possibly triggery if you can't deal with fic depictions of rape or the sugar-coating thereof
Okay, this has been bugging me since last night, and even if might be construed as wank bait, I can't not post about it.
I visited a certain February-holiday-themed HP fic smut exchange last night and read several of the recent story postings. One, which was meant to be quite funny, featured the following:
Character A is tied to the bed and blindfold.
Character B is fucking (this really is the correct term) Character A.
Character C, our POV character for the fic, is a horny bastard (the point of the story) and catches them in the act.
Character C pulls Character B aside (much to the confusion of Character A, who can't see what's going on), and offers him a blowjob in exchange for being allowed to fuck Character A himself. Character B wants to inform Character A of this, but is convinced otherwise.
Character B gets his blowjob, and Character C happily begins fucking Character A. Character A notices the change in size, and assumes Character B has altered himself in some way--which is to say that Character C's penis is bigger than Character B's.
At the end, there is the "big reveal," which is framed in entirely comic terms, as Characters D and E arrive to advise silencing charms, and Character A is horrified that Character B let Character C have sex with them.
Everyone thought this was hilarious. Me? I felt sick. Sure, the story was labeled "dub con," but I can't see that as "dubious" consent at all. There was NO consent. It was, in fact, rape, played off for a big joke. I wouldn't have read the story had "non-con" been listed among its warnings*. And the reason I think it wasn't? *(I hate the non-con warning, b/c "non-con" is just a way of prettying up rape, but that's a whole other thing.)
B/c all of the characters in question were male. Apparently, it's a big funny joke that a guy lets his best friend screw him, and is therefore automatically going to be okay with someone else coming along and sticking his dick in. (And in the context of the fandom, I think it's easy to be like, "Oh, haha, Ron is the butt of the joke [pun not *really* intended, but amusing all the same]. Ron is vulnerable and freaked out! Funny!")
I wanted to ask the commenters if it the story would've been just as funny had Character A been female. A woman tied to that bed, having sex with her boyfriend, who then lets his friend have a go without asking her? I can't see the same response. I can't see the writer, who was almost certainly female (just by virtue of the fact that most fic writers, even in HP, which has more men than most fandoms, are female) writing that moment as a bit of hilarity. And I can't see the commenters thinking it was hilarious, either.
The Harry Potter fandom, like most fandoms, has a shaky grasp on the concept of rape, anyway. And for once, it's not necessarily the fault of the source text (as opposed to, say, SG-1, where rape was written into canon but totally ignored as a serious problem (see: Hathor)). I'm not calling out the people here who write rape fantasies or whatever--that's their deal, and I choose not to read it, but I'm not going to scream at them for it. What I really hate is this whole idea that rape or "non-consent" (gag) is funny or makes for a good way to get your characters together. The latter has bothered me for years, but I rarely run into the former. And I think, in this case, it's largely b/c the violated individual is male. We, as a society, don't take male rape seriously (witness the jokes about rape in prison, which I myself am guilty of making), and I wonder if there isn't some buried notion of "punishing" the one who allows himself to be the bottom. I mean, is this some variation of the "if a woman sleeps with one man, she's a loose woman open to any man" paradigm?
I visited a certain February-holiday-themed HP fic smut exchange last night and read several of the recent story postings. One, which was meant to be quite funny, featured the following:
Character A is tied to the bed and blindfold.
Character B is fucking (this really is the correct term) Character A.
Character C, our POV character for the fic, is a horny bastard (the point of the story) and catches them in the act.
Character C pulls Character B aside (much to the confusion of Character A, who can't see what's going on), and offers him a blowjob in exchange for being allowed to fuck Character A himself. Character B wants to inform Character A of this, but is convinced otherwise.
Character B gets his blowjob, and Character C happily begins fucking Character A. Character A notices the change in size, and assumes Character B has altered himself in some way--which is to say that Character C's penis is bigger than Character B's.
At the end, there is the "big reveal," which is framed in entirely comic terms, as Characters D and E arrive to advise silencing charms, and Character A is horrified that Character B let Character C have sex with them.
Everyone thought this was hilarious. Me? I felt sick. Sure, the story was labeled "dub con," but I can't see that as "dubious" consent at all. There was NO consent. It was, in fact, rape, played off for a big joke. I wouldn't have read the story had "non-con" been listed among its warnings*. And the reason I think it wasn't? *(I hate the non-con warning, b/c "non-con" is just a way of prettying up rape, but that's a whole other thing.)
B/c all of the characters in question were male. Apparently, it's a big funny joke that a guy lets his best friend screw him, and is therefore automatically going to be okay with someone else coming along and sticking his dick in. (And in the context of the fandom, I think it's easy to be like, "Oh, haha, Ron is the butt of the joke [pun not *really* intended, but amusing all the same]. Ron is vulnerable and freaked out! Funny!")
I wanted to ask the commenters if it the story would've been just as funny had Character A been female. A woman tied to that bed, having sex with her boyfriend, who then lets his friend have a go without asking her? I can't see the same response. I can't see the writer, who was almost certainly female (just by virtue of the fact that most fic writers, even in HP, which has more men than most fandoms, are female) writing that moment as a bit of hilarity. And I can't see the commenters thinking it was hilarious, either.
The Harry Potter fandom, like most fandoms, has a shaky grasp on the concept of rape, anyway. And for once, it's not necessarily the fault of the source text (as opposed to, say, SG-1, where rape was written into canon but totally ignored as a serious problem (see: Hathor)). I'm not calling out the people here who write rape fantasies or whatever--that's their deal, and I choose not to read it, but I'm not going to scream at them for it. What I really hate is this whole idea that rape or "non-consent" (gag) is funny or makes for a good way to get your characters together. The latter has bothered me for years, but I rarely run into the former. And I think, in this case, it's largely b/c the violated individual is male. We, as a society, don't take male rape seriously (witness the jokes about rape in prison, which I myself am guilty of making), and I wonder if there isn't some buried notion of "punishing" the one who allows himself to be the bottom. I mean, is this some variation of the "if a woman sleeps with one man, she's a loose woman open to any man" paradigm?