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Let's talk about what it means to act in good faith and how that relates to consent and the collective work of building a strong consent seeking and granting culture.
The concept of in good faith can mean a variety of things in different contexts. For our purposes let's agree that we mean to act without the intent to defraud, deceive, or act maliciously towards others.
This seems pretty obvious, yes? A person can't meaningfully grant consent to you if you're planning to trick them, lie to them, or otherwise be an assbag. If you're here to argue otherwise, you might be an assbag too.
Consent is contextual. We have to really establish and get this one, a lot of other concepts flow from here. If we can get this one dialed in we're in good shape for so much more consent culture building...
When we say consent is contextual, we mean that the act/scene/interaction you are consenting to is surrounded by a lot of detail that matters. Some of these details will contain conditions for consent - things that must be present for the person to even consider consenting. These might include aftercare, a specific language/act/framework for engagement, or any number of things.
Outside of conditions for consent, we also have to account for a variety of social contexts, most especially those that carry power differentials. Race, gender, sex, class, age, it all hitches a ride in here. I'm 10 years older than my partner and he genuinely believes that I know more than he does, that I have more wisdom than them. That impacts how they grant me consent to do the things we do. I can't necessarily change his orientation toward my age, but I can account for it.
If you are outright deceptive about the context for consent-seeking then the consent-granting is invalidated. Solicit consent by promising to bang someone while speaking French, only you can't speak French? Nope. Consent to bang? Cest révoqué. Yes, revoked. Taken away. Taken back. Invalidated. That can happen when you set out to trick someone into consent.
So far this is all pretty cut and dry. Consent can seem that way on paper, when we talk about physical acts between two more more bodies. It all sounds so clearly delineated, solvable with affirmative consent granting language. And yet, that's our binary bias showing. The deceptive ease of relegating all situations to good or bad and all people within the situations to a similar goodness and badness can preclude genuine growth within people and communities. It doesn't allow us to see the nuance of human interaction.
When we talk about the complexity of consent-in-flow it gets much more murky. The flexing bonds of conversational consent are, for example, much more tricky to navigate. What does it mean to revoke consent mid-conversation? Can you revoke consent mid-conversation? Does one even consent to a conversation? Certainly, no one likes to be talked at, and is it a consent violation? Is it a consent violation to be a jerk to someone, if they did not first begin the conversation with the idea that you should not be a jerk to them? Philosophy aside, that's just not how human interaction tends to work.
Truthfully, I have no idea when consent violations are occurring in a conversation that is absent of overtly violent language (slurs are consent violations, for instance). Being mean? A jerk? It might be a consent incident. It might be a consent violation. See past writings for distinctions there. It also might not be about consent. I see a lot of conversations happening in bad faith online. We've come to the collective misunderstanding that a gotcha moment is somehow effective.
Laying landmines is violent. Full stop. I can't see how violence on your community will aid in achieving any goals, most especially a healthy consent seeking and granting culture. Trickery and consent don't play well together.
Enter the notion of motive, which is fully separate from consent. Motive is tricky and often we don't want to involve motive because it gives rise to the worst parts of the intent vs impact debate. In this case, I don't suggest we interrogate the motives of the other person in the conversation (how could we), but rather our own. If you are the landmine layer, what is your intent? What's your motive for the gotcha? Are you hoping to expose something that others have not yet seen? Are you hoping to catch or trap someone in a moment, as though it were amber, so that others can witness a thing?
If those are the goals, that may well be a method of achieving them.
It's a terrible way to accomplish change though. If the motive is true change, then there may be a misalignment in method and outcome. True change requires open and vulnerable dialogue. Open and vulnerable dialogue require space and capacity.
Do you know who often does not have space and capacity? Harmed people. This is why advocates exist. This is why therapy exists. None of us are likely to be our best advocate while we are experiencing nervous system dysregulation. See previous writings for an unpacking of how harmed folks are not always reliable narrators and how that's not related to truth telling.
Motive check - are you seeking change or retribution? Do you want understanding or do you want someone to hurt like you hurt?
These aren't objectively bad or wrong goals. It's really normal to want someone to understand the breadth and depth of your pain, and to believe that can only occur through experiencing it directly. (Which might be true, I do not know.) These also aren't goals and outcomes with goingness. They don't move anything forward. More pain begets...more pain. More trickery leads to less consent seeking and granting.
If we're seeking change, we have to figure out how to allow people to be wrong. It has to be not a moral failing to be wrong, so that it can be not an arc of morality to become less wrong.
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