I'm a consent monitor at a sex club – here's what my job entails...
Trained staff like us make sure that everyone in a BDSM playroom stays safe and has fun.
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If we want to make clubs safer, especially for women, we need a shift in priorities. It’s no secret that councils hold the threat of revoking licences over club’s heads, but few venues in the UK have lost their licence because of sexual harassment or assault. Pretty much all security measures – searches on the door, only one person allowed in a toilet cubicle at a time, bouncers walking around with little torches – are in the service of disrupting drug use.
Your run-of-the-mill nightclubs could learn from the organisers of London's sex parties – events that typically consist of a dance floor with playrooms used for BDSMplay and other intimate sexual escapades – who recruit trained consent monitors to keep a watchful eye on proceedings. Clearly uniformed but separate from security, they mainly tell people where the toilets are and how to get to the main room, but they also trawl the club checking in on people’s wellbeing and looking out for sexual harassment and assault.
VICE spoke to staff from a few different club nights who told us about what their job entails and all the times they’ve had to intervene to make sure people stay safe in the service of having a good time. Their names have been changed to protect their identities.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvnx...my-job-entails