by Seq, NCSF Board Member and Chair of the DEI Committee
Q. Please tell us a bit about yourself including any identities you hold
I am Aredvi, hailing from the land of saffron, figs, and pomegranates, known as Iran. As an immigrant, I’ve spent half my life in the US, embracing an Irani-American identity. I navigate my queerness by exploring my body, sexuality, and relationships. Rejecting the confines of colonized ideas of gender, I identify as trans. I am both an artist and a forager, residing with well-managed disabilities in rural Massachusetts.
Q. Please share some things about your history in alt-sex communities
Over the last decade, I’ve crafted educational media on sex, kink, BDSM, and non-normative relationships and practices. Being a person of color and an immigrant has posed challenges in finding my place within alternative sex communities. However, the movement for sexual liberation has yielded several welcoming and celebrating spaces for marginalized folks. Through The HEAL Project, I am honored to have contributed to this co-creation, merging sexual pleasure and healing with the struggles of surviving sexual and relational trauma and the many oppressions that our people are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. I look forward to expanding upon these experiences further.
Q. Please share some of your current projects or activities related to our communities’ interests if there are any you care to share
Currently, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I am connecting with activists, healers, and movement builders through a day-long training titled “Roots to Rising: Cultivating Curiosity & Connection.” Our next destination is the Sex Down South Conference in Atlanta, where we will offer a workshop on transformative relationships devoid of capitalist and carceral norms. Most exciting is our upcoming “Just Healing Retreat,” a 3-day immersive virtual experience centered on communal healing. This retreat is rooted in the Rivera-Azad Sexual Healing Integration Model (RASHIM), co-developed by myself and my partner in this work, Ignacio Rivera.
Q. How did you get into consent work?
During my early twenties, while doing rape prevention work, consent was the central topic. I remember the frustrations of feminists like myself because phrases like “no means no” demanded extensive education for recognition in mainstream culture. As I have continued my work in examining the Culture of Sexual Violence and asking what it takes to prevent and end childhood sexual abuse (and all forms of sexual violence), understanding consent has become an integral part of the process.
Q. What would you like to see in regards to consent education for our communities?
Sexual violence is a form of relational violence and so consent education cannot be limited to sexual interactions; it is about all of our connections and relationships. This includes friendships, (a)romantic/(a)sexual relationships, marriages, as well as our dynamics within the workspace, schools, religious institutions, and family.
As much as I wish consent practices were mainstream and easy to follow, looking deeper into our culture, it becomes clear why so many people struggle with the concept of consent. How do we expect people to practice good consent – and I will explain what I mean by that in a second – when it is not something that we get to practice anywhere else. In fact, we are constantly taught otherwise. Our agency and autonomy is constantly under threat, and most of us have to say ‘yes’ – when we really mean to say ‘no’ – just to survive. So it’s no longer a surprise for me to see that as simple as consent should be, the reality is much more complicated.
I would like us to start thinking about consent as a skill that begins within and is practiced with community and on all levels of the society. Consent education has gone through many iterations and formulations from ‘informed and enthusiastic’ consent, to various checklists and playful ways of communicating what works and doesn’t. But I think there is still so much more to be desired. What does it mean to consent to a sex act when most of us walk around disconnected from our bodies, our needs, our boundaries, and our desires? How can we claim that an interaction is consensual when there is no basis for knowledge and education one might have around sexual and emotional health and well-being? I think consent is a low bar anyways, but as things are, we can’t even confidently get there.
I promised earlier to talk about what I consider good consent practices. I believe it is impossible to engage in truly consensual interactions without being deeply in touch with oneself and trusting that others have access to their own internal processes. I am aware that this is a lot to ask for and that we live in an imperfect world. Yet, within this context strengthening our connection skills is key to practicing good consent.
As an example, I talk about the importance of intuition in practicing good consent. Much of consent education has focused on external ways of obtaining and revoking consent and skipping the important step of knowing what a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ feels like in our body – or what happens within us in between the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’. Then we have to also be able to energetically make it possible for others to engage with us in their full autotomy. Yes, it is a great idea to ask before we act, and it is even better when we feel before we even ask. This means feeling our body connecting to our desires, becoming aware of our traumas, and also tuning into the conditions in which everything is taking place including power dynamics embedded in every interaction. This is why intuition is such a vital tool in making meaningful consent happen.
Q. What do you think people need to know about consent for kink and non-monogamy?
Kink and non-monogamous communities have contributed significantly to consent education, countering mainstream misconceptions about kinky and non-monogamous practices. Pushing against the stigma has resulted in consent being a part of the language of kinky and non-monogamous people. We see this in the use of terms like RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) and CNM (Consensual Non-Monogamy).
As much as we have contributed to consent education, because we exist within the larger Culture of Sexual Violence, consent violations continue to happen within our communities too. I think first of all we need to set the standard higher than consent. We need to start examining how we show up in all of our relationships and whether we are empowered to determine what does and does not work for us, and even sit with the not-knowing and make decisions and explore anyways.
I have engaged in plenty of consensual interactions that were simply unpleasant, unsatisfactory, or even regretful. I have spent a lot of time getting stuck trying to figure out if what happened was consensual or not, instead of focusing on my feelings about it and what I (and my partners) needed. Sometimes it feels like we have to be able to pinpoint whether something was consensual or unconsensual before speaking about how we are impacted and seeking support.
There is now a binary of consensual as the “gold standard” versus unconsensual as disgusting and criminal. We have fallen into another false binary, influenced by carceral systems and responses. We desperately want answers that are easy so we can make a judgement; to be able to point the finger and say we are ethical people and not like those ones over there. I think as kinky and non-monogamous people continue to lead the movement for sexual liberation, we need to start acknowledging that consent work is much more complicated and it begins by doing internal work for each and every one of us and not just those people who don’t understand consent.
Q. How can people help do consent advocacy for marginalized communities?
Dismantling systems of oppression facilitates consent in marginalized communities. True consent remains elusive when injustice prevails. To establish a foundation for consent, marginalized communities need improved material conditions.
Under the current system, so many of us depend on (a)romantic and (a)sexual connections and relationships for survival of various kind. We depend on these relationships for housing, healthcare, and just being able to make it in this world. When the culture and the system is set up to make our survival a condition of maintaining these types of relationships, how can we possibly freely consent under these conditions?
So let’s start by redistributing wealth and power and ensuring that no one is going without their basic needs being met regardless of their relationship status or their ability to have or want sex and romance.
Q. What do you hope to witness in the future in alt-sex communities in general?
What I desire is transcending the “alternative” label and being fully integrated in the larger culture. I often daydream about a sexually liberated world and what that looks like: a world in which sex talks are normalized for everyone from birth to crossing over; a world in which all bodies are liberated from oppression and inequality and get to self-determine their desire with dignity. In that world, being kinky or non-monogamous will not be limited to small privileged groups who create their own local oasis or have to constantly navigate sexual oppression. Instead, kink, non-monogamy and other practices that are currently considered non-normative will be viable options among others. This means none of these options will be rewarded or punished by our families, friends, the society, or the state.
I hope to witness a world in which I can trust myself and others to not only consent with confidence, but also engage in connections that are much more interesting than just consensual; connections that are transformative and spiritually enriching; connections that help us recenter and remember the beauty of community and what it means to be an individual yet connected to everyone and everything else.
Bio: Aredvi Azad (they/them) is a speaker, educator, and trainer building the movement for sexual healing and liberation. Aredvi has a decade of experience creating educational media and programming on gender and sexuality, intersectional approaches to relationship building, survivor healing, and prevention of sexual violence. As an Irani-American queer and trans/non-binary immigrant living with multiple disabilities, Aredvi’s work focuses on the link between sexual violence, especially childhood sexual abuse, and the oppressive traumas of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other systems of inequality. As a scientist-turned-sex-educator, Aredvi is working towards a sexually imaginative and expansive world. Aredvi is the Co-Executive Director at The HEAL Project, on a mission to prevent and end childhood sexual abuse through healing the wounds of sexual oppression and embracing sexual liberation.
Social Media: https://heal2end.org