AoOO Thoughs

[alixtii]

1. I understand "Choose Not to Warn for Some Content" as meaning that, if no other warnings are selected, then there is a nonzero number of primary standardized warnings which don't apply to the story (most likely noncon)--because if all of them applied, and the author didn't warn for all of them, then the phrase "Choose Not to Warn [full stop]" comment would apply and, in accordance with Grice's Maxim of Quantity, the author would have used that tag.

Apparently, not everyone shares this understanding.

2. I'm very uncomfortable with the implication, given by the existence of the primary warning tag "noncon/rape," that dubcon isn't rape. "Rape," as the term is used more or less uniquely in contemporary usage, is a legal-ethical concept: it identifies a certain type of illicit sexual activity. "Noncon" and "dubcon" pull out certain aspects of these acts which are relevant to the needs of fanfic readers and writers, but not to a legal or ethical understanding, and involves knowledge unavailable to people who are not omniscient narrators (e.g., the precise mental state of the victim, and what what that state would have been in other circumstances). But any circumstance in which consent is in any way dubious--whether through the use of alien influence, or power imbalances, or social pressure, or drugs or alcohol, or through not being of legal age--is rape. Period.

"Noncon" and "dubcon" identify out types of rape, in much the same way the term "statutory rape" does. (ETA: Actually, they don't even do that, I think; they measure something which is on completely different axis than what "rape" measures. It just happens that there is an incredibly huge degree of correlation.)

Now, one doesn't have to read the "noncon/rape" tag as implying that "noncon" and "rape" or synonymous or equivalent. But if not, the meaning is ambiguous: does it cover for cases which are "noncon AND rape" (but not dubcon) or cases which are "noncon OR rape" (which would include dubcon). ("Noncon XOR rape" can be safely ruled out.) Praxis seems to support the first usage as being dominant, but I think this somehow covertly encourages the (problematic equivalence between the two terms discussed above. (And both usages are fundamentally redundant, because "noncon AND rape" = "noncon" and "noncon OR rape" = "rape.")

And, continuing to read the post linked above, I'm not the only who has thought of this (not that I had assumed I was).

Comments

[legionseagle]

I think there is an inherent fail in the point you're making; in fact, I think there's a compound set of fails between the point you're making and how you're making it, and there seem to be a lot of unexamined privileges coming through. Suppose we start from here:

But any circumstance in which consent is in any way dubious--whether through the use of alien influence, or power imbalances, or social pressure, or drugs or alcohol, or through not being of legal age--is rape. Period.

A lot of other commenters have disagreed with that and they may have different reasons for doing so, but this is my take on it.

However much you may try to self-consciously use the term "survivor" rather than "victim", rape is always stigmatising to the subject of it - in fact, the reason it's systematically used as a weapon of war in places like Congo and Bosnia is that in large areas of the world it's more stigmatising to have been raped than to be an admitted rapist. In any case, being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted or harassed is to be blamed and a lot of that is self-blame - what did I do wrong? What signals did I send out that I shouldn't have? What should I have worn/done/said differently?

The problem with your categoric statement that if factors X, Y, or Z are present it can't be consent and it must be rape is that you've just told a lot of people that they're rape victims even when they don't themselves think of themselves that way. That's the first fail, right there. You're redefining other people's sexual history and telling them you know better than they do about what their past actually means.

The second fail is because we're talking about literature, and dubious consent has a very long and complicated history in fiction written by and for women.

People write dubious consent fics, among other reasons, to work through aspects of their own sexual past they may themselves be conflicted about or which they may be not in the least conflicted about but which they find other people being dissatisfied because they aren't sufficiently conflicted about and where they feel they need the alternative voice to be heard. As a concrete example of this, every time the row comes up about warning labels on fic and protecting rape survivors you will always find a strong minority of survivors saying that writing rape fic is part of their own survival strategy and they dislike being told that coping in the way they want to cope is sick and wrong. One reason labels like "dub-con" and "non-con" have been used in the past, I am aware, is because rape survivors writing non-con fic do want to draw a distinction between what they write, as a trope, and what has happened to them, and they don't all want to write either confessional misery-porn or violent pornography, which is what "rape fic" tends to connote.

Then, there's the role which rape fantasy has always played in women's romantic fiction (I'm referring to alpha male sweeps swooning woman off her feet, has his wicked way, she loves it really, he awakes to horror at his own brutality, he frantically begs for forgiveness, she acknowledges she has nothing to forgive, all ends in wedding bells). Sex pollen is often its modern equivalent. Now, I can see a case for warning about that sort of thing, because plenty of people don't want to read it, but it comes out of creating a safe space in which people can acknowledge sexual desires which they've been taught it would be wrong to acknowledge more overtly. Again, by failing to distinguish between rape fantasies in which it is absolutely clear in context that the heroine does want it "really" and disingenous legal pleas that because a woman dressed, say, like Dawn in the picture you have above she was clearly "asking for it" you're casting aspersions on women's ability to distinguish between fiction and reality.