SSC and RACK: Two Formulas and the Argument Between Them

Every subculture that does something dangerous eventually writes down a rule about it. This one wrote two, sixteen years apart, and has been arguing about them ever since. The argument is more interesting than either formula, because what is being contested is not the wording but the authority behind it.

What SSC was written for

Safe, sane and consensual was drafted in 1983 by David Stein, working on a statement of purpose for Gay Male S/M Activists, a New York organisation founded two years earlier. Stein has given a detailed public account of the circumstances, and the attribution rests mainly on that account.

The context explains the wording. In 1983 this community faced two simultaneous pressures. The feminist sex wars described in the era essay for 1970 to 1989 had produced a sustained public argument that sadomasochism was violence with a rationale attached, and the AIDS epidemic was making every aspect of gay sexual life a matter of public inspection. An organisation forming in that environment needed something it could say out loud: a short statement distinguishing what its members did from what they were accused of doing.

That is what the formula is. It was written for a document explaining an organisation to the outside world, not as a checklist for what two people should do on a Friday night. Stein has said as much, and has been open about his discomfort with what the phrase became. The distinction between a public position and a private standard collapsed almost immediately, and by the 1990s the formula was being printed on club literature and quoted as though it were law.

Why it spread

The mechanism was the one described in the era essay for 1990 to 2009. Organisations teaching newcomers needed something short, and the formula was short. Once the newsgroups arrived, a phrase that fits in a signature line spread faster than any argument for or against it.

It also did real work. Groups used it as a membership standard, as a line in press statements, and as grounds for excluding people. The organisations traced in the history of BDSM organisations needed a defensible public position, and this was it.

RACK, and the objection

Gary Switch proposed risk aware consensual kink on a Eulenspiegel Society mailing list in 1999, and set out the reasoning in print afterwards.

The objection has three parts. Safe is a promise nobody can keep, and pretending otherwise encourages exactly the carelessness the formula was meant to prevent. Sane is a judgment, and a community that spent a century being described as insane by clinicians should be slow to use the word as a test of anyone’s fitness to participate, particularly since it functions in practice to exclude people with diagnosed mental illness. And the pair together define a class of acceptable activity, which means that anyone whose interests fall outside it is not merely doing something risky but doing something the community has disavowed.

What RACK offers instead is a procedure rather than a category. Identify the risks, understand them, accept them knowingly, proceed. It moves the question from what kind of activity this is to whether the people involved know what they are doing.

The variants, and what they are all missing

Other formulas followed, with less traction. One rearranges the terms around personal responsibility and informed consent. Researchers in the 2010s proposed a four-part alternative built around caring, communication, consent and caution, aimed at clinicians and at the academic literature rather than at practitioners.

The proliferation is itself the finding. Every version keeps the word consensual and argues about everything else, which suggests the community agrees on the substance and disagrees about the framing. And every version shares the same weakness: each describes a state of affairs rather than a process, and none of them tells anyone what to do when the state of affairs does not hold. The people who cause harm in these communities are usually fluent in whichever acronym is current. That failure is the reason the practical conventions in the history of safewords and the negotiation procedures developed after 2010 have carried more weight than any slogan.

What the argument is really about

Strip away the wording and the dispute is about who is entitled to draw the line, and against whom.

SSC is a boundary drawn by a community for the benefit of its standing in the outside world. RACK is a boundary drawn by individuals for themselves, on the argument that the community’s standing is not their problem. Those are genuinely different politics, and the same split runs through the depathologisation campaigns traced in the DSM and depathologisation: respectability buys protection, and it is bought by leaving somebody outside.