The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent!
by Dr. Betty Martin, with Robyn Dalzen
Get yourself a free chapter
or heck, just go ahead and buy the book!
A smartly written and revelatory reexamination of readers’ most intimate experiences…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.
– Kirkus Reviews
The Wheel of Consent will transform you and every relationship in your life.
– A.V. Flox, author of. Disrupting The Bystander: When #metoo Happens Among Friends
It is the single best tool I know of to clarify sexual dynamics and interpersonal challenges. I use its lessons in my personal and professional life every day.
– Marcia Baczynski, author of Creating Consent Culture
Not only will this book liberate your sex life, it will also help you navigate all your relationships—romantic, social, business, and political—with integrity and generosity. A groundbreaking, life-changing book.
– Barbara Carrellas, author of Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century
Betty Martin’s work is so insightful and impactful in so many dimensions, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
– Caffyn Jesse, Somatic Sex Educator, author of Science for Sexual Happiness
Betty Martin’s work moves the conversation about consent away from an intellectual exercise and lands it right where it belongs, in our embodied responses to each unique situation.
– Chris Maxwell Rose, founder, Pleasure Mechanics
Over the years I have talked about this with Fritz Perls, Abe Maslow, Marilyn Ferguson, Albert Ellis, Byron Katie and many many others. And now the voice of Betty Martin takes the conversation further, and in intriguing detail, in this great book!
– Brad Blanton, Ph.D. author of Radical Honesty
Betty Martin’s new book gives us her wisdom, experience, brainpower and vision so we can receive a more sexually satisfied life and have a better world.
– Annie Sprinkle, sex educator, activist, and author of Assuming the Ecosexual Position.
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®” 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. 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. We also discover that the Art of Receiving invites us to notice and ask for what we really 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 #MeToo movement exposed the pervasiveness of boundary violations in modern culture. 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.