A Detailed Evaluation of The Concept of Personal Responsibility.

Every single time anyone writes or talks about having their consent violated, being assaulted or abused, there are inevitably, (often by the same people), calls for personal responsibility. I think, perhaps, it is worthwhile to deconstruct the concept so we can jointly gain some clarity on it. I will say, before I even begin, that I have a quite a boner for personal responsibility. No matter what the situation, before all else, I will evaluate my role in the situation but I also know that the concept is very commonly weaponised by parties that act in bad-faith and unfortunately, it is easy to do that because this is a subject that requires a close look and a little nuance so I am going to try to bring that to the discussion.

Let’s just start with trying to understand what personal responsibility actually is. On the face of it, it seems very easy to understand, it is the responsibility I bear for myself when I undertake certain actions, and more specifically, on the scene, when I play with someone or begin a dynamic with them. More adaptably, it can be referred to as the process of taking accountability for your role in something, being proactive in mitigating the potential risks of your role and ensuring you are doing the work to understand the ethics and impact of your actions. Very basically, that’s what it means but there is a lot more to how it does and does not work.

## The foremost thing about personal responsibility is that it only works when all parties involved participate in it.

In many of my classes, I discuss how blame is pointed outwards and accountability is observed inward. I blame you for your actions, I hold myself accountable for mine, but the most important thing about that is it can only work if I can also trust you to hold yourself accountable for yours. A lot of times, people who advocate “personal responsibility” do so to the person who is making allegations against the bad behaviour of someone else, and often this person may even explicitly state what they think they could have done better in the matter, but there are rarely calls for accountability from the accused, and if the accused does discuss their part, it is often only to explain why the accuser is wrong. Within a relationship (casual, dynamic, play-based, platonic, whatever), if one party takes responsibility for their actions while the other alleges their perfection with impunity, this is no longer a safe-space for personal responsibility. In such a situation, I may assess my own behaviour quietly, and even make changes to it, but I won’t discuss it out loud because it will be weaponised. A good-faith environment allows personal responsibility to flourish and a bad-faith environment renders it unusable.

*Personal responsibility is not a zero-sum game. All the responsibility I take is not exonerating you from responsibility you should take. There’s enough responsibility to go around. Two people can be responsible for the same unfortunate outcome for entirely different reasons.*

## The problem with personal responsibility is that it turns into victim-blaming way too easily, by other people but often, also by ourselves.

I attempted to write about re-victimization. I am very interested in the subject but over the years, I have taught myself to ruminate on it more quietly and covertly because as a survivor of rape and abuse, discussing my role in my own (re)victimization is fraught and unless we pay very close attention to the distinctions, very easy to misinterpret. I talk about how my somatic addiction to high-stress, crisis-focused environments created by narcissistic, abuse perpetrators leads me to being instantly attracted to those kinds of people because my body expects to get a hit of its favourite, terrible drug. My personal responsibility, to myself, in that situation is to develop systems that allow me to recognise my erroneous instinct in those moments and distance myself from those people which is what I strive for (and for a while now, mostly succeed) at doing, it does not extend to making their instinct to abuse my fault, even if I fail at recognising it. However, other narratives become attached to this. For instance, someone suggested “The Law of Attraction” which I think vaguely opines that your energy attracts a certain type of energy. I understand energy in a physics classroom, I don’t understand this type of energy. I think, often, this type of accessible, pithy, new-age phrasing is meant to make some concepts more accessible, and it is used because it may be harder to grasp the neurological basis for how someone may be addicted to abuse, but it can come off very differently. Personally, I don’t assume it is ill-intended, but it does have a certain destiny ring to it making it seem like no matter what you do, you cannot avoid your fate of being abused. It doesn’t just make one seem helpless, it also centres fate and could remove responsibility from the abuser. If something is meant to happen, like a natural disaster, it is framed and viewed differently than something that is a criminal choice made by one party to influence another.

*The purpose of personal responsibility, especially for someone who has been victimized, is not to blame themselves, but to see if they could be acting out of a proclivity that is very difficult to grasp without blame and see if there is something they can do about that in the interest of their own growth and development, not something they can do to reduce the blame or responsibility of the other party.*

### One cannot hold themselves responsible in a way that justifies the abuse or mal-intent of another.

I am sure we have all heard of the concept of a perfect victim, but someone also suggested the concept of an easy victim and then vaguely insinuated there are things you can do to make yourself less “easy” as a victim. This is not a process of personal responsibility. While one can, of course, familiarise themselves with red-flags, be mindful of their triggers or learn self-defence, none of those things exonerate the perpetrator from the onus of responsibility, nor do they make you safe. For one thing, what makes a victim “easy” is not as simple as being a victim who can defend themselves versus one who freezes instead of fights, not to mention the danger of the value judgement associated with that and the insinuation that if one is victimized it is because they didn’t do everything they should have to protect themselves. It’s just a hop-and-skip from there to questions of about what you wore, drank or why you even went there in the first place. Secondly, believability places a huge role here and it is almost entirely a function of privilege, the social script and the conditioning of people around you. People are, as a function of society, less likely to believe women, sex-workers, trans people, queer people, poor people, mentally ill people and others, and that is not something one should have to take personal responsibility for because if your identity makes you an easy target, that is about hate and not about you. There is no personal responsibility to be taken there. Of course, people mask or make attempts to pass to keep themselves safer but that is an unfortunate consequence of the world in which we live, not something we should have to do.

*Personal responsibility is not an excuse to put someone’s identity on trial. It is not an excuse to attack someone’s personhood. The optimisation of the environment by a perpetrator to choose a victim it would be easier to malign does not make it your responsibility to not be that victim.*

## Often, the wrong-thing happened in the moment when it happened, but what is deferred is my realisation that something wrong happened, and that is not the same as re-framing an experience.**

I think one of the most common situations in which I hear calls for taking personal responsibility is when someone has a change of heart about an experience that occurred in the past. I admit, this is a tricky situation, and one I have been in, as well. I think there are two broad categories in which something like this could fall and one of them calls for personal responsibility. Say, I play with someone, I negotiate with them and the play takes place within the bounds of what we have negotiated, but I come out of it feeling uncomfortable and violated. I say that, maybe they apologise or maybe they ask if they can help but I am not sure so we leave it be. A few months later, I realise there was a trigger at play, one I had not identified or declared to the person in questioned, and once I realise that, I have two option. I can share it with the person and let them know I intend to work on identifying my triggers better, taking personal responsibility, or I tell them they violated me even though they had no way of knowing my trigger was a trigger. I think there is personal responsibility to be taken on my part, here. The second situation is one where I play with someone, we negotiate, and during play they breach a boundary, either through the exploitation of a loophole or more directly than that. I am shocked or I end up physically enjoying whatever is happening in the moment or I don’t like it but I let it go because I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but later, maybe it is weeks or months later, I find that I have not been able to gain comfort with it, and I finally confront the person. This is not a change of heart. The wrong thing they did, they did in the past, my consent was not revoked retroactively, the only thing that changed is them getting away with it. Now, I may, on a personal level, decide I want to change how I approach my boundaries or speaking up when I feel them challenged, but that does not mean I bear any personal responsibility in the choice to breach my boundaries that was made by the perpetrator back then. Whatever they did, it was wrong then and it is wrong now, I just remained silent then. That’s all. That does not mean I bear personal responsibility in what you did.

*What we call retroactive revocation of consent or ruining people’s lives over “changed feelings” is often an attempt to weaponise personal responsibility mechanisms to keep predators safer.*

## Personal responsibility can be about accountability and growth but it is not justice and it does not diminish the need for justice.

Let me tell you a story. Back when I was TOU age, I was very angry with men after having watched my father abuse my mother and being raped by a different man who was much, much older than I was, and I decided I wanted to fuck with men. I slept with men much older than myself when I was underage and I made them feel terrible about it after the fact, I knew I was safe because I could not be held legally responsible, I was a child and they should not have been sleeping with me in the first place. I know this is an uncomfortable story but it’s an important one. As I grew up, I realised I didn’t like the person inside me who wanted to do these things, as real as she is, even today. I regretted sleeping with married men, baiting myself and setting the precedent to men that girls as young as myself were available to them. I may have been less-than-adult at the time but I was aware of what I was doing and I understood it well enough to game the system, I am responsible for my actions and I regret them. I work to ensure I will never repeat them. Now, just because I realise my part in all of this and I reform myself, does not mean the men do nor that they’ve been held to a standard of responsibility, let alone justice. I can learn and grow from personal responsibility as much as I want (and so can they) but it is not the same thing as justice or reform. They do deserve to be imprisoned. Even if a child tries their hardest to fuck you, it is criminal for you to encourage that child as a person twenty-years older than them and it says something about you. Even when that child grows up to realise how their trauma led to this, it does not mean you are cleared of your part in it.

*Two people can be wrong in one situation but if one wrong is egregious and dangerous, while the other is criminal and dangerous, the processes of reform required are different and one does not compensate for the other.*

## Personal responsibility absolutely includes doing the math on your risk-appetite and assessing your ability to handle whatever it is you are undertaking.

The most common question, story or query I get from people as an educator has to do with how someone can diminish or erase the consequences of their actions or choices. Let me elaborate. Someone will want to play with ESM or CNC but find that when they do they experience severe drop, outbursts, trauma or conflict within their relationship and can I please tell them how they can stop that from happening. To be very clear, there are better ways to handle drop, there are methods to mitigate risk and there are things you can do to make all kinds of play safer, but I said consequences, not risks, because they are different things. You can make a sky-dive safer, you cannot make a sky-dive the same as doing dishes at your sink. A lot of times people do things and are surprised by the consequences of doing those things. If you hurt your feelings for the thrill of it, surprise-surprise, you will have hurt feelings. If you subject yourself to systems of force and circumvention, you will feel violated. That is what you set out to and it is your responsibility—top or bottom—to determine whether you can actually handle that. It is your responsibility to determine whether you can safely handle these things. I know exactly 34993 cuckolds who love cuckolding, but after the fact, act out (even aggressively) within their relationship because they liked how they felt when it was happening but no longer like it now that the clothes are back on. This is unfair to other parties in the equation, especially if you led them to believe it would not be like this, and of course, there is some room for unknowability and reform in all of these things, but it is actually pretty rare for me to come across a person who is attempting reform in a deliberate manner, I mostly come across people who just decide they’ll make it work and not act like that, but do it anyway. Sometimes, being a responsible person means paring down or rejecting your desires because you are not ready or able to handle their consequences.

*Personal responsibility does mean being able to tell when your hurt feelings or trauma are not someone else’s fault but a consequence of your own choices, and can even be damaging to another person, it is okay to ask for support in such a situation, but it is not okay to make it someone else’s problem and responsibility altogether, especially if you are the bottom.*

## Calls to be mature or realistic do not bolster personal responsibility or actually encourage anyone to take it.

A very common narrative associated with personal responsibility is that it is the mature or realistic way to be and okay, I suppose, when you consider concepts like maturity and realism in a vacuum, that may hold some merit but they don’t exist in a vacuum, so for me, it warrants a closer look. The most prevalent way in which I see maturity being used as a way for one person to make life easier for other people by taking more than their fair share of responsibility. I was a mature girl when I was growing up because I took responsibility for the actions of my parents and focused on making life easier for them and for many years that meant that I continued to take more than my fair share of responsibility in many, many situations because I conflated responsibility with this definition of maturity. Being realistic can also work in similar ways sometimes. Being realistic means catering not to what is right or wrong, but to the world as it exists and it’s a slippery slope. It can be generally-acceptable, largely benign but annoying. Like, ideally, if you make a doctor’s appointment at 11 AM, you should expect to be seen at 11, but realistically, you know that 11 never means 11 and you actually have no idea how long it could take so you clear a larger window in your day than the correct situation would require. That’s not ideal, but it is realistic and I suppose, acceptable. However, it is also realistic to say that if someone violates your consent, it is likely that you will not be believed, so is it realistic and therefore, responsible, to operate under that assumption? I think some people would say it is and act accordingly, while others wouldn’t. Regardless of whether you let certain conditions of reality impact your behaviour or not, the right and wrong does matter, and if you cater to the wrong behaviour while determining how to behave, that is not taking responsibility, it is undertaking an unfair amount of labour to cater to the nefarious intent of other people. I think it’s important to call it that, even if it doesn’t mean that we will be able to fix it.

*Safety is not solely a matter of personal responsibility. It is a joint responsibility of many, many systems that are interpersonal, social, political and legal. Telling someone that bending over backwards to keep themselves safe is a personal responsibility only enables more victim-blaming down the line.*