The Black Rock City Bureau of Erotic Discourse (BED) is a team of volunteers who gather each year at Burning Man to provide information and promote consent culture.
BED is going virtual! If COVID has taught us anything it’s how to adapt to using our online tools to spread the message of consent. Normally, a BED representative will come to your camp during Burning Man to gift a talk on how to talk about sex, rejection, and keeping us safer through community. Why not bring that year round so we can watch over each other in the default world too?
The purpose of this training is to start getting your camp talking about consent culture and how we can keep the people around us supported. Our talks have typically been pretty long so we are going to condense them down with a curriculum for camps to complete.
We're fundraising for a unique opportunity we have to reduce logistical brainpower and focus on improving our content! Please share or donate!
https://givebutter.com/bedfundraiser
Note: Signing up to Teachable will create your account, but you will still need to enroll in BEDucator Training to access the content. Click the course below to get started!
Become a BEDucator
IMMEDIACY! Let's get started! It's Radically Self Reliant this year and your camp's participation will continue to grow this new way of spreading our 11th Principle of Consent! The goal of taking everything online is to reach more camps through technology before the burn and to have familiar faces talking about how YOUR camp can have the conversation about consent. We will be looking for your feedback after we've all recovered from Burning Man.
Become A BEDucator
A BEDucator is YOU! You sign up to educate yourself on consent culture through BED’s video curriculum. You have volunteered yourself as the known person to talk about preventative consent concepts, rejection, and how to deal with Teachable Moments.
This is not to say you are an expert in dealing with complicated situations, but that you have taken the time to learn how to teach others on what to do if they are presented with uncomfortable situations. The more people in your camp who take the course just means the more support your camp has for each other.
Start A Theme Camp Organizer (TCO) Consent Policy
The BEDucator gets with their Camp Leads in a 1-hour long meeting to decide how escalations will be handled and by whom. We will provide you a guide on how to fill this out with your camp and an example of what BED's looks like after doing this exercise. The purpose of this is to foreshadow what the Problem/Resolution is by the members of your own camp.
Many people have gotten stuck on how to confront or even identify a Teachable Moment. We have provided a consent enforcement procedure that we have found works.
Give A BED Talk at Burning Man
The BEDucator gifts, or assigns, a BED presentation at their camp. This will either be you or someone in your camp talking about the Consent Policy you created in your TCO meeting and verbalizing your transcribed Problem/Resolution procedure.
Practice consent by taking a camp photo and allowing anyone who does not consent to be in the picture to sit out. We'd love to see your pictures after burn! If it works with your camp meeting schedule, open up the floor to discuss the topic of consent with your campmates.
Hi, I’m Momo
I've been in BED since 2017 and officially joined the Board of Directors in 2018. Watching the way the world has been frustrated with consent has taught me to listen to a larger group more than telling people how to be. If you're here, you have a concern for harm reduction and believe in the support of the people who have a similar concern. The concepts in these lessons are practiced in my default world career with data to prove significant reductions in unwanted encounters, support from your immediate community, and an overall more freeing environment to be in.