Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Why would most people endure unwanted or unsatisfying touch, rather than speak up for their own boundaries and desires? It's a question with a myriad of answers - and one that Dr. Betty Martin has explored in her 40+ years as a hands-on practitioner, first as a chiropractor and later as a Somatic Sex Educator, Certified Surrogate Partner and Sacred Intimate. In her client sessions, she noticed a pattern wherein many clients would "allow" or go along with discomfort or unease rather than speak up for what they wanted or didn't want. Betty discovered there was a major component missing for people -- the confidence that we have a choice about what is happening to us.

In her framework, "The Wheel of Consent(R)" Betty traces the fundamental roots of consent back to our childhood conditioning. As children, we are taught that to be "good" we must ignore our body's discomfort and be compliant: to finish our food even if we're full, to go to bed - even if we're not tired, to let relatives hug and kiss us even if we don't want to. We learn that our feelings don't matter more than what is happening, and that we don't have a choice but to go along, whether or not we want it.

As adults, this conditioning remains with us until we have an opportunity to unlearn it, which is why consent violations are often only called out after the violation has occurred - because we have not been taught or empowered to notice our boundaries, much less value or express our internal signals as the unwanted action is happening.

In this book, Betty guides the reader through the Wheel of Consent framework, and shares practices to help us recover the ability to notice what we want and set clear boundaries. While the practices are based on exchanges of touch, they can also be learned without touch. In these practices, we discover that the Art of Giving includes knowing our own limits so we can be more generous within those limits, and not give beyond our capacity - a common problem which creates feelings of resentment or martyrdom. We also discover that the Art of Receiving invites us to notice and ask for what we really want, and not just what we think we are supposed to want. This knowledge, and its embodied practice, is foundational for creating clear agreements and bringing more satisfaction into relationships.

While much of consent education focuses on noticing what we don't want, or prevention of violation, Betty has developed a "pleasure-forward" approach to teaching consent. By first accessing and awakening (sometimes re-awakening) our bodies' relationship to pleasure and what we want, we can practice noticing and verbalizing what we don't want. Such an approach provides a more holistic frame in which to unlearn the childhood conditioning that taught us to be silent and compliant, and in which individuals can learn to ask for what they want and state what they don't, in a more empowered way.

The implications of this approach to consent education extends beyond touch and intimate relationships. When we forget how to notice what we really want, we lose our inner compass. When we continue to go along with things we don't feel are right, we lose our ability to speak up against injustice. This has a profound effect on society. We allow all manner of inequality, corruption, theft of natural resources and our planet's future health - because "going along with it" feels normal.

The Wheel of Consent offers a deeply nuanced way to practice consent as an agreement that brings integrity, responsibility, and empowerment into human interaction, starting with touch and relationships, and further expanding our understanding of consent to social issues of equality and justice.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A guide offers a new, comprehensive evaluation of the concept and practice of consent. In this sweeping reappraisal of the whole world of giving and receiving, of touching and being touched, Martin attempts to undercut and offset readers' long-standing assumptions by posing a disarmingly simple question they should ask others: "How do you want me to touch you?" In the author's extensive experience interviewing people as a sex educator, she often finds that this question causes confusion. "The most common thing that happened when people made this offer was that they forgot they could set limits or say no," she writes. "They sometimes assumed that they had to do whatever their partner asked of them." Martin draws her readers' attention to their own poor training by society in this very question of regulating and experiencing touch and contact. She points to the fact that people are trained early in childhood to suppress their ownership of their physical actions: clean your plate (even if you're not hungry); let grandma kiss you (even if you don't want her to). She contends that most people extend this deficient training into their adult lives: "Not only do we go along with something, we often try to make ourselves like it more." To break this momentum, she proposes not only the simple question "How do you want me to touch you?" but also its follow-up: "How do you want to touch me?" These principles are further elaborated throughout the book. Martin, who founded the School of Consent in 2018, repeatedly makes it clear that the clarifying concepts she's outlining will at first seem peculiar to her readers. They will challenge them, she asserts: "Long-held assumptions will crack open, and there will be insights that shake you up." She elaborates on the four "quadrants" of giving and receiving touch--"the Serving Quadrant," "the Taking," "the Accepting," and "the Allowing"--and their permutations (are you touching someone for your pleasure or theirs? Are you allowing yourself to be touched for your pleasure or theirs?). And she continuously reassures her readers that this fundamental realignment of old reflexes will be challenging: "It tends to feel odd, sometimes foreign, occasionally impossible, but when it clicks, there is often a feeling of relief and of recovering something you had lost." She compensates for this strangeness with, among other things, a marvelously open and welcoming prose style, clearly breaking down her concepts in order to help her readers construct a new idea of what touching is--and, by extension, sex and all issues of consent. She stresses that the instructions she's explaining are in fact extremely simple--the hardest part for many of her clients is merely taking them seriously enough to practice them. Admittedly, many readers will need this encouragement; despite the clarity of the author's prose, her explanations can often feel jarringly alien. Surely, some readers will think, there are aspects of interpersonal touching that are basically instinctual; surely, it can seem oddly artificial to dissect every aspect of touching so analytically. The implicit response of Martin's valuable book, written with Dalzen, is simple: Readers can--and must--do more than just follow their instincts. A smartly written and revelatory reexamination of readers' most intimate experiences. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.