Raves and Reviews for
the Wheel of Consent®
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, author of Assuming the Ecosexual Position.
Deceptively simple, yet stunningly nuanced, the Wheel of Consent helps peel back layers of confusion around the basics of human interaction: giving and receiving. 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, co-author of Creating Consent Culture.
The way we teach and understand consent is static and flat, when human interaction — including sex — is a multi-dimensional thing in motion. What Betty Martin has done with her Wheel of Consent is encapsulate the multi-dimensional and dynamic reality of human interaction in an elegant model that anyone can understand. 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
The Wheel of Consent framework and the questions it asks have become universally integrated into the way I construct critical thought, solve problems and move through the world. It’s where I try to begin, professionally and personally: what are you doing, and who is it for? I think it extends beyond the interpersonal and the somatic, too, providing a framework for interpreting many of the power dynamics we experience in the wider world.
Gala Vanting, writer, educator, sex worker advocate
I
have used Betty’s Wheel of Consent to help countless students and clients get unstuck in their erotic relating by offering them the simple and profound understanding of the very real, yet subtle, differences between giving, taking, receiving and allowing. 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
The Wheel of Consent teaches me every day about my relationship with care attuned with my wants, what I’m willing to do and what I have had enough of. It teaches adults to how to play in win-win harmony opening the senses to feel more and fear less. Ultimately it is a spiritual path into experiencing generosity and gratitude, integrity and surrender. I am in deep gratitude to Betty teaching these step by step routes back into congruence with care and duty of care.
Katie Sarra, artist, Body Poet, Somatic sex Educator, Eros Therapist, co-founder and teacher of Sea School of Embodiment
Betty Martin’s work is so insightful and impactful in so many dimensions, I cannot recommend it highly enough. As a teacher, a partner, and a contributor to multiple communities devoted to co-creation of sustainable and loving worlds, I celebrate its ever unfolding shapes, and import, and how it holds such endless guidance for choosing and practicing integrity, goodness and joy.
Caffyn Jesse, Somatic Sex Educator, author of Intimacy Educator: Teaching through Touch, Science for Sexual Happiness: A Guide to Reclaiming Erotic Pleasure, and Elements of Intimacy: The Dance of Loving Connection
When I learned the Wheel of Consent with my partner it felt like someone waved a magic wand at us. It was a simple, yet profound, and it brought us closer than ever by clarifying touch, problems and differences between us – AND most importantly – it provided a solution for them.
The magic of the Wheel of Consent continues to amaze me and when my daughter asks me “Do you want to play the 3-minute?” I feel proud and happy that I can give to her what I had to wait a long time for.
Sofia Kreissl, Pleasure Therapist, www.pleasuretherapy.org
Betty t
aught me the joy, slowness, and surprise of one-way-touch—Am I touching you for your pleasure, or my pleasure? And is your body, or my body, going to be the the “canvass” for our erotic painting this afternoon? Betty’s teachings transform sex play into tasty morsels–savored and sipped–while you express your desires, and hear your partner’s, with new skills, ease and comfort of consent. Brava Betty, your pioneering work has empowered tens of hundreds of my sex coaching students!
Charla Hathaway, author of 8 Erotic Nights: Passionate Encounters That Inspire Great Sex for a Lifetime
Betty Martin has spent 3
0 years teaching professionals and students how to touch with more clarity, consent and kindness. Now, with this long awaited book, she brings her wisdom to the hands that matter most: yours.
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. This book will empower you with the tools to bravely ask for what you want, hold clear boundaries and negotiate with confidence. Betty brings us out of the sterile conversations about consent and back home to the rich landscape of human connection.
Chris Maxwell Rose, founder, PleasureMechanics.com
Dear Reader, Wow!
You are in for a treat! This book is about contact between humans being, including, but not limited to sexual contact. Betty Martin is introducing the dilemmas of contact for people with minds and bodies already trying to tell the difference between mindfuckland and reality, and what happens when there are two or more of them at the same time!
This is one of the most profound dilemmas of current humans—that we all want and need contact, and we all want and need withdrawal—but hardly ever at the same time or to the same degree! And we very seldom know clearly what either one of us want, and even then we seldom risk saying so! No wonder our closest sense of intimacy sometimes is that we are all going crazy together! Our best friends are at least a part of our looney toons alliance!
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: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth, and other books. www.radicalhonesty.com
About working with the Wheel of Consent
I took your weekend*long course in Portland over this past summer and the learning has stayed with me and deepened and gets juicier! I just referred to you on my facebook page, sharing the idea of making a *30 second plan!* This was a big take-away for me from that weekend. Even when I think I don’t “know” what I want, I can commit to a 30second plan, for which I can identify *exactly* what I want. Brilliant. So, just thinking of you and feeling grateful to have trained with you. I’d do it again and again in a heartbeat, and will look forward to seeking out those opportunities around the Northwest. — T.
When it comes to the Wheel of Consent, I consider myself an anomaly. Receiving touch or anything for that matter is not usually a problem, and especially as a cis-woman, people are often astonished that I love taking and love being served. What I wasn’t aware of in myself after doing the Wheel of Consent deep dive with Betty Martin in her exceptional workshop called Like A Pro, was that while it was easy to receive touch and things, I never truly received the person. I was so focused on the gift I was receiving that I never stopped to slow down and look at the person that was so lovingly giving to me. The “thank you“ after receiving, while I gave it lip service and I’m good at following directions, was never truly authentic. This new “Thank you” awareness was more powerful and heart opening than anything I had learned before. The exchange of touch, the awareness of consent, and the gift between friends mean nothing if we lose the humanity, the person, the giver in the gift. Consent, now I understand, must include the human connection. Both a yes and a no are an invitation to go deeper with each other, to know each other in a new way. This is the power of the Wheel of Consent practiced in gratitude. — Janet