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Note: of tangential relevance at best to the general warnings discussion. Rather than engaging with the dos/don’ts, I’m talking here about the meaning I give to particular terms, mainly “dub-con” or dubious consent. I’m interested in others’ definitions and usages, but it is unlikely I will stop enjoying dub-con in fanfic and I value having a way to distinguish a dub-con story from a story in which either the character or the author defines what happened as rape.
I understand why people object to distinguishing rape and non-con as labels. I have only the most tenuous of distinctions for them in my mind (mostly having to do with what the characters themselves think happened and/or fic community practices, and I see why that’s confusing). On the other hand, when we’re talking about “how to find what I want to read,” then in my experience the choice between one and the other is usually correlated, however imperfectly, with the story content, so maybe the dual terms are helpful to readers and authors, at least when paired with a summary.
Where my thoughts are most confused, and also most passionate, is dub-con. The fact that dub-con is non-con to many readers matters; my understanding of the point is that if the events happened to people and not to characters most if not all dub-con would be rape because of an inability to consent or uncertainty about consent. I agree with that premise but think that dub-con serves a valuable signalling role in fiction, perhaps even more valuable than non-con. Because the line between non- and dub-con differs for different people, having all three terms available seems like the best compromise I’ve seen. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility that someone will want a warning for non-con or rape and the author will disagree that that's what happens in the story.
I think of dub-con as “issues of consent,” actually, because issues of consent are where my fannish id lives and breathes. I love characters whose screwed-up-ness leaves them with trouble defining consent as it should be defined (according to Overlord Me). I love situations where normal human rules don’t work. I love situations where at least one character misapprehends the facts, or is out of control: amnesia and sex pollen and mistaken identity and golems shaped like people and and and. I love stories where Sam wants Dean and Dean gives in because he thinks it’s the only way to keep Sam; I love them whether or not Dean learns to stop worrying and love the bomb. I expect that my spectrum of “dubious” overlaps with the average definition, but only overlaps. Working with cliches is, I hope, a little protective here, because I expect that if you see “sex pollen” you will automatically presume that there are issues of consent. But I’ve been wrong before.
A ton of the het romance I read growing up I would now call dub-con. Did I notice it then? Not consciously. Did it shape my fantasy preferences? Quite possibly, and definitely living in a society that’s screwed up about, specifically, when women consent to sex also shaped my fantasy preferences. I still like some het dub-con now, but I’m more easily thrown out of it. I like a higher percentage of dub-con in slash because it feels like I can get the thrill of issues of consent between two people who are attracted to each other but have various barriers to acting on that attraction without the misogyny, or at a minimum accommodation to the strictures of heterosexism, that regularly accompanies this trope in het (note that I am not saying slash escapes or is more likely to escape misogyny, I am saying that slash dub-con more readily gets me hot without my inner censor telling me I am a bad feminist, and that I value this effect in particular cases while remaining concerned about it in general).
As for what I write: I write a lot of issues of consent. The first two that come to mind are: (1) I fell in love in Hell and it is simply so distressing, in which the issue of consent is, I flatter myself to think, a real issue: what does it mean to be capable of consent? Not for nothing, that's also the twist of the story. (2) An Act I Would Enjoy, the sequel to Filthy Mind. It was important to me that neither Sam nor Dean used the term “rape” in Filthy Mind, because of what it would have meant to them to say it even though they both knew what was happening. Filthy Mind is about rape, whereas I think the sequel is plausibly dub-con, though I didn’t label it as such because I wanted to leave the matter unclear. Sam--rather willfully in my opinion--refuses to engage with the real question, which is about Dean’s consent to sex with Sam in the first place, and not about Dean’s interest in particular scenes/props. Now that I’ve written this out, I see that these stories are both about the same issue, which is similar to the basic feminist question so painfully raised by Catharine MacKinnon: in a world that has done so much to crush your freedom of choice, to what extent can you choose to have sex, especially heterosexual sex and/or sex that eroticizes power disparities? (As I said above, this question is so excruciating that I find it easier to explore at a distance, through slash. And angels.)
But that’s not all dub-con is to me. I’ve written numerous other variants of dub-con, where it’s more about rejecting (often well-justified) constraints on desire. Dub-con can mean passion, passion so great that one character will sacrifice everything else in the world to satisfy it. I find that extremely hot. (But I still worry about contributing to various pathologies of desire, because what’s good for characters is often bad for people, and narratives are really powerful.)
In the end, I’ve got only this: I'm not done thinking about this, and I would like to talk about how we signal that issues of consent are important to a particular story, once we've decided that rape is not the right label. (Someone could convince me that rape is the right label, certainly in particular cases and possibly even in general, but more likely I'm going to want to keep dub-con.)
Comments at DW; comments at LJ.
I understand why people object to distinguishing rape and non-con as labels. I have only the most tenuous of distinctions for them in my mind (mostly having to do with what the characters themselves think happened and/or fic community practices, and I see why that’s confusing). On the other hand, when we’re talking about “how to find what I want to read,” then in my experience the choice between one and the other is usually correlated, however imperfectly, with the story content, so maybe the dual terms are helpful to readers and authors, at least when paired with a summary.
Where my thoughts are most confused, and also most passionate, is dub-con. The fact that dub-con is non-con to many readers matters; my understanding of the point is that if the events happened to people and not to characters most if not all dub-con would be rape because of an inability to consent or uncertainty about consent. I agree with that premise but think that dub-con serves a valuable signalling role in fiction, perhaps even more valuable than non-con. Because the line between non- and dub-con differs for different people, having all three terms available seems like the best compromise I’ve seen. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility that someone will want a warning for non-con or rape and the author will disagree that that's what happens in the story.
I think of dub-con as “issues of consent,” actually, because issues of consent are where my fannish id lives and breathes. I love characters whose screwed-up-ness leaves them with trouble defining consent as it should be defined (according to Overlord Me). I love situations where normal human rules don’t work. I love situations where at least one character misapprehends the facts, or is out of control: amnesia and sex pollen and mistaken identity and golems shaped like people and and and. I love stories where Sam wants Dean and Dean gives in because he thinks it’s the only way to keep Sam; I love them whether or not Dean learns to stop worrying and love the bomb. I expect that my spectrum of “dubious” overlaps with the average definition, but only overlaps. Working with cliches is, I hope, a little protective here, because I expect that if you see “sex pollen” you will automatically presume that there are issues of consent. But I’ve been wrong before.
A ton of the het romance I read growing up I would now call dub-con. Did I notice it then? Not consciously. Did it shape my fantasy preferences? Quite possibly, and definitely living in a society that’s screwed up about, specifically, when women consent to sex also shaped my fantasy preferences. I still like some het dub-con now, but I’m more easily thrown out of it. I like a higher percentage of dub-con in slash because it feels like I can get the thrill of issues of consent between two people who are attracted to each other but have various barriers to acting on that attraction without the misogyny, or at a minimum accommodation to the strictures of heterosexism, that regularly accompanies this trope in het (note that I am not saying slash escapes or is more likely to escape misogyny, I am saying that slash dub-con more readily gets me hot without my inner censor telling me I am a bad feminist, and that I value this effect in particular cases while remaining concerned about it in general).
As for what I write: I write a lot of issues of consent. The first two that come to mind are: (1) I fell in love in Hell and it is simply so distressing, in which the issue of consent is, I flatter myself to think, a real issue: what does it mean to be capable of consent? Not for nothing, that's also the twist of the story. (2) An Act I Would Enjoy, the sequel to Filthy Mind. It was important to me that neither Sam nor Dean used the term “rape” in Filthy Mind, because of what it would have meant to them to say it even though they both knew what was happening. Filthy Mind is about rape, whereas I think the sequel is plausibly dub-con, though I didn’t label it as such because I wanted to leave the matter unclear. Sam--rather willfully in my opinion--refuses to engage with the real question, which is about Dean’s consent to sex with Sam in the first place, and not about Dean’s interest in particular scenes/props. Now that I’ve written this out, I see that these stories are both about the same issue, which is similar to the basic feminist question so painfully raised by Catharine MacKinnon: in a world that has done so much to crush your freedom of choice, to what extent can you choose to have sex, especially heterosexual sex and/or sex that eroticizes power disparities? (As I said above, this question is so excruciating that I find it easier to explore at a distance, through slash. And angels.)
But that’s not all dub-con is to me. I’ve written numerous other variants of dub-con, where it’s more about rejecting (often well-justified) constraints on desire. Dub-con can mean passion, passion so great that one character will sacrifice everything else in the world to satisfy it. I find that extremely hot. (But I still worry about contributing to various pathologies of desire, because what’s good for characters is often bad for people, and narratives are really powerful.)
In the end, I’ve got only this: I'm not done thinking about this, and I would like to talk about how we signal that issues of consent are important to a particular story, once we've decided that rape is not the right label. (Someone could convince me that rape is the right label, certainly in particular cases and possibly even in general, but more likely I'm going to want to keep dub-con.)
Comments at DW; comments at LJ.
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