I've never thought about this, Damyanti, but I have thought a lot about the limits of consent. Here's one way to think about consensual snuff. People on here seem to be pretty unanimous against sexual activity with children. Why is that? As we've seen on a number of threads, children can be very sexual creatures, and they certainly are people with preferences. Why on earth shouldn't they be allowed to consent to mutually pleasing sexual activities with adults? I assume that for many people, as for me, one of the reasons is that we believe that children simply are not capable of giving or withholding meaningful consent in this realm. We might feel the same way about someone who's temporarily impaired - very drunk, say, or under the influence of some other drug - or someone who's mentally impaired.

So here's the thing - I don't need to make a case-by-case analysis of the sanity of someone who's willing to consent to snuff. I just don't. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that anyone who "consents" to snuff is simply incapable of giving meaningful consent.

Is there the possibility of a grey area? Sure, just as hypothetically there might be a young child who would be capable of consenting to sex with an adult. (In fact, in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake there is a character who comes very close to this.) Someone posted on these threads a few months ago (I'm not giving names because I learned my lesson about this) about wanting to end the life of his terminally ill wife in one final scene of torture. I will say that most responses to this were not totally on board for the idea. But then he explained that his wife was in tremendous pain during the last days of her life, and he wished that he could translate that pain into something that she could bear and enjoy. Technically snuff? Maybe, although a minor point worth mentioning is that he didn't actually do it. But to me, this begins to seem like it falls into the area of assisted suicide rather than consensual snuff. So there might be a grey area. But just as with pedophilia, the possibility of some outliers is not enough to make me change the general rule. I think "consensual snuff" is simply an oxymoron.

I really hope that people for whom this is a deeply cherished fetish will not be offended. I'm all for fantasies and people can have whatever fantasies they want. I'm not judging you, I'm not judging your sanity. To my mind, the fact that you're still here speaks for itself.