Code of Conduct

1. Purpose and Scope

This Code of Conduct governs every CARNALIFE member, at every CARNALIFE event, in every CARNALIFE digital space, from the moment an application is approved until membership ends. It applies equally regardless of tenure, vetting tier, or role. No member is exempt, including reviewers and admins acting outside their staff role.

It also governs guests, at the events that are open to them. Some CARNALIFE events are open to people who are not members and have not been vetted: munches, meetups and similar public, clothed evenings where nothing happens beyond a meal and a conversation. A guest is bound by this Code from the moment they accept the guest terms until the event they are attending ends, and by Section 6 for good afterwards. They are bound for the same reason members are. These rules describe how people behave in a room together, and a room does not become safer because somebody in it has not applied for anything.

Where Sections 3, 4, 6 and 9 say "member", read "anybody present" whenever the setting is an event a guest may attend. The other sections are about membership itself and reach members only: Section 5, because content creation is never open to guests; Section 7's revocation grounds and Section 8's reinstatement paths, because a guest has no membership to lose. What stands in their place for a guest is stated at the end of Section 7.

It exists because consent is infrastructure at CARNALIFE, not a formality members are asked to sign once and never think about again. Vetting decides who gets in. This document decides what happens after.

2. Core Principles

Consent is ongoing, specific, and revocable at any time, by anyone, without explanation. A yes to one act, one partner, or one moment is not a yes to anything else. Silence is not consent. A prior yes is not a standing yes.

Discretion is respect, not secrecy. Members do not out, photograph without consent, or discuss another member's presence, identity, or activity outside the space where it happened. This applies to people you like as much as people you don't.

Embodiment is a core value, not a marketing line. This Code applies the same way regardless of a member's body type, orientation, or relationship structure. No member is held to a different standard because of who they are.

CARNALIFE would rather lose an ambiguous case than let a real violation back in. Every rule below is written with that asymmetry in mind.

3. Consent Standards

Consent at a CARNALIFE event or in a CARNALIFE space means an enthusiastic, specific, sober, and freely given yes, checked for continuously, not assumed from a prior interaction, a relationship, an event ticket, or a membership itself. Purchasing a ticket or holding membership is never, under any circumstance, treated as consent to any specific act with any specific person.

Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Withdrawal, by word, safeword, or clear physical signal, ends the activity immediately. There is no negotiation period after a withdrawal.

Consent is specific. Agreeing to one activity, or with one partner, is not agreement to another activity, or another partner, even in the same scene or the same night.

Consent requires the capacity to give it. A member who is intoxicated past the point of clear judgment, asleep, or otherwise incapacitated cannot consent, regardless of what they agreed to earlier in the evening. Capacity is judged in the moment using all three available signals together, not any one alone: the member's own self-report, a staff member's direct observation, and a buddy-system check with whoever they arrived with or are playing alongside. Any one of the three raising a concern is enough to pause and check in before anything continues.

Safewords or an equivalent stop signal are required at any event involving impact, restraint, or intensity play, and CARNALIFE has one house standard: the traffic light. Under it, red means stop, yellow means yield, and green means consent has been expressed. Every member, guest, and monitor is expected to know it, so that a signal means the same thing everywhere in the room. Red ends the activity immediately, and a monitor who hears it will step in whether or not they are part of the scene. Yellow means slow down and check in before anything continues. Green is the person saying yes to carrying on. Tapping out is the non-verbal red: three taps on a partner or on any surface means stop, for anyone who is gagged, non-verbal, or cannot be heard. Participants may agree an additional signal of their own before play starts, as long as everyone involved understands it before anything begins, but a personal signal is always in addition to the house standard, never instead of it. Red, and tapping out, always work.

4. Member Conduct at Events

No photography or recording of any kind without the explicit, specific consent of everyone who would appear in the frame. This includes members in the background of a shot, not only the intended subject. Phones and cameras are expected to stay away during play in shared spaces unless a host has designated an explicit photo area with active opt-in.

No means no, every time, from everyone, without exception or negotiation. A refusal is never treated as an opening move. Pressuring, guilting, or repeatedly asking after a refusal is itself a violation, independent of whether the original request would have been acceptable.

Respect event-specific ratio and RSVP policies. CARNALIFE events set attendance ratios for safety and comfort reasons (Brand Bible Section 21.5, Business Plan). Showing up without an RSVP, or misrepresenting your relationship structure to game a ratio, is a vetting-dishonesty matter, not a minor etiquette lapse.

Nobody is brought through the door on the night. At a members-only event, arriving with an unvetted guest is vetting dishonesty, unless that person was approved in advance through the guest-request process. At an event open to guests, a guest takes their own place, in their own name, and accepts these terms themselves. Neither route lets one person vouch another in at the door, and which kind of event this is was decided when it was published, not on the pavement outside it. The one exception is not a vouch at the door: a membership applicant whose vetting is already complete, and whose fast-track an admin approved before the night, can have that approval finished at the door once door staff have confirmed who they are. Nothing about them is decided on the night that was not already decided beforehand.

Respect the physical and emotional space of others. Entering someone's scene, commenting on activity in progress, or touching equipment, furniture, or another member's belongings without invitation is not acceptable, even when curious or well-intentioned.

Aftercare space is protected. Members visibly in aftercare, in a designated aftercare area or otherwise, are not to be approached, photographed, or engaged unless they initiate it.

5. Content Creation and Recording

CARNALIFE occasionally facilitates content creation scenes: organized photography or video, beyond the incidental personal-phone use covered in Section 4. This section governs those scenes specifically, and it is stricter than Section 4, not looser. Recording as part of an organized content scene is not a smaller version of the no-photography-without-consent rule. It is a separate activity with its own paperwork and its own consent layer.

Participation is voluntary and separate from membership. A member's vetting status, tenure, or standing on the platform never depends on whether they participate in content creation. No member is ever made to feel that declining a content scene affects anything else about their membership.

All required forms must be signed before any recording begins, not after. This includes, at minimum: a performer/model release, a scene-specific content consent form describing what activity will be recorded, and an acknowledgment of how the resulting content may be used and distributed. A shoot does not start until every participant's paperwork is complete. Verbal agreement on set is not a substitute for a signed form.

Consent to participate in a scene and consent to how the resulting footage is used are two different things, and are treated as two different things. A member can consent to being filmed and still set specific limits on distribution: internal/members-only use versus public release, face-blurred versus unblurred, specific platforms excluded. Those limits are recorded in writing at the time of the shoot, not negotiated after the fact.

Withdrawal of consent to appear in a scene, mid-shoot, works exactly like Section 3: immediate and without negotiation. A participant can stop a content scene at any point, the same as any other scene.

Withdrawing consent to appear is not the same as withdrawing consent to publish already-recorded footage, and the two are governed differently. As a matter of default contract law, a validly signed release granting consent to record and distribute, signed with real consideration and without fraud, coercion, duress, or impaired capacity, is not something the person who signed it can unilaterally revoke afterward just by changing their mind. That is the entire function of a release: it gives the other party certainty, and courts treat a signed release as presumptively valid, setting a high bar for undoing one.

CARNALIFE goes beyond that legal floor as a matter of policy, not legal obligation. A member may formally petition admin, in writing, to withdraw consent to further publish or distribute footage they already appear in. Admin reviews each petition and decides whether to grant it, weighing: how long ago the content was published, whether copies have already been distributed to or licensed by third parties outside CARNALIFE's direct control, the member's stated reason, and whether granting the request is actually achievable (CARNALIFE can pull content from its own platforms; it cannot retrieve a copy someone else already saved). Granting a petition is not automatic, and it is not yet a right written into the release form itself. If this petition process is meant to be a binding right a member can enforce against CARNALIFE, rather than a discretionary courtesy, the underlying content release form needs its own explicit revocation clause drafted by counsel. A promise made only in this policy document, without matching language in the signed release itself, carries little legal weight against the release's own terms.

Discretion protections in Section 6 apply in full to content creation, and then some. A member appearing in CARNALIFE content is never identified by legal name, and any identifying detail beyond what the member explicitly consented to showing is treated as a discretion violation under Section 6, regardless of who caused it.

CARNALIFE staff overseeing a content scene are held to the same recusal standard as Section 8's enforcement staff. A staff member does not oversee, direct, or make decisions about a scene involving their own partner, metamour, or someone they are currently seeing.

6. Discretion and Confidentiality

Members do not disclose another member's identity, attendance, or activity outside a CARNALIFE space, to anyone, for any reason, including to other members who were not present. This includes social media, group chats, and casual conversation with people outside the community.

Members do not out another member's involvement in the lifestyle, kink identity, or relationship structure to anyone outside CARNALIFE, under any circumstance, even to people the member believes are trustworthy.

A member under review or investigation for a violation of this Code is never publicly named. The outcome of any investigation is shared only with the parties directly involved. This applies even after a member is removed.

These obligations survive membership. A former member remains bound by the discretion rules in this section for anything they learned or witnessed while a member.

Guests are bound by this section in full, and it does not end when the event does. Somebody attending as a guest sees who is in the room. Naming them, photographing them, or repeating any of it afterwards is the same violation it would be from a member, and is treated the same way. This obligation does not depend on whether the guest ever applies, and it does not lapse if they never come back. It asks the most of the person who has been vetted for nothing, which is exactly why it is written down rather than assumed.

7. Grounds for Suspension or Revocation

Membership can be suspended or revoked at CARNALIFE's sole discretion, at any time, for any of the following. This list matches the categories used in CARNALIFE's own enforcement system and is not exhaustive:

• Consent violation: any breach of Section 3 or Section 4's no-means-no standard, including a single incident.
• Safety incident: conduct that endangers another member's physical or emotional safety, whether or not it rises to a consent violation. Logged independently of any resulting revocation, so a pattern can be seen even when no single incident alone justified removal.
• Vetting dishonesty: lying or materially misrepresenting anything during application or vetting, including relationship structure, identity, age, health-verification status, or reason for applying. It also covers attending an event that requires a health verification after learning of a positive result for any test in the verification set, without first withdrawing your verification, which takes one button on your profile. Discovered after approval, this is grounds for immediate revocation regardless of how long the person has been a member.
• Other: conduct that damages trust in the community in a way not captured above, at CARNALIFE's discretion. This category exists because a fixed list can never anticipate every real situation, not as a way to avoid stating real reasons.

The same grounds reach a guest, and the consequence is a bar rather than a revocation. A guest has no membership to revoke. A guest who breaches this Code is removed from the event, refused a place at any future one, and barred from applying for membership. The bar is recorded the same way a revocation is, and is honoured by guest registration and by the membership application alike, so it cannot be walked around by using whichever route was not used the first time. Vetting dishonesty reads for a guest as it does for a member, and covers lying about identity or age.

8. Enforcement Process

A reported violation is investigated before any decision is made. CARNALIFE does not act on rumor or secondhand account alone; a decision is based on confirmed facts.

The reporting member's aftercare comes first. Support and resources are offered to the person who reported before any process concerning the reported member begins, and regardless of the investigation's outcome.

The process is confidential. Neither the fact that a review is happening, nor its outcome, is shared beyond the parties directly involved and the staff conducting it.

Removal is permanent by default. CARNALIFE does not offer an appeal of a revocation decision. Where reinstatement is possible at all, it requires a full new vetting process from the beginning, on the same terms as a first-time applicant, not a review of the original decision, and eligibility depends on the ground for the original revocation:

• A consent violation combined with a safety incident is permanent. There is no reinstatement path.
• A consent violation on its own is evaluated on whether the underlying conduct was a failure to honor a withdrawal (consent was given, then revoked mid-encounter, and the violation was not stopping in time) versus conduct where no consent existed at any point. The former may be considered for reinstatement through full re-vetting. The latter is treated the same as a consent violation combined with a safety incident: permanent, no path back.
• A safety incident on its own, or a revocation under the "other" category, is evaluated case by case at CARNALIFE's sole discretion.
• A single vetting-dishonesty finding with no safety component is eligible for reinstatement through full re-vetting.

Staff conducting the review recuse themselves from a case involving someone they have a personal relationship with. A reviewer or admin never adjudicates a report involving their own partner, metamour, or someone they are currently seeing.

9. Reporting a Concern

Any member can report a concern about the conduct of anybody at a CARNALIFE event or in a CARNALIFE space, at any time, without needing to be the person directly affected. A report is taken seriously regardless of the reporter's vetting tier, tenure, or relationship to the person reported.

A guest can report on the same terms, and a report from a guest carries the same weight. The standing that matters is having been in the room, not having been vetted. A guest is the person least likely to know how to raise something and most likely to assume it is not their place to, which is why it is stated here rather than left to be inferred.

Reports are never minimized, joked about, or handled with any hint of the Hedonist brand voice. A report is met with the Guardian voice only: certain, unhesitating, and taken at face value until the investigation says otherwise.

A member or guest who reports in good faith is never penalized for the report, even if the investigation does not substantiate it, unless the report itself is later shown to have been made in bad faith or with knowing falsehood.

10. What This Document Does Not Protect You From

This section exists because the distinction it describes is easy to get wrong, and getting it wrong is dangerous.

A signed liability waiver or consent form protects CARNALIFE and its members on the civil side. Florida enforces clear, well-drafted liability waivers for adults engaging in risky recreational activity (Sanislo v. Give Kids the World, Fla. 2015). Signing CARNALIFE's waiver is real protection against a civil lawsuit arising from the ordinary risks of the activity you agreed to.

A signed waiver, or the fact that an activity was consensual, is generally not a defense to a criminal charge. Florida criminal assault and battery law does not, as a general matter, recognize consent as a defense in the BDSM context. This means that if an incident at a CARNALIFE event rises to the level of a genuine crime, the fact that the people involved had a consent framework, a safeword system, or a signed form does not shield anyone from criminal liability, and does not shield CARNALIFE from having to cooperate with a criminal investigation.

The same caveat applies to every content-creation release form described in Section 5. A signed release protects CARNALIFE and its members on the civil and rights-of-use side. It does not turn a criminal act that occurs during a shoot into a lawful one.

This Code of Conduct, CARNALIFE's vetting process, and any consent form a member signs are community safety and civil-liability tools. None of them are, or are described to members as, a shield against criminal prosecution if an actual crime occurs. Any language anywhere in CARNALIFE's materials that could be read as promising otherwise needs to be corrected before this document is finalized.

11. Acknowledgment

Every member affirmatively agrees to this Code of Conduct as a condition of membership, separately from and in addition to any event-specific waiver signed at check-in. A member agrees when they apply, and again whenever this Code changes, before they can use the member area or work a shift. Each agreement is recorded with the version, the time, and a fingerprint of the exact words the member was shown, so it can always be shown which words a member agreed to.

A guest affirms this Code before they can hold a place at an event, as one of the points in the guest terms, recorded with a version, a timestamp, and a hash of the exact words they were shown. That acceptance is what binds a guest under Section 1. It is not an application, and it creates no membership.

Participation in a content creation scene under Section 5 requires its own separate forms, signed at the time of that scene. Agreeing to this Code of Conduct does not substitute for, and is not substituted by, those scene-specific agreements.