The Last Part of Ethical Intimacy: Tools and Practical Answers

Monday, April 7, 2025

1. Mutual Recognition: • Tool: Active and tuned listening.

In every encounter, it is essential to recognize the other in their entirety, without projection or possession. This requires deep listening, where we perceive and embrace the other’s desires, needs, and limits without judgment or haste. Every word, every gesture must be taken into account with the intention of seeing the other as a complete being, not as an object of desire to be consumed or used.

2. Full Subjectivity: • Tool: Cultivate full awareness of one’s own subjectivity and maintain it active in each interaction.

It is crucial to never lose sight of the other’s subjectivity, but also of one’s own. Desires must be shared in a framework of informed consent, where each being’s sovereignty is respected at every moment. This means that neither partner should be forced into a role, an object, or merely a response to the other. Every movement, every action, must be a manifestation of this mutual autonomy.

3. Balance in Exchange: • Tool: Emotional and physical self-regulation.

Ethical intimacy relies on a constant balance between recognizing desire and respecting limits. This implies constant awareness of the balance between excitement and full consciousness, with a return to the question: Is the other still whole?. If either partner feels reduced, erased, or intruded upon, it is crucial to pause, readjust the interaction, and ensure that consent is maintained. Balance is maintained through mutual adjustment, in a dance of listening and respect.

4. Refusal of Asymmetry: • Tool: Redefining norms and expectations.

One of the essential keys to ethical intimacy is to dissolve the asymmetries in relationships. This requires an active reconstruction of roles and expectations: neither the woman nor the man should be seen as the giver or receiver, but rather as two complete beings, co-creating the intimate space. Intimacy is not a space of exploitation or validation, but of shared equality, where one’s desire never eclipses the subjectivity of the other. The work here is to accept that excitement is not a goal but a shared energy in an exchange of reciprocity.

5. Respecting Boundaries: • Tool: Intuition and self-regulation in intensity.

Knowing when to stop is, first and foremost, knowing how to listen to the other and to oneself. Ethical intimacy is never forced, and there is an invisible space where the bodies can meet without ever losing themselves. This requires emotional intelligence that knows when the intensity could become intrusive. The gestures, words, desires, must always be adjusted to the presence of the other, in full respect of their subjectivity. The boundary is not a rigid rule, but an active sensitivity, where consent is not only verbal but felt.

6. Liberation of Body and Soul: • Tool: Create intimate spaces of conscious autonomy.

Each partner in ethical intimacy must be able to free themselves from social expectations and normative projections. This includes the liberation of the body from societal and physical prescriptions, and the liberation of the soul from any form of submission or self-abnegation. For this, intimacy must be experienced as a private territory, where desires are lived as authentic expressions and not as imposed expectations. Every gesture, every word, every movement must be freed from any social obligation.

In summary, the last part of ethical intimacy is defined by mutual respect and active recognition of the other’s complete humanity. This is practiced through cultivating one’s own subjectivity and the other’s, through constant adjustment in exchange, through refusal of asymmetries, and by a sustained attention to intimate boundaries, which must be adjusted as we go. It’s not just a theoretical proposal, but a practical reality.

This requires slow reconstruction, rupture of imposed codes, and a gradual liberation of bodies and minds in this dynamic of co-creation.