THE ART OF RECEIVING AND GIVING

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.