When it comes to consent, who do you think knows best? A cop or a dominatrix? Police Scotland seemed pretty sure the answer wasn’t them, so they went with the dominatrix. Sort of.
They recently launched a campaign about domestic abuse featuring an OnlyFans star and member of the kink community as the face of the campaign—and man, did the public have big feelings about it. Pearls were clutched all around, even though, when it comes to consent, sex workers and members of the kink community know the territory better than anyone.
The campaign’s primary goal was to raise awareness about consent in relationships and what that actually looks like. Police Scotland hired Ross Rankin—an explicit content creator in the kink niche on OnlyFans—to be the face of the campaign. The backlash was swift, though Police Scotland made an effort to stand by their choice.
You see, when it comes to sex workers in general, society still tends to look down on them as somehow being other. Never mind that they’re just people showing up to do a job that has quite a bit of demand. Because the work they do is perceived as taboo, they tend to get the side-eye far more easily than, say, people who gamble with someone else’s money for a living—I think we call them stockbrokers? Anyhow, throw in the fact that Rankin is also a member of a second misunderstood group—the kink community—and you have a recipe for some piping hot hypocrisy.
Mainstream media loves nothing more than to preach about the immorality of celebrating healthy sex lives while simultaneously profiting off sex. Society only really respects sex workers when it’s convenient—a toast to the Magic Mike franchise, if you please—but in general, sex workers are treated as a dirty little secret everyone looks down on. And the very same people decrying the work that adult entertainers do? They’re often the ones consuming it the most.
When it comes to understanding the risks of domestic abuse and what consent really means, sex workers and kink communities are the experts. In BDSM, nothing happens without clear and enthusiastic consent. Safeguards are firmly established before any encounter so that everyone knows the code words for “stop, I’m not okay.” If that’s not how things play out? Then that’s not BDSM—it’s assault. And abusers get found out and bounced from the community very quickly.
In more traditional relationships? Well. Women joke about having a headache for a reason. People fumble with boundaries all the time, which is why having a sex worker who specializes in kink—two communities that set the gold standard of consent—as the face of a consent campaign was actually pretty perfect.
Rankin’s ad has since been pulled from the media, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean unconventional voices should be ignored when deciding who does and doesn’t get to be deemed credible in consent education.
So, who do you trust to teach consent more effectively? The person whose job is enforcing the rules, or the person who has to live and breathe by them?
Next time Police Scotland decides to promote a consent campaign, maybe they should grow a pair and stick with a sex worker. Just—maybe use handcuffs, so everyone is on the same page.
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