What kind of speech act is an invitation? What does it do? Invitations create a hospitable space for the invitee to enter. When you invite someone to something, they are not obligated to accept the invitation. But also, you are not merely opening a neutral possibility; you are making clear that they would be welcome. If I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and I want you to please come, and if you don’t I’ll be hurt,’ then I am requesting your presence, not inviting you. Conversely, if I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and you can show up or not, it’s totally up to you, I don’t care either way,’ then this is not really an invitation but perhaps more like an offer; at best it’s a highly unwelcoming, inept invitation. Invitations leave the invitee free to accept or reject them. If you turn down my invitation, I get to be disappointed, but not aggrieved (although I can feel aggrieved if it is turned down rudely or insultingly). An interesting quirk of invitations is that, if they are accepted, gratitude is called for both from the inviter and the invitee. I thank you for coming to my dinner, and you thank me for having you. [...]
A sexual invitation opens up the possibility of sex, and makes clear that sex would be welcome. Invitations are welcoming without being demanding. Although we are usually pleased when people accept our sexual invitations, we generally don’t want people to agree to sex with us as a favour to us, as it would be if it were the granting of a request. And the invitation needs to be felicitous and appropriate. I cannot invite you to have sex with someone else other than me (which would be both infelicitous and unethical). I cannot invite you to have sex with me if doing so would be an abuse of power, or if for other reasons it would be difficult for you to say no to the invitation (which would be both inappropriate and unethical), or at the end of a two-minute chat about the weather in the grocery line (which would be inappropriate and probably uncomfortable). The mere fact that an invitation can be freely turned down does not give people licence to issue infelicitous or inappropriate invitations – which is something that street harassers, for instance, often don’t seem to understand. [...]
An invitation need not presume that the recipient wants to accept it. But a gift offer is designed to be an act of generosity that pleases the recipient (whether or not it succeeds in doing so), and it calls for reciprocation. This is part of why, unlike sexual invitations, sexual gift offers are typically presumptuous and inappropriate in the early stages of getting to know someone, when you don’t yet know what would please them and you aren’t yet in a position to impose an obligation to reciprocate on them. But generous offers of sexual gifts, designed first and foremost to please one’s partner rather than to directly satisfy one’s own sexual desires, are a normal part of an ongoing healthy relationship. Such gifts do create an obligation to reciprocate, though not immediately, or exactly in kind, or on any particular schedule. If you routinely indulge my sexual desires out of generosity, it is disrespectful and undermining of our relationship if I never reciprocate. [...]
Part of what is interesting about safe words is that they let someone exit an activity at any time without having to explain themselves, or accuse anyone of transgression or any other kind of wrongdoing (although they can also be used when there has been a transgression). Calling ‘red’ does not imply that anyone has messed up or violated consent; it simply ends things. It calls for no apology and requires no apology after its use. It is significant that safe words are typically semantically irrelevant words that are not going to otherwise come up in a normal sexual encounter – they are designed to intrude minimally and unambiguously, without calling for interpretation, discussion or conversational response. Without a safe-word system, if I want to abruptly end a scene or activity, I need to say something like: ‘Stop this immediately.’ It’s very difficult for such a speech act not to come off as a rebuke; it almost inevitably creates a rift in our interaction that now needs repairing.
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