As we approach the one-year anniversary of the mainstreaming of the #MeToo movement, there may be no single event seemingly more suited to testing its momentum than Burning Man. The massive annual hedonistic “don’t call it a festival” in the Nevada desert is historically anarchic, conceived in its earliest years by a group of San Francisco artists as an experimental, autonomous zone, where they could, at first, be free to make stuff and set it on fire.
More than 30 years and several thousands of attendees later, Black Rock City’s temporary residents have largely submitted to the laws of the land (including those enforced by the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office: the drive-by shooting range, for example, is no more), but the event still largely eschews order. When popular DJs and other musical acts perform at Burning Man, they are asked not to publicize their sets, nor is there any hierarchy among theme camps, which can number a few dozen to hundreds of people, to determine a run of show. Elaborate (and frequently skimpy) costumes are often procured in advance—occasionally, nowadays, with the help of a stylist—and are worn to shreds amid storms of alkaline “playa dust.” Officially, nothing is for sale, except for coffee and ice, part of the event’s de-commodification ethos.
The popular refrain is that “your Burn is your Burn” (essentially, “you do you”)—you can flit between massive art installations; Champagne-fueled dance parties; the famed and self-explanatory Orgy Dome; the Thunderdome, where you can fight a friend; a mass group rinse in a huge glass square box called “Foam Against the Machine” (suds provided by David Bronner, of Dr. Bronner’s soap); and all manner of structures and play places, all built in the run-up to one week of ultimate freedom, with little cell service or Internet, “on playa.” Accordingly, Burning Man has received criticism as a privileged playland for the largely wealthy, largely white elite who can afford it, a crowd increasingly populated by tech oligarchs from Silicon Valley, who fly into Burning Man on private planes.
So the question remains: How have the #MeToo movement and its calls for increased accountability, reporting, and protocol surrounding sexual misconduct been received in this determinedly unstructured, decidedly unsober setting? The answer is a little anticlimactic, since they’ve long been a part of the proceedings.
Five years before #MeToo blazed across Hollywood, activists began calling for an addendum to Burning Man’s 10 governing principles (which were only nailed down by founder Larry Harvey in 2004, when regional Burns began to pop up, claiming affiliation); they called it the 11th principle of consent. And almost a decade before that, also in 2004, the sex-positive Bureau of Erotic Discourse, aka B.E.D., started raising awareness about consent issues on playa, from unwanted hugging to sexual assault and rape. Consent—or any—11th principle has yet to be officially adopted, but with the advent of #MeToo, maybe that will change. And there is more to learn than you might think from an event where sex positivity and bottom-up organizing are indelibly part of the culture. Especially compared with the slow progress of traditional industries and institutions, in which we’ve been sorely disappointed during the past 11 months—though, as Burning Man gets bigger, it has started to resemble them.
A group of Southeast Burners began the 11th Principle: Consent! project in late 2012, out of necessity. “We had some issues at our Burn,” says Jaime Chandra, a founding member, “and that same year, there were a ton of sexual assault reports from Black Rock City.” (The 2012 After Burn document, which the organization disseminates each year post–Burning Man, recounts that the Mental Health Branch of the Emergency Services Department, which deals with sexual assault–related cases, had “the busiest year on record,” an 85 percent increase in calls, and 10 sexual assault cases, two of which resulted in rape kit exams for attendees administered in Reno.)
Chandra’s regional Burn is held in West Virginia and called Transformus. Though she’s a 10-year Burner, she has never made it to the playa. The regional Burner community, whose events are officially sanctioned by the Burning Man organization at large, might not be well known to outsiders, but there are dozens of affiliated Burning Man events on multiple continents. Their attendance and participation speaks to the uniquely intense collective investment in Burning Man’s culture—as well as its diffuse organization.
In 2012, as ticket purchases to Burns around the country increased, Chandra “felt like it was open season for anybody who wanted to be a predator to come in and take advantage of this culture of radical expression and inclusion.” Chandra herself was “dosed” at Transformus in 2012 (she was unknowingly slipped hallucinogenic drugs). In its conception, 11th Principle’s notion of consent included sexual harassment and assault, but also sought to cover all manner of undesirable interactions. “People stealing your stuff, people coming in, like, grabbing guys’ butts under their kilts, fondling people’s costumes, making a special cookie or candy and not disclosing that something’s in there,” as Chandra enumerates—they all fell under behaviors that needed to be made verboten, which is to say, explicitly uncool.
By naming their efforts “11th Principle,” organizers knew they would be rattling some of the Burner establishment, many of whom consider the word of Larry Harvey, who died earlier this year, sacred—but that’s what they wanted. “We did receive a lot of flack,” Chandra says, but they also got noticed, and eventually, they were invited to Burning Man’s Global Leadership Conference in 2015 to make a presentation on their consent work at Transformus and elsewhere. The larger Burning Man Organization has since adopted some of 11th Principle’s language in their pre-Burn materials, and the group sends their consent-oriented patches, buttons, and stickers to several Burns; hosts resources for incident response; and creates codes of conduct and conduct committees online.
B.E.D., the aforementioned Bureau of Erotic Discourse, is more focused on playa, according to Chandra, though the groups work together, and was also started in response to reports of assault in Black Rock City. Not only does substance intake create vulnerabilities on playa, as they do at regional Burns where drug taking is widespread—in 2016, of the 46 people arrested by the Pershing County sheriff, 37 were brought in on drug-related charges (the most common was marijuana, followed by cocaine, ecstasy, and acid)—but the playa is also home to some of the harshest conditions in the Burning Man regional network, in which lack of hydration, cell reception, and access to emergency services can combine to leave victims particularly susceptible.
B.E.D. has a close relationship with the Burning Man Organization, and this year is in part funded by it—B.E.D. is one of Burning Man’s dozens of theme camps, through which attendees organize around not just mutual interests (polyamory, for example, or EDM) but also via an offering to the event, be it cooking meals, serving drinks, organizing workshops, playing music, or fixing bikes. B.E.D. members donate (part of the “gifting” principle) consent training and workshops to other theme camps, and run a sex-positive play shop. They also help educate attendees on Burning Man Org’s official escalation process in reporting assaults and violence on playa, including involving police.
Ascher Munion is a B.E.D. member and a Burner currently training to become a Black Rock Ranger, Burning Man’s khaki-clad volunteer phalanx of guardians who patrol the playa. Munion explains that many attendees don’t know that Burning Man has a range of resources: from Zendo—a mental health–focused camp whose volunteers have crisis response training and can provide anything from water and a place to lie down to counseling—to the org’s Emergency Services Department, which has a Crisis Intervention Team. Munion says that Black Rock Rangers who hear about or witness sexual assault or domestic violence are “mandated to report it” to those higher up the chain; another section of Rangers then liaises with the two law enforcement agencies on playa, Pershing County, and the Bureau of Land Management, when deemed necessary, and can arrange for ambulance transportation. Rape kits cannot be administered on playa due to chain-of-custody concerns, and Burning Man has to ferry victims to Reno—a phenomenon common elsewhere in Nevada and across the country. As is also true in the “default world” (how Burners refer to life off-playa), no one can be forced to make a report to law enforcement themselves, and, according to Munion, the vast majority of incidents do not get prosecuted.
For many Burners, the community accountability on which Burning Man functions has, in their experience, worked; camps try to weed out bad actors themselves by attempting mediation or, in more extreme cases, banning past members from camping with them. Similarly, Burning Man will ban theme camps from receiving their approval and funding, if they’ve received any, should they hear a rash of complaints about a camp’s level of M.O.O.P. (matter out of place, Burner lingo for debris or refuse) or the behavior of its members. Chandra and another Burner giving consent workshops on playa this year, JR Russ, whose goes by Nexus, both said that they have known regional burns to share lists of banned members in a kind of whisper network to protect the larger community from bad actors. Leah Reitz, a four-time Burner from San Francisco, describes consent as ingrained, and not just because of B.E.D.’s pervasive signage on the subject (they famously flyer the porta-potties—and there are many—on playa). “[Burning Man] has given me practice in asking can I do things, and also asking for what I want and being okay with the no that comes with it,” she says. “You can go dance with your friends and there’s not a concern about a creepy dude leering behind you." Because attendees have been inundated with messaging, bystander intervention is common: many report helping victims themselves, whether intervening in an argument or helping someone who appears overly intoxicated.
Burning Man’s unique decentralization and structure around the Principles “gives you the permission and encouragement as a community to do what it is you think needs to be done,” says Chandra. “Just go ahead and do it. You don't have to wait for an organization to agree with you.” That’s why, as many Burners echo, the community seems ahead of the curve, rather than scrambling to address the #MeToo movement as the film industry, universities, or corporate America seem to have in the past few months. Mitchell Gomez, a ten year Burner giving a workshop through B.E.D. this year, pointed out that none of the founders have been accused of sexual misconduct or harassment, an increasingly rare distinction among any organization. But while Burning Man Org might avoid the pitfalls of having a well-known titan or executive at its helm to protect, it still pulls in millions in revenue, and is only expanding.
Burning Man is in the process of renewing its ten year permit with the Bureau of Land Management, and the organization is proposing that as many as 100,000 people be allowed to descend on the Nevada desert in the next few years. That’s 30,000 more than the already 70,000 expected to be present in 2018, including attendees, vendors, and volunteers—and, unlike a university campus or office environment, neither the BLM nor Burning Man currently know exactly who is “on playa” at any given time. Though some coveted tickets are set aside for theme camps and other crews, there are rounds in which individuals can purchase tickets, as well as exchange and resell them. None of the physical Burning Man tickets require identification to use them.
Combined with the increase in popularity among “tourists,” or non-regularly attending Burners, it’s easy to see Burning Man’s growth as a kind of consent powderkeg in the context of #MeToo. “We feel like it’s underreported,” Tom Bjerke, an official with the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office, says of sexual assault on playa, “based on what we’re hearing from Burners.” He expressed a request that Burning Man Org be more transparent with their own reporting on sexual assaults—Ascher Munion also said that Burning Man doesn’t “really collect statistics on this.” But Jim Graham, a communications official with Burning Man, contradicted that statement: “We have a decade’s worth of statistics on crime at the event,” Graham said, “including sexual assault. In any given year we typically receive between five and 20 reports from participants of alleged sexual assault. Law enforcement determines which of those reports merit a full investigation, typically fewer than half. Many involve ‘alleged misconduct,’ for unwanted behavior which is not considered sexual assault under Nevada law. There are typically one or zero arrests for sexual assault each year.” Those arrest and report rates are indeed much lower than national averages for sexual misconduct; a 2012 CDC survey of adults found that approximately 1 in 20 women and men experienced “sexual violence other than rape, such as being made to penetrate someone else, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, or non-contact unwanted sexual experiences” in the year prior. (The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for crime statistics from 2017; in the past, they have been released to the local Reno Gazette-Journal.)
Subscribers to Burning Man’s official newsletter, “The Jackrabbit Speaks,” received several communications on consent ahead of attending this year, including an email that referenced #MeToo outright. But there are likely thousands of people at the event who didn’t see them, given that tickets are passed among attendees so frequently. Among them might be those who have joined the recent—and controversial—rash of “plug and play,” “turnkey,” and “concierge” camps, in which attendees pay for luxury playa amenities like accomodation (that they haven’t built themselves), food and water (that they haven’t had to lug in or prepare), and working toilets, which many Burners say are less connected to the more traditional theme camps, in which members participate with nearly every aspect of set up and clean up. In the past, the “gifts” that some of these camps have offered visitors, in the traditional co-op Burning Man style, have been perceived as somewhat dubious in the community—in 2014, a camp called Caravancicle run by venture capitalist Jim Tananbaum was criticized for reports that it turned some outside guests away.
It follows that if attendees aren’t schooled on the ten principles, they won’t necessarily respect the 11th: “At the end of the day it's still a city of 75,000,” says JR Russ, who is active in the DC Burner scene. “The kind of the things you hear about in the news for Burning Man, about like all these billionaires and caviar and whatnot, those camps tend to keep to themselves and don't get out in the city much.” Munion has noticed an uptick in another potential danger: first-timers who aren’t briefed on the basics, and who require extra help if their water spills or their food goes rancid. These newbies also might not get prepped for how to deal with dangerous situations at crowded venues, at night, or inebriated. For volunteers, “that is a lot of work, and I don't necessarily know that that was there earlier when it was smaller.”
With Burning Man selling out year after year, and with more financing from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and personalities who pay for dazzling art cars and other outlandish theme camps, the Organization may face a reckoning with itself. It was recently the subject of a Salon investigation into its treatment of its Department of Public Works volunteers, who typically toil for months in harsh desert conditions prepping for the event. A union at Burning Man might seem as unlikely as an 11th principle; but as the incentive to keep the event scandal-free and chock full of Burners increases, so does the organization’s urgency to protect itself from liability. The “radical self-reliance” principle—which some have said reflects the underlying libertarian outlook of its white male founders, rather than Burning Man’s counterculture—might not be enough.
When asked if Burning Man, as it grows up, might have to codify the more nebulous aspects of its radical non-hierarchy hierarchy, with, say, more official registration and record-keeping systems, Munion says that those changes might be inevitable. But Burning Man Org’s “internal policies around reporting and survivor support are,” all in all, “pretty good. They're on par and reflective of what's going on everywhere in the world, in the U.S., around these things. So I think those are pretty okay, unless we're going to change the entire legal system.” Jim Graham referred to the emails sent ahead of the event and other Burning Man online resources, and said that the Org is “proud of the work in our community related to consent.”
For Munion, the potential for evolution lies not in the upper echelons at Burning Man Org’s San Francisco corporate office, but in the intensely connected Burner community. Munion is a self-described realist—as well as, after last year, a survivor of assault on playa. “It was really frustrating, because I taught thirty-something workshops on sexual assault prevention and consent, and then I got sexually assaulted” says Munion. But, still, they don’t believe Burners should simply institute more traditional top-down systems of accountability, nor kick everything they can up “our retaliatory justice system.” Instead, Munion and others have started to implement restorative justice models more common in the sex work and anti-carceral activist communities. B.E.D., for example, is preparing a web series on mediation: “At the end, you walk away with a restorative justice process specific to your camp that reflects your community standards.” Though “the idea of reintegration can be really tricky for some folks,” they concede. “And it's not always possible, right?” Russ also describes his DC community as going through the process of trying to implement a “restorative justice approach.” And he has seen the main event evolve, even over the past five years that he’s been attending. He describes being one among a few black attendees he encountered in his first few Burns, a number that has slowly increased. Perhaps Burning Man may one day officially adopt, if not the 11th principle, a pioneering restorative model for communities reckoning with sexual violence.
The #MeToo movement caused interest in 11th Principle to “blow up” this year, according to Jaime Chandra. And Munion says that B.E.D. has been invited to given consent workshops at some theme camps that would not typically ask for one. (They would not describe any of these as “plug and play,” however.) “It's a really great place to be able to change these things, because you get a couple of people really hyped up about it,” Munion says of running the workshops. “And if you get one person in a major team hyped up on it, we come in and do a training and then suddenly 35 people, or 150 people—and now we have a training for like 350 people at one point this Burn—are all hearing these things that they've never been taught.” It sounds like a very radical happening.
