Fandom definitions: non-con and dub-con

[ratherastory]

Hola, flist!

Okay, I can no longer claim to be new to fandom (damn, has it really been almost a year and a half?), but there are still aspects that I find hard to define/quantify/whatever.

This has popped up lately because of a problematic fic (which I haven't read, I will hasten to point out), in which there is apparently an issue of consent. Without getting into the actual debate about posting warnings (for the record, in fandom my rule of thumb is "better safe than sorry" and "add warnings if your readers inform you that they found the material triggering"), I would like to clarify the whole notion of dub-con and non-con.



"Dub-con" is something I had never heard of before fandom. I used to be a pretty active member of a feminist group back when I was in university (yes, back in the dark ages), and so as far as I was concerned, until I got into fandom, the issue of consent was pretty cut-and-dried. No means no, is the catchphrase I live by. Being pressured into sex means no. Being drugged unconscious before sex means no. Feeling like you have no choice but to have sex means no. No means that any attempt to have sex with you is an attempted rape. A husband who has sex with his wife when she tells him she's not in the mood is, in fact, committing rape. In short, I err on the side of caution when it comes to that.

Okay, so rape is not a term I see often in the warnings for fic. Rape usually gets translated into "non-con." Which, okay, I can understand, because the term itself can be triggery.

So what, exactly, constitutes dub-con? I figure this HAS to be a grey area, so I'm curious to hear opinions on the matter. Readers, what do you consider dub-con? Writers, when do you decide to warn for dub-con?

Also, if you feel like staying anonymous, that's fine, just keep it civilized. :)

Comments

[ratherastory.livejournal.com]

Eesh. From what I've understood, BDSM itself is a pretty tricky thing to write anyway when it comes to the whole consent thing, and runs the gamut.

[peppervl.livejournal.com]

But in correctly done BDSM, there is no consent issue, and the sub is the one with all the power.

Now, that's not to say that people don't label dub-con and non-con as BDSM. And I think that some people think that BSDM is dub/non con because in that situation no doesn't mean no. The safe word/safe motion they agree on ahead of time means no, and everything else means yes. But if you don't understand that was what was agreed on ahead of time, then the perception of it being dub/non con is there.

The issue, I think, with BDSM is that unless you're into it in real life, it's hard to understand. I was friends with people who were into it, and I'm friends with an author who wrote a very well researched novel that featured it (and she talked to people who were into it while writing it), so I feel as though I understand it a little better than a lot of people who aren't into it, but it's a very tricky area.

However, I can say with utter certainty that the people who are into BDSM in real life do not like the labeling of dub/non con as BDSM and the improper portrayals of BDSM any more than those of us who don't like dubious or non-consensual stories do, because it hurts them.

[ratherastory.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I've just seen it written as dub/non-con, hence my comment.

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

Really, if you think about it. the BDSM community is probably one area where consent is something that's given a lot of thought and respect - because the whole thing just falls apart without it- much more than you might find with more vanilla sex, if only because talking about consent (and all the shades therein, e.g. consent to A is not consent to b) seems depressing taboo in many other cases.

[lunasky3.livejournal.com]

^All of this. If it's real BDSM then it's a choice, and it's 100% consensual. If the sub doesn't hold all the power, then it's non-con. There's no in between.

[katwoman76.livejournal.com]

correctly done BDSM
Which I guess is the crux. A lot of times it's not correctly done in fanfic and the line gets very blurred. >:<

Stories are labelled as BDSM although one of them was coerced into the relationship - that's non-con, not bdsm.
Safewords,alternatives if speaking is not an option,previously defined lists of dos/donts and so on are rarely even mentioned in fanfic - it sometimes feels like they want to write bdsm, but don't want to add the "clinical facts of safe bdsm in their fantasy" so they rather add the dub-con-label.

guess the list could go on...these were just some of the things that came to mind.