Dubious consent what is

It may not be rape, but it definitely counts as dubious consent. To me this is the biggest grey area of all: misunderstanding. Words of consent or force are not often spoken. So much is nonverbal or built into other words through innuendo.

No, he relies on cues, which means there is room for error. The tragedy of these scenarios is that the woman may feel violated and suffer shame, and yet the man is not a rapist.

In the middle of the night, he came and had sex with her. As a reader, I got that feeling. How is that different from so many other non-rape sexual encounters, where the woman was a totally willing participant? I take issue with these qualifiers because I think that it is far more insidious than out and out rape porn. At least when we say it is rape, then we can move on to the next step: saying it's wrong, just a fantasy, etc.

But avoiding the label perpetuates the rape myths that have had such a damaging effect on victims and justice: did she enjoy it, she didn't really say no, she was a tease, they've done it before. None of those things matter, and when a person labels their fic, they need to stop pretending they do. Or sex pollen stories. Or pon farr stories. Because I love rape-recovery fic. I love sex pollen stories particularly bad!

I'm not saying that writing non-con is dirty! I've written it. I read it. I collect it, in many flavors, as evidenced by the many folders of various fanfic saved on my laptop.

What I'm asking for is this: First, that authors be a little more aware of what is and is not consent within our social norms legally and socially. Second, be aware of the social framework within which a given work is set, and the shift in perspective on what is and is not consent that may occur.

But most importantly, to be aware that boundaries exist, and that if your story is going to poke holes in or disregard those boundaries, you'll have to be able to redefine them to support the situation you're trying to present. The term "dubious consent" automatically has a negative connotation attached to it; the story I warned for is dub-con because of the initial scene - she wakes up with his hand inside her panties.

However, the entire series centers around the push-pull of the characters' relationship, and this particular story takes place after they have stopped fighting each other and using sex as a weapon in that fight.

It's actually the most forgiving of the stories, even though it contains the most dubious scenario consent-wise. So I guess the question then becomes how do we warn or do we warn at all for a potentially dub-con scenario when we, the authors, know that it's not dubious because of the background story? However, not everyone in fandom uses those terms in those ways. And I think that's a problem that we need to fix.

Because, especially when situations that exist in real life and that would be called rape in real life are labeled "dubcon," I think it does real harm to us all We currently live in a culture where not fighting back - because, for example, the rapist has threatened to kill you, or someone else, or your pet, if you don't go along with it - will very often get a rape case overturned in court.

Where judges and juries and god knows the popular media will pick out and analyze every detail of a person's life to determine whether they were asking for it, whether they secretly wanted it, whether they could have conceivably fought back more than they did, why they didn't scream, why they didn't report the blackmail that was used to control them, whether or not their "consent" might've been implicitly given by winks or nods or secret handshakes or a general miasma of sexual invitation.

In other words, we live in a world in which rape culture, a thing we all unwittingly participate in at one time or another, works very very hard to label things dubcon when they're really noncon. Like, I think of dubcon as used for those situations where, IRL, where it is impossible for us to know what people are thinking except by what they tell us, it is rape, but because this is fiction and I actually do know what is going on in the protagonists' heads, I can know this sex was actually desired.

I would also use dubcon for those instances where someone is unable to give meaningful consent because of their status, like slavery or age, or because they're in an altered but coherent state. And I realize that, yes, in real life, those should all be treated the same, but, in fiction, in a situation where we as a community are making finer grained distinctions, the part that is important to me is the feeling of the person whose consent is being interrogated by the story.

I don't read "dubcon" and "noncon" to mean their actual, literal meanings any more than the " First Time " tag is supposed to apply to stories where someone milks a cow or sings karaoke for the very first time.

I am not ashamed about this. I have never felt shame about tagging or warning appropriately; I'm very grateful that fandom provides a good structure for giving detailed tags and warnings, to give the authors the ability to be precise, and the readers the ability to choose fic that they want to read from a range of works, some of which might be powerfully triggering.

I think your issue is with people who mistag, and people who do not use the same definition of "consent" that you do there is some overlap between these two. Unfortunately, you are taking that frustration out on people who create and enjoy dubcon fanworks. This post comes across very strongly as a condemnation of dubcon, whether or not you intended that, and all the comments expressing strong agreement reinforce this. So although I agree that that use of "dubcon" should be avoided for all the reasons you name, I think some people who use the "dubcon" label are trying to draw a distinction that is also useful, although not politically important in the same way as the proper distinction between dubious consent and lack of consent.

As a reader, I avoid fics with realistic depictions of rape, because they often trigger me. But I am very seldom triggered by the fantasy scenarios I've seen mislabelled as dubcon, and sometimes they're a kink for me. So that's a distinction I'd like to preserve, but in a different wording that keeps the consent issue clear. To me, it seems like we should maybe be splitting the currently-labeled-as-"dubcon" stories into two different types of fic, rather than trying to lump one of them in with noncon.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica has a non-sexual example. Kyubey only contracts children who agree to become magical girls. However , he does not tell them all of what being a magical girl entails, he uses emotional abuse to browbeat them into agreeing, and he often propositions girls who will die if they don't contract such as a crash victim who is bleeding out on the highway.

This is played deliberately in Revolutionary Girl Utena several times, mostly for the purpose of Fan Disservice.

The paramount example is the relationship between Akio and Anthy , since the audience is initially led to believe at first that it's consensual and both parties seem happy with the relationship; it's only after one scene in particular where Akio rapes Anthy when she hesitates to come to him that it becomes clear that it's really not, and in fact is almost literally note To the point that people have actually run it through a checklist used by professionals and hit pretty much every point.

This is also present in the infamous episode 33, where Akio takes Utena's virginity , leading to an extremely uncomfortable and awkward scene where they're never fully shown having sex we only see Utena from the shoulders up, babbling and later moaning , but the results are rather obvious by the time it's all done.

Yet again with most of Akio's relationships due to the vast age differences between the parties, meaning that even with consent, most of them would be considered rape in real life. In The Movie , Akio has a Freak Out when he realizes that Anthy — who he'd thought was unconscious was awake for at least part of while he was raping her after slipping her drugs in her drink. Anthy tries to calm him down and tell him that she's okay with it, but he stabs her in the chest before throwing himself out the window.

The light novel also has Touga having sex with Miki, with extremely dubious consent present throughout the entire scene. Scum's Wish : The first time Hanabi and Sanae have sex, Sanae tells Hanabi to say if she wants her to stop knowing that Hanabi wouldn't say no to her for fear of losing Sanae as a friend.

Sanae : You care about me as a friend, I know that I'm someone special to you. You can't say no to me, because you don't to lose me too. So of course, I'm going to take advantage Comic Books. Afterlife with Archie is vague on whether Cheryl and Jason's relationship is mutually consensual or whether Jason is manipulating his sister. In the first issue of the New 52 Catwoman relaunch, Selina and Bruce are shown going at it, but Bruce at first seems pretty reluctant, adding a layer of squick that was most likely not intended.

In the words of Linkara : " Because it's not rape if he consents eventually , right? This was the cause of major backlash when the first issue of Red Hood and the Outlaws showed Starfire as an amnesiac and unable to remember individual humans' faces, which made the fact that she then slept with Roy Harper pretty iffy.

Two later attempts at an Author's Saving Throw both failed for similar reasons: First, it was shown that this was an act , but it still means that Roy didn't come out looking good since he slept with her even while thinking that she was amnesiac. And then it was further clarified that Roy believed that if he left, then she'd forget him, which adds a whole other level of Squick, as it's essentially putting a very lonely person in this case Roy in a position where the only way to keep one of their two friends is to never leave them.

It probably wouldn't have gone well if Roy had wanted to end the relationship but retain a friendship. Word of God confirms that the reason Terra of Teen Titans was shown in a sexual relationship with the villain Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke , was to shock readers and emphasize how evil she was by showing that she was a slut.

This falls flat when one remembers that Terra is 16 at the time while Slade is significantly older, and Terra honestly seems to think he loves her, meaning that rather than showing how evil she is, it instead comes off as her being a young, confused girl who's being played by a note possible, depending on the state rapist who wants to murder her teammates. The cartoon version of this storyline, aside from being significantly sanitized for younger audiences, actually addresses this trope by showing their version of Terra as a confused, lonely girl who clearly is manipulated into evil actions, and just how freely she's committing those acts is actually discussed and used as a point of drama.

The infamous issue of The Avengers , in which Ms. Marvel is written out of the book by being kidnapped, brainwashed, and raped, and then happily waltzing off with the guy who did it to her. That's not what was intended, of course, but somehow it slipped Jim Shooter's mind that the guy using a mind control machine on her meant her consent was nothing of the kind.

Not even sexual, but let's just say that the God dess of Stories incarnation of Loki is very bad at this whole consent thing. For example , it's one thing assuming that your best friend trusts you and would be okay with you trying to save her. Although it's usually danced around, X is indeed a victim of this as she was introduced into the comics as a prostitute in NYX. Her age is never stated, but later books suggest she was no older than 16, meaning that she was very much unable to provide consent under New York law.

Even ignoring her age, there is her mental and emotional state to consider. By the time Zebra Daddy got his hooks into her, she was an emotionally broken girl who was forced to leave her only family, suffered severe physical and emotional abuse all her life, and has been violently conditioned for subservience and obedience to the point she honestly doesn't understand how to make choices for herself.

Laura would later confide in others that at the time Daddy found her, she didn't even comprehend that her body was her own. By no stretch of the imagination would she be considered mentally or emotionally capable of providing informed consent, even if she were to have sex with someone her own age.

Starfire : Brought up in issue After Syl'khee accidentally hypnotizes Raveena and Sol to lose their inhibitions, the two of them make out, but Sol afterward sees the incident as a violation of his consent.

By contrast, Rave felt that she was empowered and was more in control during the make-out. However, she chooses to drop the incident if that's what he wants. It's Me Starscream , he needs to persuade an OC to stop hating him and design weapons for the Decepticon cause. So he induces some good old Stockholm Syndrome. The consent is hideously dubious seeing as she's being held captive on the Nemesis, and it's practically Laser-Guided Karma that he goes on to fall prey to Lima Syndrome.

Three years ago in Promises Kept , Glinda had sex with Fiyero while on a date but she regretted it even during the act. When Elphaba asks Glinda if Fiyero forced himself on her, Glinda declines. Glinda mentions that she had wanted to stop it, but she felt she was too far gone to do so. In A Different Medius , Azurai's marriage to Iratu is definitely an example, the former making a sarcastic remark, and the latter thinking it's a proposal.

Iratu also jokingly "threatens" to eat Azurai if he doesn't go through with it. Azurai can't tell whether it's a joke, and doesn't care to find out. In An Anthem for Sheltered Bays the year old Eren enters a romantic and sexual relationship with Levi, but Eren depends on Levi for virtually everything since he can't get back home, forced to become human, and Levi would not allow him to leave anyways.

To Levi's credit, he actually does realize this and is repentant for it. Angel of the Bat: Times of Heresy 's 15th chapter is rife with this without ever making it further than second base. Cassandra's girlfriend Sadie initiates the couple's first real sexual contact undressing Cassandra and playing with her breasts while constantly asking if Cassandra is comfortable, which she always replies yes to.

The mucking comes when one remembers that Cassandra has had no sexual experience and very little education, suggesting she's not entirely aware of what she's getting herself into.

Further complicated by the fact that Sadie has been lied to about Cassie's background and thinks she has had a standard childhood and education and just can't speak English well due to being raised overseas. Sadie does at least stop as soon as she hears Cassie say "no", though Cassandra said it too quietly to be heard the first time, necessitating her saying it twice.

In Advanced Theory , Sora makes a fake confession to Riku to get back at him for being a jerk to Sora's friends. Which backfires because Riku accepts the confession and admits to having feelings for Sora.

In Riku's excitement, he pressures Sora to have sex with him because Sora was afraid of hurting Riku's feelings with the truth. While Sora never calls it rape , he admits to feeling tainted by the experience.

To Riku's credit, he picks up on this and makes sure to check for Sora's consent. In Kimi No Na Iowa Chapter 23, Ichiyo wonders In-Universe that though shipgirls have rules about only having sex with consenting men, how genuine that consent really is when they are an Inhumanly Beautiful Race with a supernatural Presence that creates or amplifies awe and desire in the muggles around them. In My Mirror, Sword and Shield Suzaku returns Lelouch's feelings, but as his future adoptive father points out Suzaku is in no position to refuse.

As Emperor, Lelouch could execute him if he felt like it and is Suzaku's boss. And Suzaku depends on Lelouch's patronage for protection and shelter while his time machine is fixed.

Their large age gap makes it dubious enough, but it's also noted that Adam was emotionally abusive. Blake doesn't question Yang when she asks if Adam forced her to have sex with him, but Blake implies that she enjoyed it because it made her feel like an adult. Nevertheless, Blake's friends and parents consider Adam to be a rapist. Scar Tissue has Asuka, who is still traumatized from the events before and after Third Impact and who copes with her loneliness by repeatedly having sex with Shinji.

Although he never resists or tries to get help, it's clear that Shinji is too bogged down by guilt and fear to refuse. Asuka herself later compares it to rape. TRON : Endgame Scenario : Jet was a condemned prisoner at the time , and Mercury tracked him down to try and see if he was truly on her side working for Ma3a as he claimed , or not.

She first threatened to kill him, but changed tactics, hoping to get him lowering his guard. Things went too far, partly because of the difference between human sex and Program energy melds, and Mercury realized what she had actually done far too late.

Jet treats the whole matter as a misunderstanding and forgives her having an explicitly consensual encounter with her later , but Mercury is less inclined to forgive herself, especially given that Jet is a very reluctant deity over her people. Delia mentions that Giovanni "had his way with her", which sounds aggressive but could also mean that he just ignored her afterwards.

We'd Fly Away Together : Terra claims that she consents to having sex with Slade and that she's the one coming onto him, but it's likely she's lying to herself.

She seems uncomfortable with it and, even if she did verbally consent, it's unlikely that she can legally consent due to her Vague Age. Weight of the World : A non-sexual and non-romantic example. America uncomfortably defends Atlas and Ozpinati's decisions concerning him and Vale. The therapist mentions it sounds like America was coerced and pressured into consenting to the Aura transfer. For context, America was outnumbered, without allies, and in an unknown and secluded location when he was " asked.

America : I said yes to them. I gave my consent. I mean, I didn't want to, and I didn't really have another choice but I said yes. Films — Live-Action. Deadpool has a non-sexual example in that Wade consents to be taken to a facility that claims to have an experimental cure for his cancer. He is not told, however, that this experimental cure is essentially non-stop torture, that it may or may not trigger latent mutant genes that he may or may not have, and that if it does work he'll be sold as a slave-soldier to the highest bidder.

In the Ruggero Deodato movie Jungle Holocaust , this gets a sort of inversion: the protagonist, as he sinks deeper and deeper into savagery, rapes a native cannibal woman in a fit of rage in one scene after she tries to run away from him while he's employing her to help guide him through the jungle.

As reviewer Nathan Shumate notes, however, her cannibal tribe is demonstrated throughout the film to be rather callous and amoral about sexuality and human life, so due to some serious Deliberate Values Dissonance , the woman doesn't exactly treat his raping her as being raped, but rather as his staking a legitimate claim to her the way any man in her tribe might and as some are indicated to have tried to do elsewhere in the movie.

As her tribe has basically raised her to see herself as belonging to anyone forceful enough to take her, she treats the protagonist as her new master from then on and doesn't try to run away again. Killer Joe : Dottie and Joe's sex scene. He first orders her to undress, then manually stimulate him before having sex with her. In no case does he seem to care what Dottie thinks, and though she complies it's dubious that he'd care. She may also may well be intimidated by the fact he's a hitman, and feel afraid to resist or object to this.

Her attitude is hard to read, but Dottie never shows much discernible enthusiasm. Joe also says she's his "down payment" for the hit, with a huge implication of legal entitlement i.

The Matrix : As Cypher specifically complains , the whole "red pill vs. If the situation was explained in full, many people, like him, would reject the "real world". In Never Let Me Go , the protagonists and others are getting exploited in the most brutal way, and they have all been conditioned to unquestioningly accept the system. Discussed in "O" regarding sex between Odin and Desi that started out fully consensual - but when Desi found it too painful and asked him to stop, Odin kept going for some time.

Desi is talking about it with Emily, who reminds her that she asked him to stop and he didn't. Observe and Report plays this for very black comedy. Ronnie and Brandi's date ends with the drunken Brandi seemingly passed out, with puke on her pillow and Ronnie pumping away on top of her.

This looks like a straight case of date rape, but when Ronnie starts to slow down, she mutters, "What are you stopping for? The Survivalist : Kathryn and her daughter Milja are desperate for food and shelter. The Survivalist has a bed and a shotgun. So Milja sleeps with him. The Survivalist is not used to company, so the gun is probably to protect himself from her possible threat, and not to force her compliance, but if Milja didn't sleep with him, then she and Kathryn would have been sleeping outside.

While she seems fine with this, it also doesn't look like she knows what sex even is exactly, pushing him off her after he apparently ejaculates to examine herself. Thus, it seems doubtful that she actually knew what was going on. So from either of their perspectives, it's problematic. Further complicating this in the other direction is the fact that one can be reasonably sure he wouldn't have had sex with her if he actually knew she's an alien who's already killed several men via Honey Trap , meaning that since his willingness to have sex with her is based on her knowingly deceiving him about her true identity, she would be committing Rape by Fraud if she was acting deliberately.

Indecent Proposal. A billionaire offers a couple one million dollars for one night with the wife, who has already turned down his advances earlier in the film. At this point, the couple is broke, having blown all their money on a venture to Las Vegas to try and make money which they initially did before foolishly deciding to return to the casino and make even more, rather than quitting while they were ahead.

After much discussion, they decide to go ahead with it. The billionaire takes the wife to his yacht, but sensing her discomfort with the arrangement, offers to flip a coin and release her from the deal if she wins. However, he wins, and… cue Sexy Discretion Shot. It's obvious that at no time does she want to sleep with this guy but does so only out of desperation and some twisted sense of obligation. And even worse, later in the film, it turns out that the coin in question was rigged, meaning that the billionaire would have won no matter what, and making his actions look really sleazy in hindsight.

Son of the Mask : Tim has sex with Tanya while under the Mask's influence, which she didn't realize he crawled into bed in the dark.

It's quite likely she wouldn't have if his appearance was clear to her. This leads to the conception of her son too, and so there's the implication that he may be a Child by Rape. Passengers : It's very probable that had she known that Jim woke her up early from cryosleep thus forcing her to live out her life with him , Aurora would never have had sex with him, making her consent thus very dubious.

James Bond has two notorious examples in the series. It doesn't help that in both cases, Bond "seduced" the girl primarily as part of his plan to take down the Big Bad , as she was integral to the villain's operation: Goldfinger : In the most controversial sex scene in the entire series, Bond has sex with Pussy Galore after getting in a fight with her and planting a kiss that she clearly doesn't want. She appears to consent to sex afterwards, which begs the question: did she give consent under duress, which wouldn't make it consent at all, or was it that she wasn't fighting him but her attraction to him and she finally let her guard down?

The movie probably intended the latter, but it doesn't change the fact that she wasn't ready to say yes at that point in time. Live and Let Die : When Bond first meets the villain's fortune teller Solitaire, he asks her to draw a tarot card for him and it's The Lovers, hinting at their future relationship. When they cross paths a second time later in the movie, he's dealing the cards and asks her to pick one, and it once again turns out to be The Lovers, so she proceeds to have sex with him.

Then he drops the deck behind her back and all the cards are The Lovers. For an example that isn't mission related, in Thunderball , James basically blackmails his physical therapist at the health spa into sleeping with him in exchange for him not reporting the incident where he was nearly killed by a spine stretching machine being set to a dangerously high setting which wasn't her doing to management, which could have cost her her job.

Berlin Syndrome : Clare once has sex with Andi after he starts holding her captive, but of course this context makes it dubious how consensual it was, although she seemed willing otherwise. The Inner Circle : Anastasya is taken away from her husband to be Beria's mistress.

In their one scene together, she seems to be charmed by him and additionally, when she briefly sees her husband before they're separated, she doesn't seem overly distressed or claim she was raped, despite sex clearly having occurred.

However, Beria is, historically, very well known to have been a prolific serial rapist and Anastasya later commits suicide rather than give birth to his child, having suffered extreme sanity slippage.

Bit : Laurel is happy to become a vampire. As the other option is death, however also she would turn into one of them automatically otherwise , this wasn't much of a choice. Lake Mungo : Nobody uses the word rape and Alice was sixteen when she had an "affair" with her married neighbors. Although everyone treats this as though it was consensual and judging on the sex tape, it nominally was , Alice's psychological unraveling after that and the fact that the husband tries to steal the tape underlines that something else might have been ongoing, at least some form of psychological coercion.

Troy : Achilles woke up with his prisoner Briseis pressing a knife to his throat.