Thread by @krinndnz

Today @PhormUncorked & I spent a while turning a joke into a thought experiment: what if NFPA safety diamonds, but for kink? Of course trying to quantify _kink_ is a fool's errand, but there are related factors where one might reasonably expect consensus. 🧵

NFPA 704 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704 is about _setting expectations_ — without telling you exactly what a cylinder, room, or building contains, a safety diamond tells you how to prepare for interacting with it. More specific than a generic ⚠️, more concise than an MSDS.

To try the thought experiment for yourself, pick a piece of media (or pick a random e621 post e621.net/posts/random if you feel lucky), rate it, then show your consenting co-experimenter the rating _before_ showing them the media. Do they agree with your rating? Why or why not?

The idea here is to practice discussing kink content in a contextualized, holistic way, in a way that makes concrete reference to the world around us rather than appealing to abstract or unknowable factors.

Kink discussions are _incredibly_ prone to people talking past each other, conflating moral judgments with revulsion, and/or leaping to conclusions about unknowable factors. These make it very hard for any participant to emerge from the discussion happier or wiser.

So, the thought experiment goes, what can we say about expressions of sexuality that centers tangible factors — factors where even in disagreement, people have a good chance of talking about the same thing, rather than falling into a wild disarray of same-words-different-meaning?

More practically, what could you put on the slipcase of a piece of porn media that's more specific than "contains explicit content" and more concise than a barrage of e621 tags?

Similar to the NFPA 704 diamond, this little infographic is only helpful when set atop a foundation of good faith. Safety standards can't help people who ignore them; a kink diamond can't speak to abuses of trust. These are specialized tools to aid judgment, not to replace it.

Since this is a thought experiment that two people came up with in a casual way, our expectations are low. We probably made errors! We hope merely to add something helpful to people's mental toolkits for thinking & communicating about kink.

Begin postscripts.
Q: "What's the reference group for squick?"
A: The general public.

Q: "Is this actually useful?"
A: Posting it and letting people scrutinize it is a much better way of finding out than not posting it.

Postscript: It was very interesting to realize how wide some terms are. "Vore" could be anywhere from 0 to 4 on all axes. This scene from The Lion King with Scar, a mouse, & Zazu is a <0,0,0>. (lions do eat those, revulsion rare, common multi-genre trope)