Non-Consent/Reluctance

[le_kitty]

I have a question for the group.
I feel that there is a vast difference between non-consent and reluctance. Non-consent to me means that the characters never really want to be involved. The reluctance seems to suggest that they were not sure and gave in to lust or were persuaded. should these be two different categories? I am curious to hear others point of view.
Thanks

I write non-con and reluctance and split right down the middle with those definitions.

But I think I write non-con with a soft touch. Reluctance is the sweet and non-con is the bitter.

Hands summed it up nicely.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I have a question for the group.
I feel that there is a vast difference between non-consent and reluctance. Non-consent to me means that the characters never really want to be involved. The reluctance seems to suggest that they were not sure and gave in to lust or were persuaded. should these be two different categories? I am curious to hear others point of view.
Thanks

I agree. There are 3 existential outcomes to sex: Congruent consent where its what you want to do, reluctance where youre not totally onboard, and congruent nonconsent where sex isn't appealing at all.

 

[Handley_Page]

To my mind, non-con is rape, pure & simple.

But I think there's a bit of a problem.
Every now & again some 'feminist' or other will make a good & valid point about "no" meaning NO; often as result of some legal argument in a high-profile trial. And it is a valid point.
So perhaps we authors should ease the pedal a bit ?

 

[sr71plt]

The REAL dilemma here, I think, is that the "rape fantasy" is a real element in erotica and this is an erotica fantasy story Web site. I could go on about why this is a problem on a site that individual users want to rework to their individual view of right/wrong and political correctness and how much everything has to cater just to them and they can't take responsibility for themselves on what they read and what others can choose to write/read, but I think that users here are still having trouble grasping that the "rape fantasy" is a real element of erotica.

 

[Hypoxia]

I wrote some not-fully-consensual scenes into stories but I didn't set out with rape in mind and my 'victims' (all genders) usually don't say no. (*) I did write a (non-graphic) rape scene; it was NOT sensual, but a brutal attack triggering a dramatic response.

(*) In one, at her wedding the slut is publicly confronted and fucked by those she betrayed. She was too stunned to struggle. In another, the drugged brother is taken by his crazed sister and her girlfriend. He was too woozy to protest much. All had previous relationships with their fuckers.

I don't see non-con as a main theme for my serious and sensuous writing. For parody, or to trigger drama, yes; as rape-is-fun, no. I don't care to appeal to non-con fetishists. Yet LIT entertains many with IMHO nastier fetishes. This is fiction, folks.

 

[DaddyAsh]

I've decided that I love NonConsent/Reluctance! I just posted my first story in that category (with one of my favorite fantasies, involving submission to a Macheath-like villain), and three days on, I can say the experience has been terrific. Consider:

- The readership has been healthy (for me anyway: LC would hardly even notice it). Based on the voting, a few may even have finished reading the story!

- Score is lowish, but since almost every story in NC/R has a low score, who cares? No one there is reading only stories with red Hs because there are almost none, and those are chapters.

- Comments are sparse there, but have mostly not been knuckle-draggers. I got one of those "this story is too dark" whines (man, what do you expect in this category?), but finally came up with what I thought a perfect response (attached).

All in all, a good time.

I orginally was not going to comment, as I thought us older Doms who remeber picking up the pieces of the dark ages of American Blight, would defend your story. I am sorry. Your POV is spot on, damn the haters write more please.

 

[Serafina1210]

I orginally was not going to comment, as I thought us older Doms who remeber picking up the pieces of the dark ages of American Blight, would defend your story. I am sorry. Your POV is spot on, damn the haters write more please.

Thanks, Daddy Ash. And Pilot is absolutely right: NonCon is a staple of erotica. Romance, too, and of course the burgeoning area of romantic erotica.

On Goodreads someone maintains a list of "Romances with forced seduction or rape by the hero." It currently has 140 titles on it--which I'd guess represents only a fraction of what's available. The comment section there shows why this controversy is not going away. But the stuff is there for two reasons:

1. Women have rape fantasies

2. Men have rape fantasies

Approximately zero percent of the women who have rape fantasies actually want to be raped. I am supposing (or at least hoping) that a roughly similar percentage of men who have rape fantasies will ever actually commit a rape.

As I see it, the Lit rules about rape are designed to maintain a wall between the fantasy, which so many enjoy, and any depiction that steers too close to the horrifying reality. This is a good thing, all in all, though the flareups of controversy about it here show why it's so hard to draw a bright line between allowable rape fantasy and what is prohibited.

I have rape fantasies. Prostitution fantasies too. (Not to mention some of the "nastier fetishes" Hypoxia mentions.) I have sometimes put them together in ways that some readers have found dark and disturbing. (My first story here is about an eighteen-year-old girl who escapes from an abusive home, is taken in by a pimp who puts her to work, and ends up inciting a roomful of men to assault her. It got rejected once for violence and had to be submitted again. The first comment I ever got on this site was something on the order of "Whoa, too intense.")

I think this is all okay, as long as we understand the difference between fantasy and reality. I don't want to be raped either.

 

[DaddyAsh]

I will admit, I have rape fantasies, but I know they are wrong. And I have read enough main stream fiction, and watched enough older movies, to know others do too.

 

[Hypoxia]

I will admit, I have rape fantasies, but I know they are wrong. And I have read enough main stream fiction, and watched enough older movies, to know others do too.

Many of us also harbor murder and mayhem fantasies that we hopefully never act-out. Fantasies allow us to process the unthinkable and channel our guilt. Fuck yeah, I wanna drive the nuclear-armed Goodyear blimp into the SuperBowl stadium! Fuck yeah, I wanna see legions of submissives cowering before my cracking whip! Throw in a few bloody bank robberies, and machine-gunning that line of PETA protesters, and extending my mind-control powers... et fucking cetera. Sure, they're wrong. So sue me.

 

[sr71plt]

I will admit, I have rape fantasies, but I know they are wrong. And I have read enough main stream fiction, and watched enough older movies, to know others do too.

I trust you're speaking of "being the rapist" fantasies. There's the other side to that fantasy, and I think there are rather a lot of folks who fantasize about losing control over something happening to them they want to experience in fantasy at least but want to escape the guilt from doing (ergo it was forced on them by someone else). I think this is prevalent even more in the GM world where there is added societal guilt of same-gender sex. (Don't know how this works in the lesbian world.)

And in the GM world, it's more prevalent in game-playing in reality than in the straight world, I think. It isn't just all a matter of fantasy. Been there; done that. There is signaling on whether it is a game or not, but, with the right signaling, it is a standard reality game--and, to be blunt, the guy who sends the right signals and is "raped" gets exactly what he was signaling to get, sometimes even to a beating.

 

[shelbakk]

I agree with hpycpl! I write reluctant stories under my Yman67 nom de plume. Non-consent seems to imply one is being forced to take part in a sexual encounter, and I call that rape. Don't read rape stories and won't write rape stories.

Do you have a link to your reluctance stories?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Do you have a link to your reluctance stories?

You are responding to a nearly three year old thread. I wouldn't expect a response in a hurry - Yman67 hasn't been active on AH for ages. You might have better luck sending a PM - Yman is still active in other forums, just not here.