Voluntary

To do something without coercion, to act with free will, to be deliberate, to decide with out being pressured. To do something through conscious choice.

The general philosophy of BME and Shannon Larratt has been to support all voluntary or consensual body modification and ritual, coupled with a general opposition to anything that is not consensual (including infant circumcision, infant ear piercing, aesthetic modification of animals, involuntary FGM, and so on). BME feels very strongly that if a person "owns" anything it is their own body, and only they have the right to choose what is done to it.