Spoiler: historical context for "dub con" tw: rape talk You're missing the point, though. In the early 2000s, people used BOTH "dubcon" and "noncon" to avoid using the word "rape". They used dubcon for the bodice-ripper kind and noncon for the more violent and humiliating and degrading kind of rape fantasy. I don't think it was because they were trying to pretend that their brains didn't touch something icky. I think it was because at that time, there were a lot of stupid arguments about whether having rape fantasies meant you actually wanted to get raped. Well, um...nobody wants to get raped. People fantasise about experiences in which their consent is violated, but in people's fantasies, their attacker is someone they find attractive and maybe even someone they secretly want to have sex with, who then through some weird telepathic miracle manages to do everything they want to have done to them and nothing that they don't want to have done to them, in such a way that they really enjoy it and are not traumatised by the experience. (Even if it's humiliating and painful, it's the kind of humiliating and painful the person secretly wanted, not the kind they didn't.) People who get off on fictional rape of this particular variety are usually having a fantasy that is really about not wanting to have to negotiate or in some cases even admit what you want, because negotiation can be sexy, but it can also be awkward and embarrassing and scary. At that time, it was useful, when dealing with people who insisted that writing or enjoying what we then called dubcon or noncon encouraged people, usually men, to believe the lies that women secretly want it, to be able to say, this experience that I am writing about differs from actual rape in a number of significant ways, and also is very unlikely to ever actually happen to anyone in the real world.
Spoiler: how do tag consent gradations? tw rape talk For the purpose of fanfic archives, there really does need to be a way to distinguish between a story about an actual rape and a story about a rape fantasy. The reason for this is that people who are looking for one of those things do not want the other one. Nobody is very happy when they are looking for one type of story and get the other one.
As someone who wrote (poorly lol) dub & noncon in 1998-early 2000s i can attest that lots of authors, myself included, used these terms more ourselves, to avoid the ppl coming at us going 'you're writing porn about RAPE, you sick fuck!!!' ^ part of an actual comment i got about one of my Gundam Wing fics, right in the guestbook of my website which they followed me to from fanfic.net. Never forgot it. I feel the terms noncon and dubcon are essential and needed. Tho i will admit it's still pretty subjective for a lot of people exactly what they mean and that can be a problem. (also do ppl use these terms in a non porn/kink context now? That's all they've ever been to me)
I've never seen them used in a non-porn instance. When it happens irl, I think we still call a spade a spade.
Also I feel like the issue of mistagging remains one of mistagging regardless of the morality hijinks going on in the cultural background of it.
I've done it once or twice for non-porn art, I think. I know I did a picture of Cronus giving Mituna a nice ol' friendly pg ~shoulder rub~ while Mituna was like YOU NEED TO STOP, and initially I tagged it dubcon, but then I thiiiiink mercury or rainbowbarnacle reblogged it and bumped the tag up to noncon. And I realized fuck, that is 100% right, I think I unconsciously, like... 'well it's not consensual but it's not rape and dubcon is like less-bad rape, so let's do that!' So I fixed it fast, and I don't think I've messed that up anywhere else, but I'm still gnargnasgagng that I fucked it up that way in the first place.
Spoiler: rape discussion tw No, I'm not missing shit. I'm saying it's still a lie, and a harmful one. It perpetuates the idea that "it's not rape if you enjoyed it." It blurs the definition of "rape" to a harmful degree. It can make it more difficult for many people to recognize that what happened to them in real life was, in fact, rape. I am aware that it was a cultural phenomenon, that people had reasons for doing it, that it was a form of self-defense. I am saying it was still harmful. Also, when people go on using it now, it fucking pisses me off to go in thinking I'm about to read something like sex pollen or drunk sex or something genuinely dubious and get a fucking violent rape scene, completely unambiguous. No matter how unrealistically the aftermath plays out.
I've run into violent rape scenes tagged as dubcon way too often to even count these days. Ugh. I don't like assuming the worst, but sometimes it's almost as if these people writing scenes like this and tagging them incorrectly want people avoiding noncon to see their unambiguous non-consensual scenes.
Spoiler: Why I think that tagging is a practical-not-moral consideration when it comes to fics involving sex with dubious or absent consent. tw: rape is mentioned kind of a lot. I find myself in the weird position of complete sympathy coupled with complete disagreement. As several posters above me have said, these are not terms that are used for anything other than fanworks and they are used primarily to label content in the hope that people will be able to find content they want and avoid content they don't want. Therefore, I absolutely disagree that they are perpetuating the notion that it's not rape if you liked it, because I have never met anyone who liked this stuff who was unaware that it's still rape if you liked any part of it (and it would be very weird for someone IRL to like all of it; I'm not sure that even happens except maybe with statutory situations). This is also a moral argument neither of us will win, so I don't want to have it. On the other hand, the tags are not doing their job, because you're getting the stuff you don't want. This is a problem that is both on topic for the thread and an annoyance to all concerned. Dubious consent has now become a category that people use for everything from "sex pollen" to "essentially rape, but fun for the victim anyway". People who want the first don't want the second. Meanwhile, noncon has lost the original meaning of "rape, not fun for the victim". But people who want to read that do not want to read "essentially rape, but fun for the victim anyway," and nobody who does want to read that wants to read anything that fits into the first category. So here is the problem. How do we come up with a tagging system that will do the job? Moral concerns are the problem, not the solution, because: A) one confounding factor is that all heavy kink writers want to avoid rude comments and death threats by people who ate the dead dove refusing to believe that it was not fried chicken, and one problem with rape as a tag is that it attracts those people; and B) from a moral standpoint, there are numerous situations that are rape, but people who want to read fic about it usually want one of 5 things and absolutely not the other 4. These things are: hurt/comfort, with or without bonus healing cock; magical fantasy rape that's everything you wanted to have happen, with or without bonus falling in love afterwards; humiliating degrading fantasy rape; rape trauma and healing, with or without bonus killing or other severe punishment of the rapist; and finally, the "this would have been consensual if not for the pollen/booze/less than 4 year age gap" story. Most people who only like one, maybe two, of these categories really do not like and are judgey about the others, but none of them is ever going to go away and all of them are used sometimes as coping mechanisms. So if we could just agree on five different tags, that would solve the problem; but, that would require agreeing that tagging is a practical concern and not a moral judgement on what counts as rape in real life. Because even drunk sex does count, if one party knows they would never have agreed to it sober. Rape is not a good fanwork tag. It includes too many different kinds of things and excludes very few, because IRL we want to make sure we don't exclude actual victims on technicalities. Fanwork tags need to be as specific as possible, for the mental health of all.
What cT said is sort of what I was feeling and couldn't get words around. It's a problem of insufficiently precise definitions not giving people ways to filter content how they want. I do think "dubcon" isn't a good term to describe Category 2, because the consent isn't what's dubious there. I feel like something along the lines of/derived from "bodice ripper" combined with an AO3 noncon warning would be a better term for it.
Alternatively: the notes section is there for a reason. A violent rape scene, regardless of if the victim enjoys it down the line, is not something I would ever classify as dubcon. Likewise, a scene where a character is drugged with malice aforethought is not something I would classify as dubcon. But! Someone who disagrees can easily qualify that in the notes section. I've seen a number of heavy kink writers doing exactly that, because they're interested in keeping people safe and the notes section of a work is easily accessible for anyone reading it. It even has the nice bonus of The thing is, we don't necessarily need specific tags so much as more tags (or again! notes section, it's a wonderful thing.) Someone who tags a fic "magical healing cock" or "dead dove" is someone who is qualifying the noncon warning. Sex pollen fics are usually tagged "sex pollen". A/B/O fics are tagged with "a/b/o dynamics". "Gratuitous depictions of violence" is a tag for things that, you guessed it, depict violence gratuitously. If someone makes the decision to tag an existing noncon work as dubcon, that is actively adding on an additional tag to the existing archive warning, modifying it in a way that is meant to signal something has consent under pressure or consent under shady circumstances. So in that regard, we have the tools we need. The problem is people not using them. And someone misusing a tag is still someone misusing a tag, regardless of the moral or immoral standards being applied to them. If I tag something as Dave/Karkat when it's a John/Sollux fic, that is mistagging. If I tag something as dubcon when the consent was fully revoked, that is mistagging. (And there's always the "choose not to use Archive warnings" tag, which is its own type of signal.)
Spoiler: why I don't think existing tags do the job in dubious/absent consent fics More tags is always a good solution but I really think it would help a lot if these five categories got their own tags because they represent five distinct categories of things that are often confused with each other and that's where most of the hurt feelings about this come from (plus having clear definitions available would help new writers who may not even know they wrote a magical healing cock story, or that dead dove can literally mean any fucking gross thing).
Spoiler: more historical talk about bodices and ripping tw rape talk And I totally agree with you there, but when I wrote the bodice rippers it was 2002-2007 ??? (I lost interest in that dynamic sometime around 2009, idky) and so that's what I tagged them because that's what you did then.
Im sorry but can y'all either spoiler the rape talk or move it? Its been going on for a few days now and its getting difficult to come in here. I know its dumb but i dont want to lose alerts for this thread and i dont know any other way to do that other than to keep clicking alerts for it. I think its still on topic for the most part so im being a bit unfair maybe but. Can y'all consider it?
Spoiler: rape talk I mean, in theory they do have their own tags. Creator tags can function with a similar purpose (see: the a/b/o example above) and I know that Magical Healing Cock is already a tag that's used for those circumstances. So it'd be back to getting authors to adopt the tags in the first place. Even if there was a selection of tags with specific noncon scenarios described next to them, there would still be people who chose not to use them. (Personally, I blame antis! They sure didn't fucking help.) Though I do find it interesting that bestiality isn't an existing archive warning. edit: If people would prefer we move it to another thread, I'm alright with that.
Spoiler: rape tw ... So, leaving off the "rape" tag AND the "non-con" tag AND having the characters go on afterwards as if what just happened wasn't sexual assault/rape does nothing at all to perpetuate the idea that it's not rape if you enjoyed it? Do you know how many people have written into @seebs and youarenotdamaged saying that the only reason they figured out what happened to them was rape was that they read porn that described something that happened to them and it was tagged as non-con/rape? No, nobody wants to be raped. Rape is bad. But plenty of people will go on to say, "But it's not rape if (you enjoyed it/you became aroused/they got you off/you didn't resist to your utmost/you went out drinking in skimpy clothes/you were already making out/you went out looking to get laid/he's your husband/he's your boyfriend/she's your girlfriend/your wife/you're a man/you've already had sex with them once/you secretly wanted it.)" This. Shit. Needs. To. Be. Accurately. Labeled. Non-con and rape aren't interchangeable. Not all sexual assault is rape. Not all situations where consent isn't given seem traumatic to the victim afterwards. There are, even in real life, genuine boundary cases where it really isn't clear enough to say. "Dubious consent" implies consent is present, but given or obtained under sketchy circumstances. Rape has an actual definition and if shit that goes down in your story fits that definition: It. Needs. Tagged. No consent given? Non-con. Fits definition of rape? Rape. Don't give a shit if thinking about it as rape kills your boner. The warning tags don't work if you don't fucking use them. Rape is an excellent fandom tag if what happens in your story is rape.
I'm not having a moral argument in this thread especially after there's been a request to move the discussion, @vegacoyote. I also do not want to have the argument elsewhere. I will participate in a discussion elsewhere of "how people should tag their shit for maximum usefulness and enjoyment to those who want to find and/or avoid specific types of content". I won't be part of a discussion regarding "what kind of content is okay to write" or "what moral conditions your fic and/or its tags must meet to be 'responsible' and demonstrate that you hold the right opinions about the content, should you choose to write content some people don't think is okay to write". Those conversations never end well. All I have to say is that it's great when fic helps people realise things they needed to figure out, but that's not actually what fic is for, and it is not the responsibility of people who write any kind of fic, especially kink fic, to provide needed education, even though it's awesome when people do manage to do so. (It's also not something every fic writer is capable of, which doesn't mean they shouldn't write fic.) Sometimes people just want to write a thing to please themselves and other people whom they know will enjoy the thing. I think that's okay. There are lots of good places that have nothing to do with fic online where the kind of education that society as a whole should but does not provide is openly and freely available (Scarleteen, Laci Green's channel, and so on), and if you want to write an educational fic about anything, nobody's stopping you.
I'm trying to figure out how to spoiler it (not the mechanics, but what I want the spoiler to say) and will do so soon.
I'm not having a moral argument either. I'm saying words fucking mean things. The request was to move or spoiler. I'm spoilering. This isn't off-topic for the thread. The people who spoke up about it are free to do so again if spoilering isn't enough.
Spoiler: shit forgot spoiler. rape discussion tw Also, I didn't say shit about "what it's OK to write." Write what you want. Just tag your shit accurately. A bodice-ripper rape scene is still a rape scene, and I want to know if I'm about to walk into one.
