally get asked about renegotiating mid-scene—something which is generally spoken of in “the community” as being a no-no, but that I am not personally unilaterally opposed to. Consenting to this, sleep play, playing around under the influence of or even with substances, are all things that I think can end up removed from someone’s risk profile over time. That’s the key to me with all of this: time. Time enough to know how you respond to various sorts of things, how they affect your decision-making, how you feel about it (immediately, days, months) after.
And with time comes experiences: the things we pick up along the way. @venerant spoke about her risk profile expanding to allow more play through experimenting a little bit at a time:
So many years of incremental risks and practice in recovering from experiences has given me more confidence that I am capable of weathering things that go badly. It has made me more open to things I once would have viewed as dangerous.
Specifically when it comes to emotional play, she said,
I’ve been able to let myself have more small risky experiences so that I can witness myself in crisis (or at least, facing down strong emotional experiences that I’m unprepared to handle) and practice managing myself.
Other personal knowledge/experience items mentioned that can change our willingness to take risks included having new outlooks on who is/isn’t in our support networks, figuring out we can heal from things we didn’t think we could (and vice versa), learning new coping methods and ways to stay grounded or take care of ourselves/our partners after intensities, and an increasing awareness of our relationship needs.
When @_Pavlov_ (who, again, is really incredible (and also writes about topics that go along with this one) ) suggested this topic to me, she said:
We don’t wake up in exactly the same place inside ourselves everyday. We don’t stay the same person our whole lives. We change, our bodies change, our emotional landscape changes, our lives change us. Trying to apply yesterday’s or last year’s or last decade’s self-made-rules can go really wrong.
It’s a process. It’s in flux. It’s a constant re-evaluation.
What’s important to note is that this change isn’t just one direction or another. What play we decide we can do both expands and contracts. As @twisted_hugs put it:
I feel like I am less willing to take risks now than before, but only because I didn’t realize how risky things were when I was doing them before. Now I’m more willing to do things I thought were very risky before, but only because I have more education on ways to mitigate the risk pretty well.
But one things for certain: things *do* change.
So if you’re reading this right now, take a moment to ask yourself how yours has changed lately and, if relevant, communicate these answers to your partner(s). What do you feel more confident about your feelings on? What new life priorities affect your kink world? What new kinks have you become aware of and interested in? What does your body do now that it didn’t when you last asked these questions?
Join the conversation in the comments on the Fetlife version of this post here.