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When I was a young fan, I remember reading a bunch of posts that said something like this: “When you write fanfic, warn for rape if you’re treating the subject seriously as something that traumatizes the victim. Warn for noncon if it’s treated as sexy or if the victim starts consenting part of the way through. Warn for dubcon if the characters’ ability to give consent is dubious– for instance, fuck-or-die, sex pollen, one character being another character’s boss, emotional coercion, or sex where one character is extremely drunk. Of course, in the real world, all of those are rape!”
And the thing is… this isn’t really a message I got anywhere else. My parents never talked about sex; my middle school sex education mostly covered all the different kinds of horrifying STIs you could get; my high school sex education was Catholic, and so was mostly themed around how sex outside of marriage inevitably doomed one to unwanted pregnancy, HIV, heartbreak, low self-esteem, inability to bond with one’s future partners, and becoming a metaphorical cup of water everyone has spat in. And, frankly, the less said about mainstream media’s ideas about how consent works the better.
And then there was noncon fanfic. The porn itself was laden with rape myth after rape myth, of course: from “he secretly likes it!” to “erections mean consent!” to “sometimes people just get so horny there’s nothing they can do!” But the discourse around the porn was some of the most anti-rape stuff I’d ever read.
For one thing, it had the category “dubcon.” It didn’t treat emotional coercion and people technically consenting to sex they don’t want as a normal part of how sex should go; it treated it as a separate thing, clearly distinct from ordinary sex. It treated dubcon as disturbing! As something it would be perfectly reasonable to want to avoid reading about! And the message was clear and unanimous that in real life dubcon is rape.
Now, I want to be clear that I’m not applying this analysis to everything. In particular, I’m not sure it applies to porn that doesn’t have a culture around it of obsessively discussing the porn, and non-fanfic porn has this depressing reluctance to tag its dubcon. And it’s perfectly plausible to me that I happened to find a remarkably anti-rape corner of fandom, and many others are far worse.
But… I see a lot of writing about noncon fanfic that says something along the lines of “it’s all very well if adults want to get off on this, but what happens if someone underage and vulnerable finds it? What if shipping Reylo makes them think that that’s how relationships are supposed to work in real life?” Well, I’m only one person, with only one person’s history, but as someone who read a lot of noncon fanfic when I was underage:
What happened is that I learned how consent worked. I learned that if someone makes you have sex you don’t want, it’s rape. I learned that the rape myths used in our stories aren’t true: that a man with an erection can still be raped, that the physical pleasure some people experience during rape doesn’t make it not rape, that being led on is no excuse to rape someone. I learned that sex needs to be between people who want to have sex with each other. And if I hadn’t learned it there, I’m not sure where I would have.
Nita said:
Agreed, the slash fanfic community is pretty good about these things. I find reading even the most gruesome, shamelessly id-driven things written by someone who ‘gets it’ easy and pleasant, but the mildest transgressions can be disturbing (in a bad, unintended way) when they seem to be endorsed by the author.
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Brenden Hawley said:
Pretty much same here I like things in fiction that disturb me in reality. Which is the way everyone is, mean if someone was a call of duty hero in real life they likey have issues due to a body count that make a serial killer envious.
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1angelette said:
I concur with Nita that transgressions the author leaves unmarked are some of the most disconcerting. Do they really think those are the rules of engagement? For example, I read one story where a group of friends throws a small party with lots of alcohol available. Guy A says he doesn’t want to drink. Guy B thinks to himself it would be really great to see (“and experience, if you know what he means”) Guy A being drunk. Their friends provide a distraction; Guy B mixes a drink that is spiked and presents it to Guy A as nonalcoholic; it gets consumed. Later, the friends entice the two boys into entering a closet and shut the door. In here, Guy B kisses Guy A, who is rendered sufficiently docile by intoxication to be receptive of these advances. The closet door is opened.
To this day the story haunts me. It’s true that the goodie two shoes is presented as “tsundere” with underlying affections that legitimately might loosen with alcohol, and the churlish boy is canonically a bit of a trickster, the type to swap out salt for sugar. The story was so cute and innocent in execution, it almost made me believe the instigator was taking actions that were in character – assuming he had been raised to see such behavior presented as a harmless prank.
On the other hand, my overarching experience is that fandom spaces were the only place I got exposed to many ideas about rape, like you describe. I would just not personally go so far to actively say “noncon fanfic is good in this way” because I have seen many less critical fanfics just like original erotica and filmed porn.
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chel said:
I must say I’ve seen quite a number of fanfics which DID creepily seem like the authors didn’t know this was bad, but they’re far from the majority and generally it can be chalked up to shitty writing. I think I’ve only seen two stories in a good fourteen years of fanfic reading where it was genuinely frightening in terms of the author not seeing the problem.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
RE: a story from a fandom I read years back during the height of its popularity when a lot of new fans (and hence new fanfic writers) were flooding in to the fandom. It wasn’t creepy but it did have me going “You are missing the point by a country mile” in a major way. I will just say it was NOT Harry Potter fandom but otherwise I’ll obscure the identifications.
Basically a twincest story (yeah, they’re in every fandom). Parent of twins finds out, freaks out that their sons are banging each other. Fairly natural reaction, you would think?
Every other character in the story – and I mean EVERY other, including the grandparent of the twins – lectures the parent on their homophobia for not being accepting of their sons’ relationship.
Because the reason you’d freak out if you discovered your sons were having sex with each other is totally and solely because you’re a homophobe, right?
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Good intention of story: gay relationships are just as valid as any other relationships, parents should be accepting and supportive
Bad execution of story: using sibling incest to communicate this message
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Patrick said:
Given what I know of the culture of internet based amateur fiction, I’m going to make a wild guess that it was no accident that the story treated homophobia as the only possible reason anyone might object to same sex incest. The author probably consciously intended to write a story that normalized same sex incest and treated opposition to it as morally wrong, and chose framing opposition to it as homophobia because he or she, plus his or her expected audience, would likely find homophobia objectionable. I highly doubt the author intended to write a story about homophobia and accidentally used incest to illustrate the same sex relationship in question. I strongly suspect they wanted to write a story about incest and chose homophobia to demonize opposition to it.
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Autolykos said:
“I strongly suspect they wanted to write a story about incest and chose homophobia to demonize opposition to it.”
Probably true. Still, it’s kind of a dick move to attach your cause to a only slightly related different cause that other people are currently fighting for. You risk discrediting them, and it makes for a bad argument anyway. I don’t know if it has a name, but to me it looks a lot like a reversed Noncentral Fallacy.
FTR: I think on utilitarian grounds there’s nothing wrong with consensual incest that doesn’t produce offspring (which is kind of a given in the homosexual case). So opposing it is still narrowminded and probably harmful, it’s just not necessarily homophobic.
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John said:
This somewhat obscure the point that tagging culture isn’t universal; I wrote quite a bit of rape before I started tagging it; not because I considered it sexy or acceptable, but because I thought it should be patently obvious that it’s unacceptable, and that tagging it to make this explicit would be an insult to my readers’ intelligence. Leaving rape untagged =/= endorsing rape, though I note that I have started tagging it since my view has become so unpopular.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
Oh, the whole area of content warning/trigger warnings is very fraught. I certainly have never thought that leaving something untagged means “I the author personally think this is just fine!” but I do appreciate content NOTES (because I’ve seen the wars over “calling it ‘warning’ is kinkshaming”) so I can avoid stories I would not be interested in reading (or that would squick me).
I’m much more likely to cut an author slack if they state beforehand “There’s some heavy content in this, if you go ahead and read it don’t blame me” than if it hits me between the eyes in the middle of the story unforewarned.
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Patrick said:
The interesting part comes from deconstructing the view that presumes that failure to tag strongly implies that objectionable sexual acts within a story were included because the author didn’t realize they were objectionable.
I communicate by having an idea, then choosing words and other symbols I think will be interpreted by my audience as conveying the idea I want them to perceive. They interpret my communication by observing my words and symbols, and trying to model what idea I must have had to lead me to pick those word and symbols.
That’s the short form of pretty much every modern theory of language.
You’ll note that it states that a major component of how someone interprets my communications is their pre existing beliefs about me. The same words and symbols chosen by an entirely different person might be read in a very different way.
Certain facets of our society tend to strongly believe that our culture is awash in “rape myths.” So when they interpret communications, they do so on the assumption that the communicator might have an unstated acceptance of rape as an ok thing to do, and an unstated inability to recognize as rape many things which they ought.
Applying the proper disclaimers works because it signals, “I’m like you, I’m one of the good people who understands what rape is and why it’s bad.” This let’s the reader interpret the work as something other than an apologetic for rape.
It would be nice if people could take the next step, and recognize that maybe, just maybe, if even people who fetishize non consent, dubious consent, and forcible rape are capable of recognizing that rape is bad in real life, maybe those rape myths were never as widespread as they initially thought. Maybe they were seeing them so frequently because of a decision to interpret an out group as negatively as possible, and in the process they lost the ability to accurately interpret the communications of others.
That’s not the only thing going on- part of it is straight up disagreements on what consent is and why it matters- disagreements so strong and deep that even after understanding what they really mean, a lot of feminist writers read to me like the most vile of misogynists, and I apparently read that way to them as well. But I think it’s definitely part of the issue.
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Nita said:
Wait, did anyone actually say that not tagging = endorsement of rape?
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Patrick said:
I went through a lot of trouble to write out “The interesting part comes from deconstructing the view that presumes that failure to tag strongly implies that objectionable sexual acts within a story were included because the author didn’t realize they were objectionable.”
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Bang-bell said:
An artist who includes objectionable material in their work, knowing it’s objectionable, but doesn’t tag it, is also knowingly encouraging the reader to read their work ‘straight’. As in, to interpret it without the knowledge that this is a fantasy. The language of those stories usually reflect that choice, and reinforce to the reader that this story is to be read as sincere.
For example, the sex scene in GoT between Cersei and Jaime Lannister at the burial of their son. If it were a fic, it would be obvious dubcon. But, audiences were enraged by it’s depiction as consensual sex, not because the filmmakers failed to put a ‘here there be rape-ish stuff’ tag in the opening credits, but because everything in the art itself implied that this scene was consensual — the way it was shot, the way the characters interacted, the way the narrative never addressed the fallout of the scene. Humans are very, very good at understanding the nuances of storytelling. We pick up on that shit.
And then, of course, the filmmakers confirmed that they never considered the scene nonconsensual, and all hell broke loose (and here we stray closer to your point about disagreements over the nature of consent — which I tend to agree with). But the original ‘ick’ was because the audience could identify something that was obviously wrong, something which the artist had not realized.
Rape myths do exist in our culture. Victim-blaming is rampant. The examples for this are plentiful. Studies have been done. The lived experiences of women and rape survivors can’t be reduced to confirmation bias. It’s icky, and it’s also just plainly incorrect. People who use these themes in their stories are very frequently not aware that they’re doing something wrong or exploring a fantasy that should remain a fantasy.
I agree with the idea that a story that’s not tagged as non-con can still treat rape as rape and not be an ‘endorsement’ of sexual assault, but I strongly disagree with the extensions you made beneath that point.
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the_ragnarok said:
…or, people might come to the conclusions that certain thoughts about rape are common because many – most, even – people have stated these thoughts as facts.
Like, yes, most people do believe the statement “rape is wrong”. And even so, it’s not exactly difficult to find people who will argue at length that emotionally coercing someone to have sex with a person is neither rape, nor wrong. Or that intentionally drugging somebody so they can’t fight and then fucking them is neither rape, nor wrong. Or that continuing to have sex with somebody who said no, but didn’t try to move away, and who earlier said yes, is neither rape nor wrong.
And those, in my view, are all rape, and morally wrong. And I know for a fact many people do not share these views. So, yeah, when people don’t state their thinking one way or another, I have no way of knowing whether writing such a narrative means to them “this is rape porn which is my kink” or “this is just how sex goes” or even “this is how I want sex to go”.
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Patrick said:
I recognize that the belief that our society is awash in pro rape sentiment is integral to a lot of people’s sense of personal and political moral worth, both in terms of valorizing the self and the in group, and excoriating the out group. I know that this means that I am not going to convince you in the space of a blog comment that this effect is misleading you, and coloring your view of both your society and specific other people in a manner that is both false, and morally wrongful.
So I’ll leave you with the only thing I can, in the hope that some day you can use this as some small part of the tools you’ll need to dig yourself out.
You said that you’ve heard people argue
> And even so, it’s not exactly difficult to find people who will argue at length that emotionally coercing someone to have sex with a person is neither rape, nor wrong. Or that intentionally drugging somebody so they can’t fight and then fucking them is neither rape, nor wrong. Or that continuing to have sex with somebody who said no, but didn’t try to move away, and who earlier said yes, is neither rape nor wrong.
Do you think that the people you say you hear arguing these things would agree with your characterization of their position? And if not, what would THEY say explains the discrepancy between how you characterize their position, and how they do?
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arbitrary_greay said:
What’s also interesting is that the awareness and nuance seems to be proportional to fic explictness. For real-world kinks, a lot of that is simply because the authors who can write well about it have the personal expertise on the subject.
For nonreal explicit tropes (ABO, G!P, fantastical dub/noncon, guro), things can get a little dicey because some writers are reinventing kinks based on what they’ve read second-hand and their own ignorance of real-world kinks as an expression of their desires. (Why Glee fandom why the fuck did you invent bugcock why)
But even in those sectors, I think the relentless fandom lecturing for such tropes and kinks to be tagged/warned for everyone to see helps un-normalize such things. Even a person who doesn’t see the noncon/dubcon discourse surrounding, say, ABO, understands on a subconscious level that those aren’t relationship dynamics to aspire to in real life, because it’s a trope that is always tagged separately, not simply bundled in with smut and romance.
Kind of like how kinks were limes, while vanilla smut was lemon. Even without explicit discourse, there’s an understanding that therefore limes are different.
You don’t have those more consistently enforced differences in non-explicit fic. The example 1angelette gives would be rated Teen at best. It’s much easier to sneak in unhealthy dynamics that can be misconstrued as more than fantasy-only aspirations in non-smut, which is why there was much hand-wringing over hurt/comfort and smarm in certain slash communities. The various types of relationships in non-smut are rarely tagged as studiously as the smut tropes involved, which means that any hypothetical wide-eyed innocents are much more likely to take a romance trope a face value, without recognizing it as a trope to be digested in a particular way.
Even then, see aforementioned hand-wringing as proof that there was still plenty of discourse educating people on what’s healthy in nonfiction vs. fiction for nonporn.
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1angelette said:
You’re correct, the story was rated T.
I agree that there are times it’s poorly executed and it’s problematic to just focus on romance in general, or misunderstandings, or a forceful kiss.
For some people though with certain learning styles I think these lessons have to be separate – for example, “shutting someone up with a kiss isn’t OK” will be separate from “you shouldn’t have sex with your spouse if they’re not actually excited about it”, one doesn’t always imply the other even with similar underlying principles. So I don’t think that consent bending T rated stories with proper criticism would be enough to teach some people about consent in sex itself, either.
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arbitrary_greay said:
I’m reminded of the differences prime time romantic dramas between Asia and the West. Asian dramas tend to be more chaste (Jdrama kisses are a travesty), but then the wrist grab is a classic trope and the height of romantic-ness. Bickering couples might happen in both hemispheres, but the West didn’t codify such concrete terms as tsundere/kuudere, so most western examples of the trope have more variance and development past the template they don’t have to follow.
In the sense that western dramas brought up the issues of underage sex, promiscuity, pregnancy, etc., at least they have to talk about it, so out of sheer volume, there’s more discourse inside and outside of fiction content about such issues.
Because sex may only be implied in more chaste media, then the dynamics of the sex are extrapolated from the dynamics of the sexual tension. Fifty Shades is the extrapolation of Twilight.
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Martha O'Keeffe said:
A trope I personally find absolutely horrific though it is treated as the acme of romance is the “soulmate”.
You know the ones? People are destined to have one (and only one) Soulmate whom they will be bonded for life to (up to and including being mentally bonded so there is always another person in your head) with no choice on either’s part or means (short of death of one of the parties) of getting out of it; signs include marks, tattoos, ability to see in colours etc. when one meets one’s soulmate.
I hate these stories because, as I said, they horrify me: the coercive, abusive, inescapable destiny element of it, the idea that this is a perfect romance and your soulmate is your perfect match (and what if they’re an asshole or abusive or simply have nothing at all in common with you?) and that most of all it’s unbreakable and you can’t get away from it – the very worst of dubcon with not even the faintest acknowledgement that a Soulmate Universe could be hellish rather than a utopia of perfect happiness and fulfilment!
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drive-by lurker said:
This aspect of soulmate AUs is routinely acknowledged. It is one reason they are tagged and there is a thriving subgenre of deconstructions.
Is it so wrong to fantasize for twenty minutes that Everything Is Fine? I feel the same way about Narnia.
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Siggy said:
I find it very doubtful that people outside of fanfic have similar experiences. How many people outside of fanfic participate in any porn-related community discussion of any sort? And if I may observe, fanfic communities don’t have many men in them.
I’ve found non-con porn useful, because it gave me models of the narratives that perpetrators tell themselves. I am grateful for this, but it was only helpful because I already recognized it as rape. I find it disturbing to speculate what the authors think, or what other readers think, especially since many people really do believe all these rape myths. (It doesn’t help that it’s sourced from Japan, and I just have no idea how Japanese people see it.)
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Flak Maniak said:
This is a good point; in all my years consuming porn, and hentai manga/doujinshi, et cetera, there was never any real discussion space, at least none I found and participated in. I mean ok I guess there are porn forums? But who would go on them? Yeah I consumed a lot of porn, but the ratio of porn to community was basically 1:0, unlike in fandom. And what was I gonna do, talk about porn with my friends? One just doesn’t. Without a community of people you met through shared sexual fantasy, there just… Isn’t a set of people to talk to.
Which is to say: One shouldn’t be surprised if boys have seen a huge amount of porn but not once talked to someone about it seriously.
What I really mean is: I wish I’d had a community with which to talk about sex; if only I’d participated in fandom.
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arbitrary_greay said:
The closest I can think of are some of the “edgier” teen dramas. Degrassi, Veronica Mars, Skins, etc.
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